When I was reflecting on the best way to frame my intervention for this edited volume, I was reminded of one of those trivial, yet intense debates that two of my IR colleagues in Montreal recurrently engaged in. Whereas both colleagues deeply respect each other, one of their main points of contention over the years has revolved over the scholarship of Jutta Weldes. As hard as it is to fathom, the debate resurfaces between them from time to time – be it at a student’s defense, during a graduate seminar in IR theory or when grading a comprehensive exam – each time with no more resolution to the argument than the last.
The first one is adamant that Jutta Weldes is a critical constructivist, and he makes a point of underscoring how her scholarship is very distinct from poststructuralism. He often encourages students to follow the framework Weldes deployed in her book Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1999). The second one insists that Jutta Weldes is a poststructuralist, and that her once calling herself a critical constructivist was simply a political move to give her work some legitimacy, as she was writing in the United States at the time of the publication of her book. The first one dismisses this reasoning, saying that her work is “exemplary and rigorous constructivist work”, that it does not “suffer from poststructuralism’s antiscientific posture”, and that it “goes well beyond language and discourse” to describe the world while mobilizing it effectively to explain a political phenomenon. The second one is adamant that this reading simply betrays a misunderstanding of discourse, and that “constructivists are simply people who do not want to take their reasoning as far as poststructuralism does because it makes them uncomfortable: reality is apparently constructed, but only at specific times and places, because it makes you more comfortable in thinking so”, as opposed to poststructuralists. In the end, both highly recommend the book to their students as a perfect illustration of “critical Constructivism” or “poststructuralism” in IR.
We could decide that settling this debate might only require asking Jutta Weldes how she would label herself, now and then, and move on. Yet, not only do I believe that this would not make a difference for my two colleagues, but I also think it would miss the point in what is really at stakes in this banal debate. More than the scholarship of Weldes, this anecdote illustrates what my colleagues are really gripping on (and passing onto their students): issues of methods and legitimacy in conducting research, which they coalesce around theoretical identity claims. Such claims are nothing short of political codes. In that case, relying on Weldes’ work was deemed acceptable and “good scholarship” by my first colleague to the extent that it did not purposefully identify as being poststructuralist. The other one, by contrast, sees this labeling of Constructivism as a disciplinary move that makes her work “merely orthodox”, and questions how using it suddenly makes it “reasonable, respectable” work in a way that labeling it as poststructuralist work would not. To that effect, Swati Srivavastava’s use of Ian Hacking could not be more à propos:
Keeping this in mind, I want to suggest that we cannot think of methods in general, and notably in relation to Constructivism, apart from the relations of power that unfold inside the discipline of IR, for “paradigms are not only social spaces, but also political that contest for power and influence with each other” (Montgomery 2017) While so doing, we need to be attuned to the fact that the political codes of both “methods” and “Constructivism” do not mean or entail the same thing from one setting to another: context matters. As such, explicitly considering methods or Constructivism as tactics can prove useful to gain legitimacy inside the discipline of IR. However, doing so is not without limits or drawbacks. Building from my personal history and experience, I want to tease out these issues in relation to feminist curiosity, here considered as a method of inquiry.
To do so, I first start with a brief semi auto-ethnographic discussion that highlights how the difference of two disciplinary educational settings has led to a reconfiguration of the key issues of legitimacy and methods in my work: studying IR in French and in a less US-centric view of IR at the Université du Québec à Montréal, and doing so in an Ivy League department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. This experience nourished my understanding of methods as being far more than tools to study the world. I found in John Law, as well as Jef Huysmans and Claudia Aradau’s understanding of methods, an echo to my experience and understanding of why “methods matter”, in the sense that they are important, but that they also create “matter” – objects, worlds, problems. From there, I then move on to explore how this understanding of methods allows me to use “feminist curiosity” as a method for conducting research that can be in line with recent calls to expand Constructivism (Kessler and Steele 2016; McCourt 2016a). Finally, the third part reflects on the tactical use of Constructivism to gain legitimacy inside the discipline of IR, and the limits and drawback for doing so. If calls to expand Constructivism’s inclusiveness and the methods falling under its purview sound promising in theory, I find that they are still undergirded by and not immune to the same “politics of membership and classic in-group/out-group dynamics” (Srivastava 2017), and run the risk of taming a politics of dissidence for disciplinary purposes
Having initially been trained in History as an undergraduate student, my transition to International Relations was marked by the emphasis on theories. Learning about the acrimonious debates between Wendt, Mearsheimer, Waltz, Ashley and Ruggie was not unsettling, as was reading about the so-called “third debate” (Lapid 1989). Indeed, similar debates around issues of objectivity and the social construction of “facts” were found in historiography, as debates around Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (1988) testified.
Yet, during my M.A. training as an IR scholar in Montreal, debates never centered on methods, but rather on epistemology. TRIP research results seem to confirm that this experience was by no means exceptional, as Canadian scholars have identified epistemology as being the most divisive element of the discipline (Jordan et al. 2008, 70), over methods, paradigms and ontology. As an M.A. student, I was taught the importance and significance of the third debate, and the edited volume International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (1996), as well as Martin Hollis and Steve Smith’s Explaining and Understanding in International Relations (1991) played a significant role in my M.A. training and thesis. Epistemology (and to a lesser extent ontology), rather than methods, weighted heavily in these two volumes. During my two years as an M.A. Student, I had virtually never been confronted with issues of quantitative versus qualitative methods, causal inference, and the legitimacy issues associated with it.
