Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium

Dilemmas in World Politics

by V. Spike Peterson, Anne Sisson Runyan

Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium connects the inequalities between and among women and men with the world politics of global governance, security, political economy, and ecology. Through historical, theoretical, and empirical analysis, the authors alert us to gendered divisions of power, violence, labor and resources, as well as the power of gender as a meta-lens that keeps gender, race, class, sexual, and national divisions in place, despite some re-positionings of some women and men on the world political stage. In this completely new edition, which reflects significant advances in feminist international relations and transnational feminist scholarship, the authors apply intersectional analysis to global governance, militarization, global economic restructuring, and environmental degradation. They explore how crises of representation, insecurity, and sustainability have widened and deepened—particularly in the post-9/11 period—while at the same time global gender policymaking (quotas, gender mainstreaming, and the advancing of women’s human rights) has increased. The authors focus on this apparent contradiction—the higher level of attention to gender and women’s human rights in a time of fierce militarization, savage economic inequality, and ecological crisis—but also address how the power of gender, as a meta-lens that orders world politics, can be deconstructed to rethink identities, ideologies, structures, and policies that rest upon gendered processes of imperialism, neoliberalism, racialization, and sexualization. The book emphasizes how hard-won attention to gender equality in world affairs can be co-opted when gender is used to justify or mystify unjust global governance, global security, and global political economy, but at the same time sees promise in coalitional struggles to re-radicalize feminist world political demands to change the downward conditions of women, men, children, and the planet. Thus, the authors also examine the challenges of forging transnational solidarities to de-gender world politics, scholarship, and practice through renewed politics of representation and redistribution.

Genres: Womens Studies, Feminism, Nonfiction, Read For School, International Relations, Political Science

328 pages, Paperback

First published July 14, 2009

Reviews

[Samantha · Rating 1 out of 5]

Absolutely awful. The authors are extremely "jargony" in their writing. The sentences are poorly written and make their point extremely hard to understand. The fact that the professor who assigned it hated it as well speaks volumes since it is clear the authors have a very narrow audience in mind.

[Kaela Spencer · Rating 3 out of 5]

My professor decided to change the book half way into the semester.

[Patrick F · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book contained the worst paragraph of all time. I would place it here but I don't care enough. Lol. If I go back to it I will update this review. I felt like I was reading the same paragraph over and over again. The authors presented a lot of data but their analysis and solutions fall short. Any time situations changed, they also moved the goal post so it makes it look like change, progressive, and liberalism is always outside the purview of gender, for example. When people get help, they become "whitened," for example because they have to maintain that "white" is a meta-lens in which without it their radical feminist IR-theories start to break down. They called women who became government officials "femocrats." What is my point in offering that example? There isn't one except for the fact that they felt the need to put every single thing into a jargony term that no one cares about and that no one agrees with outside of their niche and radical circles.

The most illuminating and important parts of this text were regarding the women who become part of the R&r of (mostly) male soldiers around the world; the section that discussed the 3 types of systemic rape that goes in during war was important. They provided excellent - at times - definitions of terms such as privatization, structural adjustment programs, and a myriad of IR theory. However, much of this is sloppy, one-sided and down right ridiculous such as the idea that the "war on drugs" is how the U.S. justifies the continual widespread spraying of carcinogenic herbicides throughout the countrysides of Central and South America.

The authors paint an insidious misunderstanding of how the world actually works; they eschew any type of science and "human nature" understanding of people. They eschew the long hard slog of progress and history. They ignore what is in front of their eyes to fit a particular worldview.

This book obfuscates more than illuminates.

[Tara Lindahl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the defining books that I read in college and it transformed how I see the world. It helped me to see and understand the different lenses and filters that I use to view the world and that the world uses to view me. It dispelled my notions of absolutes and highlighted the shades of gray our lives are painted with.