Friends don't let friends cite the malestream: a case for strategic silence in feminist international relations

• Published in: International feminist journal of politics Vol. 22; no. 1; pp. 26 - 32
• Main Author: Duriesmith, David
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 01.01.2020; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Academic writing; citation; Feminism; Gender; International relations; Scholarship; silence
• ISSN: 1461-6742; 1468-4470
• DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2019.1700818

From its origins, feminist international relations (IR) has been concerned with disciplinary silences. Beginning with Cynthia Enloe's (1990) clarion call "Where are the women?," the parameters of feminist IR have been defined as much by certain thinkers' disinterest in gender as they have by an interest in locating gender in the terrain of global affairs. After more than 25 years of robust academic work on gender, the enduring perception remains that the malestream still "just doesn't understand" (Tickner 1997). The nature of this "misunderstanding" has been the subject of ongoing analysis by both feminist authors and the malestream. With the intention of adding my voice to these debates, earlier this year I wrote a chapter in Jane Parpart and Swati Parashar's (2019) edited volume Rethinking Silence, Voice and Agency in Contested Gendered Terrains. In the chapter I aimed to explore the politics behind the disciplinary silences on gender and to consider what feminists might gain by reevaluating our practices of citing malestream scholarship. I argued that feminist scholarship should attempt to reclaim citational silences as a powerful and political act within "unloving" disciplines like IR (Soreanu and Hudson 2008; Duriesmith 2019). Here I would like to explore some of the frustrations that motivated the original pieces and outline, in part, what I see as the generative potential of refusing to cite work that is antithetical to feminist efforts to transform IR. In arguing that feminists should refuse to cite the malestream, my hope is not simply that feminists close ranks against those who do not adopt our priorities. Rather, it is that by refusing to show love for unloving scholarship we will create new possibilities for renegotiating how feminist work is positioned in relation to the malestream.