Dr. Anne Sisson Runyan

*Copyright Gregorio Borgia/Copyright 2021 The Associated Press.*

As I work with my former doctoral students now in the professoriate to produce the sixth edition of Global Gender Politics for Routledge, which began life in 1993 as Global Gender Issues, I co-authored with V. Spike Peterson, was initially published by Westview Press. and has since gone through multiple titles and permutations, I cannot help but feel like its trajectory, in some sense, represents the rise and potential fall of feminist International Relations, or FIR, as Ann Tickner dubbed it in her 2014 A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations. Much like experiencing in my own lifetime the winning and then the loss of abortion rights and affirmative action in the US in the space of less than 50 years, my role in arguing for and chronicling the life of FIR for over 40 years has enabled me to see how easily and quickly a whole host of feminist gains in the study and practice of IR, albeit typically flawed and insufficient when operationalized by institutions, can be swept away. While I have long critiqued (particularly in my writings with Marysia Zalewski) liberal progress narratives that assume an always upward trajectory in terms of the securing of rights when considering the ample empirical evidence that patriarchal, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and colonizing imperialist and predatory capitalist forces continue to maraud the earth, albeit in brief periods and some places more in abeyance, but mostly asserted and re-asserted over time and in most places, it is still jarring when struggles and their footholds are dashed over and over again.

“I realize that my relative privilege, particularly by race, class, nation, and sexuality, sustains some unconscious, non-intellectual faith in progress, different from those in millennia of struggles, such as Indigenous peoples, who insist on surviving no matter what.”

And while there are now congeries of FIR scholars and practitioners around the world and, thus, there is no way that it or feminism more generally can be eradicated in theory or practice, there is a certain survival mode we too are facing in these neofascist oligarchic times—not everywhere (for it would be a mistake to globalize what is happening in the belly of the US beast) but too proliferated in too many sites of power nationally and globally. During the early days of FIR, it was the discipline that was hard to crack open to eventually let us “in” more or less and to the degree that we wanted this. Now, in the context of attacks on the academy and, in some cases, outright censorship of anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic, anti-colonial, and pro-environmental justice thought in particular, from Orban’s Hungary to Trump’s America and many points in between, the question of how much of this thought can survive, much less advance and matter is more on my mind, with visions of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 underground book memorizers dancing in my head. So many of us have also been chronicling, too, the impact of far-right forces on the international level, where inroads have been made in “taking gender seriously” (though not transformationally), as Cynthia Enloe would say. Although we have long critiqued instrumentalist moves, whether in terms of gender mainstreaming, the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda, or feminist foreign policy, the potential death throes of these that have begun in some quarters are also giving some pause. In the face of this, I and my current co-authors are struggling to “make feminist sense” (again, Enloe’s words) of the latest severe disciplining of international and domestic feminist thought and action. We have not yet alighted on quite how to do this and best speak to resistances to it, but we know that the struggle always lies in as many of us as possible and wherever we are working to re-imagine and re-make global, national, and local politics and ourselves for more just, equal, sustainable, and non-violent worlds.

Global Anti-Gender Politics