AT Fem IR K - Michigan 7 2023 BFHGR

Aff AT: Fem IR
Fem IR---2AC
They’re wrong about “root cause” and can’t solve --- prioritizing the moral over the material is doomed to failure
Dean 19 [Jodi Dean, Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Jodi, “Against Gyno-pessimism,” 2019, https://publicseminar.org/essays/against-gyno-pessimism/, dml]
I love Liza Featherstone’s essay, “Moving Beyond Misogyny” (The New Republic, November 4 2019), an essay that highlights the current popularity of misogyny as liberal feminism’s basic category for analyzing social problems. Hatred of women is offered up as the explanation for everything from domestic violence, campus rape, and sexual harassment, to Hillary Clinton’s failure to win the presidency in 2016. Women are kept down, abused, and murdered because men hate them. It’s as simple as that.
But it’s not just that hate doesn’t explain everything – it doesn’t explain anything.
Offered up in the context of a social or political analysis, misogyny is the attribution of a feeling that covers over the absence of an explanation. An event or phenomenon is positioned as the effect of an aversion that is attributed to a group. The group is constituted as a group by virtue of the attribute and the attribute is treated as a cause – empirical evidence be damned. For example, violence against women is explained as evidence of misogyny. But according to the most recent federal statistics, except for rape, more men than women are likely to be victims of violent crime. To complicate matters further, men are more likely to be victims of offenses committed by men than women are, and women are more likely to commit offenses against women than they are against men. If misogyny accounts for violence against women, does misandry account for violence against men? Or are these categories too crude to tell us much at all?
Misogyny’s analytical weakness does not diminish its contemporary popularity. It might even increase it. In the affective networks of communicative capitalism, outrage circulates more easily than critical analysis. Moralism substitutes for explanation, and moral outrage doesn’t require reading anything too long. We know how to trigger each other enough to like and share and deploy the appropriate GIF.
The outrage of the hated can produce a momentary sense of unity. Being hated inspires ferocity, self-righteousness, cancel culture: “I’m unfriending anyone who thinks violence against women is okay.” So rather than telling us something about the haters, misogyny is an inverted or reactive social diagnosis for creating an identity among the hated. After all, haters gonna hate (and even Taylor Swift advises us to shake it off).
But what are women supposed to do about being hated? The options that the misogyny diagnosis presents repeat the traps of fairytales: be the witch who draws power from her outcast position or the passive princess dreaming of love. Poison men or win them over. Mirroring the compressed possibilities of the world it claims to critique, the misogyny diagnosis compels us to accept a world of false choices. In so doing, it avoids the perplexing dilemma of how women are to wage a struggle against an aversion by side-stepping politics altogether.
In fact, the point seems to be that we can’t do anything about being hated. Misogyny supplies an account of the world well-suited for the circulation of rage as a commodity. One gets a bit of a charge, a flash of indignation, while remaining free of any obligation to act. The situation women face is moral, perhaps even ontological. Political struggle can’t improve women’s lives when the deepest problem we face is misogyny. No wonder liberal feminists find misogyny a compelling lens for understanding the contemporary world. It reflects it back to them while getting them off the hook for failing to fight to change it.
Featherstone astutely draws out the core problem with the misogyny lens: it “forecloses big dreams of political change.” Not only does virtue signaling substitute for politics, but mirroring the dominant order conserves that order. Margaret Thatcher — no one’s feminist icon despite having broken the political glass ceiling in the UK — told us that there is no alternative to capitalism. Liberal feminists tell us there is no alternative to misogyny. Their argument takes a form familiar in the academic humanities as Afro-pessimism, the hatred of the black theorized as the root of European modernity. Corey Robin identifies the same logic in the jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas: racism is ineradicable. And we are seeing a similar eco-pessimism in writers such as Roy Scranton and Jonathan Franzen. The climate catastrophe is here and hoping that we might enact changes big enough to ward off the worst is as delusional as it is dangerous. Public funds have to be saved for disaster relief. Critical energies should be directed to learning how to die.
