Gender, Power Transitions, and the Rise of China.

This paper critiques power transition theory through gendered lenses, contending that it is gendered in its language and conceptual framework. It presents a feminist reformulation of power transition hypotheses. It then compares a power transition approach with a feminist approach to the United States’ interpretation of and options regarding the “rise of China”.The first section of this paper asks how power transition theory contains, reflects, reproduces, and reflects certain assumptions about gender in global politics and scholarship about it. It applies general feminist critiques of security studies to power transition theory, then evaluates some gender-based issues with the language and structure of power transition theory specifically. It critiques the statist approach to security thinking within the power transitions research program and those scholars’ assignment of moral value to hierarchy. Instead, it proposes, gendered lenses can add tools to deal with the question of power transition to make the theory both more representative and more aware of its gendered implications. These tools include searching for silences, disrupting dominant discourses, employing empathy and discourse ethics, analyzing the competition between masculine and feminine values, critiquing us/them dichotomies, and critiquing the sexualization of relationships. The second section of the paper applies these insights to power transition theory’s observations about the rise of China, interrogating which people and states are included in that theory, which needs are neglected by a narrow interpretation of what “security” and “satisfaction” mean, the role of gendered militarized culture, and the social construction of gendered states and their contributions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]