Problematizing "economic security" is crucial to uncover gendered social structures that contribute to conflict and structural violence

(J. Ann, You just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements Between Feminists and IR Theorists , International Studies Quarterly 41)

Whereas feminist analysis of military security has focused on the gendered structures of state institutions, issues of economic security and insecurity have emphasized the interrelationship between activities in markets and households. Feminists claim that women’s particular economic insecurities can only be understood in the context of patriarchal structures, mediated through race, class, and ethnicity, which have the effect of consigning women to households or low-paying jobs. Public/private boundaries have the effect of naturalizing women’s unremunerated work in the home to the detriment of women’s autonomy and economic security. Women’s disproportionate numbers at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale cannot be explained by market conditions alone; they also require an understanding that certain types of work such as teaching, nursing, and other forms of care-giving are often considered “natural” for women to perform (Peterson and Runyan, 1993:37; Pettman, 1996:165-8). Moreover, the clustering of women in low-paying or non-waged work in subsistence or households cannot be understood by using rational choice models, because women may have internalized the ideas behind traditional systems of discrimination, and thus may themselves view their roles as natural (Nussbaum and Glover, 1995:91). In other words, social expectations having to do with gender roles can reinforce economic inequalities between women and men and exacerbate women’s insecurities. Such issues can only be explained by using gender as a category of analysis; since they take them as given, rational actor models miss the extent to which opportunities and choices are constrained by the social relations in which they are embedded. Many of these issues seem far removed from the concerns of international relations. But, employing bottom-up rather than top-down explanations, feminists claim that the operation of the global economy and states’ attempts to secure benefits from it are built on these unequal social relations between women and men which work to the detriment of women’s (and certain men’s) security. For example, states that successfully compete in attracting multinational corporations often do so by promising them a pool of docile cheap labor consisting of young unmarried women who are not seen as “breadwinners” and who are unlikely to organize to protest working conditions and low wages (Enloe, 1990:151-76). When states are forced to cut back on government spending in order to comply with structural adjustment programs, it is often the expectation that women, by virtue of their traditional role as care-givers, will perform the welfare tasks previously assumed by the state without remuneration. According to Caroline Moser (1991:105), structural adjustment programs dedicated to economic “efficiency” are built on the assumption of the elasticity of women’s unpaid labor. In presenting some feminist perspectives on security and some explanations for insecurity, I have demonstrated how feminists are challenging levels of analysis and boundaries between inside and outside which they see, not as discrete constructs delineating boundaries between anarchy and order, but as contested and mutually constitutive of one another. Through a reexamination of the state, feminists demonstrate how the unequal social relations on which most states are founded both influence their external security-seeking behavior and are influenced by it. Investigating states as gendered constructs is not irrelevant to understanding their securityseeking behaviors as well as whose interests are most served by these behaviors. Bringing to light social structures that support war and “naturalize” the gender inequalities manifested in markets and households is not irrelevant for understanding their causes. Feminists claim that the gendered foundations of states and markets must be exposed and challenged before adequate understandings of, and prescriptions for, women’s (and certain men’s) security broadly defined can be formulated. (627-8)