The alternative is to endorse a reinterpretation of international relationships through a feminist perspective which puts reciprocal caring at the forefront. This process creates epistemological equality through interdependence, which is empirically able to solve structures and relationships that were previously socialized with a negative form of masculinity and can bridge rivalries.

(Chih-yu Shih is a political science professor at National Taiwan University and National Chair Professor of the Republic of China. He earned a Master of Public Policy degree from Harvard University and a PhD from the University of Denver. 2022, Eros of International Relations: Self-Feminizing and the Claiming of Postcolonial Chineseness. Pages 103-104. Hong Kong University Press. //CPSW – GHS-LHM)

Efforts to re-/engender international relations in the past few decades have focused on exposing patriarchal power and ideologies as well as the gendered role-making that reflects, reproduces, and arguably abuses gender differences. However, the practical improvement in international relations has been modest at best—if it even exists—because the national actors and their discourses are able to reappropriate gender consciousness and the ensuing reforms’ potential to patriarchal power’s advantage. As a result, the peace advocacy that arises from border-crossing solidarity and is embedded in living together, mutual empathy, ideological neutrality, aversion to violence, and environmental sensibilities yields to military threat, swagger, or clashes between political forces. In reality, the caring and mothering that deactivate exclusionary sovereign borders can give way to xenophobia, which seeks to monopolize resources and commit demonization, especially during an pandemic or an exodus of refugees. The responsibility to protect easily ends up politicized by national leaders, who purport to justify the confrontation, intervention, and exploitation mobilized by the trained masculine instinct. All of this is truly disappointing. In adding to the critical engendering attempts of feminist literature on international relations, this book conveys little optimistic sense of its similarly critical intent. It nevertheless seeks to present an empirically plausible reinterpretation from a revisionist gender perspective—to detect how international relations are, in practice, not always engrossed in the masculine style of sovereign, national, and power-oriented platforms. Gendered biases in international relations can occasionally lead to certain results that are conducive to the easing of masculinity, and these results become visible at various levels: national, municipal, and corporate. In these instances, the actors—women and men alike, who have been conditioned by the patriarchal pedagogy and socialization—reveal a need and capacity to think and act differently. Moreover, exactly because intelligent actors detect this intellectual and emotional need among all people, including presumably the strong, they can trigger a degree of transformation within a given temporal span and at a certain site. This book embarks upon the realization of this sporadic emancipation. Specifically, self-feminization can serve as a catalyst for emancipation that bridges the relations between rivals in context. The purpose of self-feminization is to oblige caring in order to make relationality a constituent of the identities of all interacting actors. It can peculiarly enhance the level of caring on the part of self- feminizing actors, who are the first to enjoy their own gendered image and therefore are emotionally capable of bringing enthusiasm for their service to their visitors. The epistemologically double-sided self-feminization creates plausible roles for a caring relationship either by obliging the self to care for others or others to care for the self. The two parties are epistemologically equal, as they need each other to practice the caring relationship, regardless of the asymmetry of power that often characterizes their imagined binary. Provided that the relationship is reciprocal, the rivalry between them becomes more negotiable, non-solution more appealing, and inconsistency more tolerable. As such, ostensibly universal rules and norms are neutralized. International relations theory can benefit from treating social sites, composed of carefully crafted gendered roles in context, as the base of action. Social sites are subject to spinning and recombination, through which the actors readily attend to the instability of identity, appreciate their own agency for relating, and critically engage these sites’ intersectionality, which constitutes different actors. Self- feminizing in this book relies on postcolonialism and feminism to discover how a subaltern, late-coming state, city, and corporation together reconstruct a practical thread of Chineseness, whose meanings vary according to the context, the perceived characteristics of the other relational self, and the strategy of those allegedly acting on behalf of Chineseness. This unstable Chineseness would bring forth a disquieting epistemological lens and prompt a quest for another kind of empirical agenda, one to retrieve and even reactivate an emancipation through gendered relations.