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Wagner Santos, Crisano Mendes Prostutes, Mercenaries and Feminism: The Public and the Private in Internaonal Relaons
and motherhood. Men would be assigned to the public sphere and ideali-
zed as rational, virile, strong, brave, and heroic (Shepherd, 2010).
Feminists questioned the frontiers through which such opposition
had settled in the international arena and sought the means to combat
them. Starting from hermeneutical, discursive and humanistic metho-
dologies, they used philosophical traditions previously ignored by con-
ventional approaches, looking at global politics through “gender lenses”
(Peterson, Runyan, 2010; Sjoberg, Tickner, 2013a).
In the eld of foreign policy, feminists warn that the male sex is not
only dominant, but also the policymaker based on the assumption that if
they are rational and strategically oriented actors, they would be better
able to represent the nation’s line of defense, making better life or death
decisions (True, 2005). In their study of foreign policy and defense, Nancy
E. McGlen and Meredith Reid Sarkees (1993) concluded that women are
rarely insiders in the political game and even more rarely make or parti-
cipate in foreign policy decisions that lead to war, for example.
But despite sharing a deep interest in gender equality or, as they
prefer to assert, in “gender emancipation” in IR, feminism is not a one-no-
te theory. The variety of activism associated with feminism parallels the
innumerable paths that its arguments may take (Jaggar, 1983; Mohanty,
Russo, Torres, 1991; Steans, 1998; Sylvester, 1996; Zalewski, 2000). Liberal
Feminism, for example, draws attention to the subordination suered by
women in global politics and argues about the need to include women
in the areas of the public sphere that have been denied to them (Sjoberg;
Tickner, 2013b). It departs from the assumption that women have the
same capacity for action as men and cannot be excluded from any social
sphere: higher education, government, international institutions, and -
nancial aairs, among others. Liberal feminists investigate, for example,
the inequalities between men and women and the human rights viola-
tions committed disproportionately against women, such as internatio-
nal tracking and rape at war. Their approach uses gender as an expla-
natory variable in the analysis of foreign policy through statistical varia-
tions (Caprioli; Boyer, 2001). They also argue that discrimination deprives
women of having equal rights to achieve their own goals. While men
are judged by their individual merits, women are judged by their femini-
ne qualities or collectively as a group. Such barriers could be eliminated
by removing the obstacles that underpin them, and by providing equal
opportunities to both genders (Whitworth, 2008; Tickner, 2001)5 .
Critical Feminism, by contrast, goes beyond Liberal Feminism and
its use of gender as an analytical variable. This approach focuses less on
women’s participation in the public sphere and more on unequal rela-
tionships between men and women as gender representations in a patriar-
chal society, in which men have historically wished to control women’s
sexuality, reproduction, and other social roles. For critical feminists, men
and women are essentially dierent and similar to each other in several
respects. These authors tend to agree that men are less prone to showing
emotion and more aggressive and competitive, while women are more
caring and more emotional. In these terms, society is organized taking
into account masculine characteristics, privileging patriarchal norms and
5. However, Liberal Feminists tend to
be criticized by other approaches for
using methods considered positivist
in their analyses. See, for example,
McMillan C (1982) Women, Reason and
Nature: Some Philosophical Problems
with Feminism. Princeton: Princeton
University Press; Steans J (2010) ‘Femi-
nist perspectives’ in Steans J et al. An
Introduction to International Relations
Theory: perspectives and themes, 3rd
edition. Essex: Pearson, p. 155-82; and
Mohanty CT, Russo A; Torres L (eds.)
(1991) Third World Women and the Po-
litics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.