Gyno-pessimism is another iteration of the same story. By diagnosing the primary political problem as an attitude, an aversion that persists transhistorically and transculturally, the liberal feminist assumes the inadequacy of politics from the start. Material struggles over the division of labor, property, and the wage are neglected and the capitalist system taken for granted as the basic economic condition of our lives. The lens of misogyny prevents us from seeing the broad history of women’s political movement. It can’t focus on women’s leadership in anti-slavery, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist struggles, or on their victories. It fails to place contemporary defeats in the historical context of the defeat of unions, labor, the Soviet experiment, and the communist dream of an emancipatory egalitarian society characterized by solidarity and comradeship.
The classical feminist critique of IR is a straw person and using diplomatic approaches to socialize and engage in behavioral learning does not link
Aydin 16 [Gülşen Aydın Assistant Professor, Atatürk University, Department of International Relations. "Feminist Challenge to the Mainstream IR." http://journals.euser.org/files/articles/ejms_may_aug_16/Gulsen.pdf]
Ann Tickner argued that whereas the Feminists are inclined to critical theory, mainstream IR is oriented towards problem solving theory. As a result, Tickner argued that Realism takes the world as it finds it and accepts the current order as its framework. Moreover, Tickner argued that whereas Feminists reject prefer humanist and philosophical traditions taking spatial and temporal attributes into account, Realists rely on positivist epistemologies taking the natural sciences as the models to follow. Lastly, Tickner argues that whereas Feminism is associated with the social construction of reality whereas Realists opt for an atomistic, asocial conception of behavior determined by the laws of nature (Tickner 1997). Against the criticisms of Ann Tickner, Robert Keohane argued that only a limited number of major IR theorists are oriented towards problem-solving, positivist and asocial (Keohane 1998, 194). Keohane focuses on Morgenthau since most of the criticisms of Tickner concentrates on him. Keohane argues that since Morgenthau was a refuge from Nazism, he was not satisfied with the prevailing world order of the late 1930’s and 1940’s as a framework of analysis. Moreover, Morgenthau had an intensely normative purpose: to prevent the reoccurrence of war generated by ideologies such as fascism and communism. Kenneth N. Waltz, the leader in Neo-Realist Theory, underlined the importance of socialization in the world politics and as a result it not appropriate to regard him an advocate of asocial theories (Keohane 1998, 194). Against the last criticism of Tickner, Keohane argued that “no serious student of international relations expect to discover meaningful universal laws that operate deterministically, since they recognize that no generalization is meaningful without specification of its scope conditions. One can recognize that knowledge is socially constructed without giving up the efforts to widen intersubjective agreement on important issues” (Keohane 1998, 194).
Essentialism Turn---2AC
Associating gender norms with state behaviors or ecological patterns is a false retroactive universalization.
Oeindrila Dube & S. P. Harish 17. Professor, University of Chicago. Post-doctoral Fellow, McGill University. 04/01/2017. Queens. SSRN Scholarly Paper, ID 2957313, Social Science Research Network. papers.ssrn.com, https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2957313.
