-- Political Science Quarterly

Until relatively recently, little had been written about gender issues in international relations despite the increased importance of the study of gender in other areas of the social sciences. Gender and International Relations fills that gap, providing a clear and accessible guide to the study of gender issues, feminist theories, and international relations. Steans illustrates how gender is central to nationalisms and political identity, the state, citizenship and conceptions of political community, security, and global political economy and development. Drawing on feminist scholarship from across the social sciences, she demonstrates the uses of feminism as critique. She also introduces readers to contemporary theoretical debates in international relations using concrete concerns and easily understandable issues to ground the discussion. The book does not construct a single feminist theory of international relations nor does it advance a particular perspective of how gender can best be understood in an international or global context. Rather, the book argues that feminist theories have collectively produced insights crucial to the study of international relations and that these insights can be used to challenge conventional approaches to the discipline.

This book provides a critique of the discipline of international relations from a feminist perspective. The critique is developed, first theoretically. Then the author examines both feminist theories and theories of international relations with a view to developing an approach to world politics which incorporates an analysis of gender, and gender relations. The critique is secondly developed through the application of the notion of gender to the activities of two international institutions, the International Parenthood Federation and the International Labour Organisation.

This important introduction to feminist International Relations discusses the history, present and future of the field. With a unique format, it examines issues including global governance, the United Nations, war, peace, security, science, beauty and human rights.

J. Ann Tickner is ranked among the most influential scholars of international relations. As one of the founders of the field of feminist international relations, she is also among the most pioneering. A Feminist Voyage through International Relations provides a compendium of Tickner's work as a feminist IR scholar, from the late 1980s through today, tracing the methodological and epistemological story of feminist interventions in IR.

Explaining gender as both an asymmetrical binary and a hierarchy, the book shows how masculinization works via 'nested hierarchies' of domination and subordination and explores masculinities within nation-state and power politics.

Tickner focuses her distinctively feminist approach on new issues of the international relations agenda since the end of the Cold War, such as ethnic conflict and other new security issues, globalizations, democratization, and human rights.