When I started my Ph.D. seminars at the University of Pennsylvania, I quickly realized that most of my peers had really no idea what I was talking about when I raised issues of epistemology. They failed to see its relevance to discussing “concrete” issues in international relations. After a few attempts at raising the issue in seminars, only to be met with an awkward and uncomfortable silence, followed by (true story) “Well, for the sake of discussion, let’s just assume that we are all positivists”, I stopped bringing up the E word, as if it were something ridiculous or irrelevant. By contrast, methods were constantly brought up in discussions: how did this author achieved this conclusion? How was the causal claim proven? This obsession over causality and how to achieve it puzzled me. As opposed to several of my IR peers, I spent way less time thinking about methods than what I had identified as epistemological issues during my M.A.: how do we know what we know? Who has a (right) claim to knowledge, and who decides on that? With what consequences for the world we live in and purport to study?
Two key points associated with this changing IR context, from Montreal to Philadelphia, should be underlined here. First, I quickly realized that many of the issues I had come to associate with epistemology during my training in Montreal and that I view as relevant during my stay at Penn were still central in American IR: it was simply that at Penn, these issues were tied to methods. For instance, whereas the question “What counts as relevant knowledge?” was seen as directly tied to methods used in the US, I had been trained to see it as an epistemological concern. In the US, I discovered that methods might be “sold” and presented to graduate students as merely tools and techniques for doing research in a “rigorous” way, with rigor referring more implicitly than not to neopositivist work. I learned about the Perestroika movement (Monroe 2005), and understood that even though it was presented as a revolt against quantitative methods to rehabilitate qualitative methods or interpretive methods, it centered on the very issues that I was initially taught as being linked to epistemology. In other words, it is not that the questions I had raised were not relevant or ignored in this new setting: it was simply being mobilized through a different proxy or political code, namely methods.
Second, as a Ph.D. student in an Ivy League university, it quickly became evident that my self-identification as an IR scholar was being denied. During dinner in 2005, an IR Professor gently corrected me when I talked about securitization theory, blaming my English as a second language for using such a neologism. I, for one, could not understand why this term seemed so alien: had they not heard of Ole Wæver’s (1995) famous chapter on “Securitization and Desecuritization” which served as basis for Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde’s 1998 Security: A New Framework for Analysis? I quickly understood that “my IR” was not “their IR”. In fact, acceptance of my work and project only became acceptable and treated as relevant in my Ph.D. prospectus class when it became clear to my peers and to faculty members that I was officially in Political Theory, rather than IR, that I was “a theorist”. To be sure, I was still reading the same IR authors I had come to enjoy during my M.A. degree (Cynthia Enloe, V. Spike Peterson, Raymond Duvall, Marysia Zalewski, David Campbell, Ole Wæver, Steve Smith, to name but a few), and still located my work inside of IR, but being labeled a political theorist allowed for more acceptance and recognition, merely because I was then seen as non-threatening to the IR faculty members at Penn, and frankly, simply irrelevant to the discipline of IR as understood at Penn. Thanks to scholars such as Robert Vitalis and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, I could find support in the IR community in the US, but still from its margins.
This experience of translating different concerns over knowledge claims and legitimacy in two different contexts of “doing IR” convinced me – and this is the point I want to carry forward here – that we need to seriously reconsider what we mean by “methods”, and what political codes the word carries with it. We cannot think of methods as merely tools, and not relate them to ontology and epistemology, to the world(s) methods aim to identify and describe, if not enact. This interrelation was captured by John Law. In After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, Law is categorical:
In IR, this posture was recently presented by Claudia Aradau and Jef Huysmans, who enjoined readers to start considering methods as “performative practices … through which substantive effects are obtained” (Aradau and Huysmans 2014, 3). Methods are not necessarily mere representational techniques deployed to describe a world: they actually do things, they create worlds and disrupt some, with all the political implications such a move suggest. As a result, methods “necessarily connect experimentally connecting and assembling fragments of ontology, epistemology, theories, techniques and data” (Aradau and Huysmans 2014, 3). Understood this way, methods can and should be understood as something broader than techniques, and this is notably something that feminist IR scholars have long called for. We can think of Christine Sylvester’s early call to embrace “empathetic cooperation” (1994) as a method, for instance, or L.H.M Ling’s recent proposal for a method of “gender as analytics” (Ling 2014).
