Feminism on Power & State
• Feminist theory increasingly influential
• Not a unified, comprehensive theory; provides a lens to examine international relations
• feminist or gender scholarship is NOT JUST about women… deeper (epistemological roots)… socially constructed masculinity & femininity - - and how ideas about what these things structure or influence the ways we can behave, the ways we can think – what gets counted as important and what gets seen as trivial or unimportant.

Feminism on P
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on Power & State

Feminists often contend that traditional theories conceptualise power as power over others.
Morgenthau's picture of international relations, divorced from feminine notions of the personal, emotional and private.
Enloe highlights an issue with the state-centric concept of power. First, she notes that power “only exists within a relationship.
Power is interpreted as state-centric, masculinised and understood as domination or power over others. According to the feminist perspective, this formulation of power is misleading as it ignores the oppressed other and the power relations required to keep them there, and means that traditional theories disregard the many strands of power emerging from shifting gender, class and ethnic relations in the margins of society that can impact upon international relations alongside the central power of the state.
Traditional theories’ reliance upon these conceptions of power therefore amounts to an inaccurate and