Losing Our Innocence: Feminist Scholars and International Relations.

This paper will explore the ways that feminist literature and various social movements have employed the link between women’s bodies and their role as caregivers to claim that women have a natural affinity with peace. It will assess the subversive potential of such claims in terms of bringing women’s subjugated knowledges into the public sphere. Women’s subject position as mothers has afforded them a unique vantage point from which to criticize visions of security as articulated by the military state. However, this representation is ill-equipped to take us out of what Foucault identified as the central antinomy of modernity, by which the transformative potential of care becomes inextricably entangled with the instrumental rationality and the totalizing objectives of the state. To get beyond this antinomy requires undoing - and not merely inverting - dichotomies that have positioned feminist/maternal virtues of nurturance and peace as subservient to masculinist rationalities and acts of violence associated with reasons of state. Undoing dichotomies demands more than a late-modern recognition of the differences between women. It requires that we as feminist scholars forego our innocence by acknowledging our involvement with power and the intricate and sometimes unforeseen connections between the feminist representations that take place on the basis of women’s maternal identities and the interpellation of such identities by the liberal democratic state. Finally, it requires that we abandon the dream of feminist unanimity while remaining cognizant of the need for a gender-based analysis to fundamentally disrupt the narratives that constitute masculinist modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]