Does female leadership lead to greater peace? On the one hand, it is commonly argued that women are less violent than men, and therefore, states led by women will be less prone to violent conflict than states led by men. For example, men have been held to “plan almost all the world’s wars and genocides [Pinker, 2011, p.684]”, and the democratic peace among the developed nations has been attributed to rising female leadership in these places [Fukuyama, 1998]. On the other hand, differences in individual aggression may not determine differences in leader aggression. Female leaders, like any other leader, ultimately have to consider how war affects their state as a whole. And, setting overly conciliatory war policies would weaken their state relative to other states. As a consequence, war policies set by female leaders may be similar to war policies set by male leaders.1 A state’s aggression in the foreign policy arena, and its decision to go to war, is arguably one of the most consequential policy outcomes, and one in which the national leadership plays a critical role. Despite its importance, there is little definitive evidence of whether states vary in their tendency to engage in conflict under female versus male leadership. This stands in contrast to other arenas such as economic development, where a growing body of evidence has documented policy differences arising as a consequence of female leadership [Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004, Beaman et al., 2012, Clots-Figueras, 2012, Brollo and Troiano, 2016]. The existing studies that do relate female leadership to external conflict focus exclusively on the modern era [Koch and Fulton, 2011, Caprioli, 2000, Caprioli and Boyer, 2001, Regan and Paskeviciute, 2003], and are also difficult to interpret since women may gain electoral support and come to power disproportionately during periods of peace [Lawless, 2004]. In this paper, we examine how female leadership affected war among European states historically, exploiting features of hereditary succession to surmount this identification challenge. We focus on the 15th-20th centuries and polities that had at least one female ruler during this period. As with electoral systems, women in hereditary systems may have gained power more during times of peace, or when there was no threat of imminent war [Pinker, 2011]. However the way in which succession occurred also provides an opportunity to identify the effect of female rule. In these polities, older male children of reigning monarchs were given priority in succession [Monter, 2012, p. 36-37]. As a result, queens were less likely to come to power if the previous monarchs had a first-born child who was male; and, more likely to come to power if previous monarchs had a sister who could potentially follow as successor. We use these two factors as instruments for queenly rule to determine whether polities led by queens differed in their war participation relative to polities led by kings. Importantly, our paper analyzes the question of whether states led by women are less prone to engage in conflict than states led by men. This is conceptually distinct from the question of whether women, as individuals, are less violent than men,2 in part because war policies are set by leaders based on broader strategic considerations beyond personal inclinations toward violence. To conduct our analysis, we construct a new panel dataset which tracks the genealogy and conflict participation of European polities during every year over 1480-1913. Our primary sample covers 193 reigns in 18 polities, with queens ruling in 18% of these reigns. We include polity fixed effects, holding constant time invariant features of a polity that affect conflict, and exploit variation over time in the gender of the ruler. Using the first born male and sister instruments, we find that polities ruled by queens were 27% more likely to participate in inter-state conflicts, compared to polities ruled by kings. These estimates are economically important, representing a doubling over mean war participation over this period. In contrast, we find that queens were no more likely to experience civil wars or other types of internal instability. An obvious concern with our IV analysis is that the lack of a first-born child who is male may itself trigger conflicts over succession, regardless of whether a woman comes to power. However, we conduct a number of falsification tests which show that the a first-born son does not affect war participation in the contemporaneous reign, or in an auxiliary sample of 18 polities that never had queens over this period. Thus, if there are other ways in which first born males affect conflict, they do not manifest under these circumstances. A second concern is that the presence of a sister among previous monarchs (an aunt, from the stand-point of the current period monarch) may be correlated with the presence of other siblings (i.e., other aunts and uncles) who may also have fought for the throne. However, we are able to control for all of the total siblings of the previous monarchs and show that the results are unaffected if we remove wars of succession from the sample. Importantly, we demonstrate that the results are insensitive to dropping any particular queen, and any particular polity. In addition, we show the robustness of our results to numerous other controls and specifications, including a reign level specification which collapses the annual data to the reign level, as well as a dyadic specification. We examine two potential accounts of why female ruler may have increased war participation. The first account suggests that queens may have been perceived as easy targets of attack. This perception—accurate or not—could have