The alt solves. Including the feminist practice of understanding social sites in an international context strengthens Post-Western IR and overcomes gaps between backgrounds and cultures.

(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 66-67. Hong Kong University Press. //CPSW – GHS-LHM)

Post-Western international relations theory has yet to extend its analysis to social sites: these sites may include gender, role, network, and so on. The individual actors, each in the capacities they choose to serve, understand and practice learned values differently while in different roles, for example. Therefore, difference and agency do not merely revise European international relations: through shifting between social sites, the actors similarly revise their own practices and understandings. Post-Western international relations gains strength by allowing differences inside all individual sites. The ensuing discussion will show how cheongsam, as both an individual and a non-geographical site, can multiply the meanings of modernity and international relations. At the municipal level, cheongsam as a metaphorical site further alludes to gender, just as it does as a social site; the site, however, is a far broader and deeper category for post-Western theories and practices than cheongsam alone. Role theory can improve this post-Western quest for sited agency and subjectivity by showing how actors not only adopt the roles imposed on them by European international relations, but also create roles for others to adopt (C.-c. Huang 2020a; Michalski and Pan 2016; Harnisch 2012). This capacity for the altercasting of others testifies to the subjectivity of the actors at a social site to revise the meaning of European international relations. However, the contemporary literature of altercasting is implicitly gendered to the extent that it is about ego-initiated interaction, the quest for ontological security, and protection of a master role (Fazendeiro 2020; Harnisch 2016; Klose 2020), as opposed to the feminist concerns regarding boundary crossing, relational security, or contextualized improvisation. Such patriarchal altercasting in the existing literature requires the exploration of distinctively internal role sources (Thies 2010, 2012; Wehner and Thies 2014). National role sources form one major agenda of role theory as it applies to international relations (Cantir and Kaarbo 2016). In contrast, cheongsam can be a social site, with its wearers inspired to cast their alters and audience into a reconciliatory role relation. Given that roles are intersubjective and mutual expectations exist between the actors, cheongsam can be a role source when its wearers are inspired to make roles. This agency turns the stereotypical women and, metaphorically, postcolonial actors in general from primarily role takers into assertive and yet non-egotistical performers (Pushikin 2017). The subsequent sections will argue that cheongsam represents such a self- romanticizing state of mind that its owners are not objects of a gaze; rather, they refine and appropriate onlooker preferences, engage in self-entertainment, and altercast the onlookers to show appreciation. Relational theory considers the social networks, linguistic embeddings, and shared rights that constitute the identities of different actors with the same relations (Jackson and Nexon 1999, 2019; Nordin and Smith 2019), and are embedded in some kind of resemblance between them. These are the prior resemblances built into the identities of actors who practice, reproduce, and revise these relations. Therefore, relations are role sources. Relational identities thus oblige self-restraint, resulting in role expectations. Post-Western international relations sensitize relational theorists to civilizational differences, but relational theory fails to cope with at least two processes that fail to prepare any apparent role expectation. The first is between actors coming from different prior relations (e.g., between Christianity and Confucianism) and the second is where the prior relations are thin or abstract (e.g., the Confucian notion of harmony or Buddhist nothingness). The Confucian theme of harmony denotes a belief that all are bound to be related, but fails to reveal how they are related. Under these two conditions, prior relations fail to offer sufficient clues regarding how to bring roles into an interactive relation, which is why the improvisation of practical relationship through role-making is necessary in order for the relational theory to be complete. The discussion that follows will show how self-romanticizing by actors in cheongsam is a particular way of improvising relations.