led queens to participate more in wars as a consequence of getting attacked by others. The second account builds on the importance of state capacity. During this period, states fought wars were primarily with the aim of expanding territory and economic power [Mearsheimer, 2001, Goertz and Diehl, 2002, Copeland, 2015]. Wars of this nature demanded financing, spurring states to develop a broader fiscal reach [Besley and Persson, 2009, Karaman and Pamuk, 2013, Gennaioli and Voth, 2015]. As a result, states undertaking wars required greater capacity. Queenly reigns may have had greater capacity than kingly reigns for two reasons, both of which themselves reflect prevailing gender norms from this period. First, queenly reigns may have been able to secure more military alliances. While marriage brought alliances for both male and female monarchs, male spouses were typically more involved with the military of their home countries (than female spouses). This was a direct reflection of taboos on female military leadership during this time period. As a consequence, male spouses were also plausibly better positioned to cement alliances on behalf of queens. Second, queens often enlisted their spouses to help them rule, in ways that kings were less inclined to do with their spouses — an asymmetry again reflects gender identity norms. For example, queens put their spouses in charge of the military or economic reforms, which effectively meant there were two monarchs overseeing state affairs, as compared to one. This greater spousal division of labor may also have enhanced the capacity of queenly reigns, enabling queens to pursue more more aggressive war policies. To test these accounts, we disaggregate war participation by which side was the aggressor, and examine heterogeneous effects based on the monarch’s marital status. We find that among married monarchs, queens were more likely than kings to fight as aggressors, and to fight alongside allies. Among unmarried monarchs, queens were more likely than kings to fight in wars in which their polity was attacked. These results provide some support for the idea that queens were targeted for attack: Unmarried queens, specifically, may have been perceived as weak and attacked by others. But this did not hold true for married queens who instead participated as aggressors. The results are consistent with the idea that the reigns of married queens had greater capacity to carry out war, and asymmetries generated by gender identity norms played a role in shaping this outcome [Bertrand et al., 2015b].3 We also consider and present evidence against several alternative accounts. Queens may also have fought to signal they were militarily strong, which is a type of signaling implied by the influential bargaining model of war [Fearon, 1995]. However, if queens were signaling, there should be larger effects on war participation earlier in their reigns, when it would have been most valuable to send signals to maximally discourage future attacks. Yet, we observe no such differential effect. A second alternative account suggests that it was not the queen, but a persuasive male advisor (such as a foreign minister), who was actually responsible for setting war policy in queenly reigns. In this were the case, the gender effect on war should be even larger among monarchs who acceded at a younger age, since these monarchs are more likely to be influenced by advisors. However, we observe no differential effect based on age of accession, which casts doubt on the idea that war participation was driven by advisors. Rather we interpret our results as reflecting the direct consequence of having a queen, and associated decisions made by the monarchs themselves. In broad terms, we see our results providing evidence for the idea that leaders matter [Jones and Olken, 2005, Pande, 2003], including in shaping policy outcomes. Most proximate to our paper are studies that examine female leadership and inter-state war. These studies have found mixed results. For example, Koch and Fulton [2011] find that among democracies over 1970-2000, having a female executive is associated with higher defense spending and greater external conflict, while having a higher fraction of female legislators is associated with lower defense spending and conflict. Other studies have also found that more female legislators are associated with less external conflict [Caprioli, 2000, Caprioli and Boyer, 2001, Regan and Paskeviciute, 2003]; that female voters are less likely to support the use of force internationally [Conover and Sapiro, 1993, Shapiro and Mahajan, 1986, Jelen et al., 1994, Wilcox et al., 1996, Eichenberg, 2003]; and that female leaders and greater gender equity is correlated with lower rates of internal conflicts [Caprioli, 2000, Melander, 2005, Fearon, 2010]. These results may partly reflect the greater willingness to elect female leaders during times of peace. Owing to this concern, we exploit a plausibly exogenous source of variation in female rule. By focusing our analysis on war over the 15th-20th centuries, we also take an identification-based approach to analyzing history [Nunn, 2009]. Our paper fits into the broader literature of how female political leadership affects public policies, including spending patterns [Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004, Breuning, 2001] education [Clots-Figueras, 2012, Beaman et al., 2012] and corruption [Brollo and Troiano, 2016]; as well as how female corporate leadership affects firms outcomes [Matsa and Miller, 2013, Bertrand et al., 2015a, Ahern and Dittmar, 2012].
That ensures their links AND alt reify gendered norms.
Dan Reiter 15. Department of Political Science, Emory U

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