Huysmans and Aradau notably specify that feminist curiosity, which can be seen at work in the exemplary work of Cynthia Enloe, is not only a simple intellectual disposition or an embrace of political activism, but a method. Their explanation of how feminist curiosity constitutes a method in the traditional sense (as a tool to gain information about the world) and in Law’s sense (as a worldmaking practice that cannot be uncoupled from issues of epistemology) deserves to be quoted in full here:
From there, one understands that adopting a method is also a political act that may disrupt existing worlds to make new ones come into being, or on the contrary strengthen social and political orders that are already in place. Cynthia Enloe nicely summarizes how a feminist curiosity precisely entails the enmeshment of epistemology, ontology and normative commitment described by Law:
Now, in terms of specific techniques or tools to translate this method in practice, there is absolutely no reason to believe that one way to proceed should be privileged over others – say, conducting archival work over semi-structured interviews or formal modeling. Enloe herself mobilized comparative methods, archival work, discourse analysis and quantitative work (Enloe 2012).
In terms of how one proceeds to translate feminist curiosity into research,2 Ackerly and True’s recommendation proves to be a useful guidance for graduate students. Building on Andrew Linklater and Robert W. Cox’s requirement for critical theorizing in IR, they highlight five specific steps that I believe could guide feminist curiosity as a method. First, research must not only “be grounded in observation of human experience, key material developments, and processes of historical change” but it should also ask “what counts as key historical information” and “what human experiences is it important to observe”. Second, inquiries “must evaluate current practices and policies from the perspective of how they are constructed”, and interrogate “the evaluation techniques … used to assess the kinds of power that have had a formative effect on the historical structures inherited and the accepted means of evaluating them”. Third, as researchers, we must examine ever-moving and changing “emancipatory social forms” and critically evaluate “who is set free and who is not by any social formation or form of inquiry”. From there, we must investigate “a society’s professed homogeneity regarding social norms; and […] [seek] to identify internal sources for and against change of established social institutions”. Finally, it is imperative that “the feminist scholar considers her own theorizing to be ongoing, self-reflective, and, crucially, to be complemented by dialogue with activists and policymakers about the accuracy and relevance of her work” (Ackerly and True 2006, 255).
Aradau and Huysmans’ argument of feminist curiosity as performative method perfectly encapsulated my own understanding of method and its performative and normative aspects. It also echoed my own experience as a researcher. As an M.A. student, I did my thesis on George W. Bush’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in Sub-Saharan Africa. What had initially intrigued me and led me to study this was the publicity made around the plan when it was launched, as it controversially made the promotion of sexual abstinence and marriage as cornerstone policies to fight the epidemic. Coming from the province of Quebec, which has one of the lowest marriage rates in the world, promoting marriage as a solution to HIV/AIDS seemed curious enough to me. It was also strange to me to read a report boastfully claiming that “By 1995, 95 percent of Ugandans were reporting either one or zero sexual partners in the past year […]. Uganda’s success shows that behavior change … is a very successful way to prevent the spread of HIV” (US Congress 2003, 22 U.S. Code § 7601 – Findings – 20[d]). Not only did the statistic seemed questionable at best, but I wondered: what would happen if we were to substitute “Americans” for “Ugandans”? Would that still be seen as a favorable development? Would we be assuming that that “American promiscuity” needed to be effectively tamed, and that it was responsible for the epidemic?
As a Ph.D. student, I turned my attention to the so-called “mail-order brides” industry, and the fact that it was regulated and depicted as a problem in the United States and not in Germany. My interest in the topic was sparked by a New York Times article, which described tours organized for American men in Ukraine and China to find a so-called “mail-order bride” or “traditional wife” to bring home. My initial reaction was one of shock: why was this legal, when sexual tourism and human trafficking were being openly fought and decried? How was it different? What kind of business were “mail-order brides” industries? Why go to Ukraine and China and not, say, Malaysia and Tanzania? Each question led to further inquiries into what I called a political economy of desire (D’Aoust 2010), and about the ways in which the same phenomenon (cross-border marriages enabled through a marriage broker) was seen as a problem or not.
While different in terms of focus and geographical areas, the common thread that unites these two studies, in retrospect, could be condensed in one simple question of general curiosity: “Why are states so invested in controlling some people’s intimate relationships?” Why do states care at all who people have sex with, who they marry – or why would the state want you to have sex (or not) with specific persons, and marry at all? What difference does it make – and to whom? Problems are not objective states of being, they are made. Therefore, to me, feminist curiosity builds on Michel Foucault’s notion of problematization i.e. a “set of discursive or nondiscursive practices that makes something enter into the play of true and false, and constitutes it as an object for thought” (Foucault 1996, 456 – 7). Deploying feminist curiosity to question the state of things, question what is taken for granted, is to problematize (what has been identified as) problems themselves, and problematize what is seen as a state of things.
This short description of my work and the feminist curiosity that undergirds it makes it obvious that both necessarily build on the very premises of Constructivism. Based on David McCourt’s logic, feminist curiosity might reclaim the label Constructivism in ways that forego essentializing the label, namely, by focusing on the “practicality” and “relationality” of its approach (McCourt 2016b). How so? To name but a few examples: reality is not given, it is constructed by the observer; what might be seen as an immutable state of things can in fact be a pretty fortified social arrangement we take for granted; feminine and masculine norms infuse social relations, etc. It can also be said to put into practice David McCourt’s injunction for “reflexive reflexivity”, for “incorporating in all constructivist research an assessment of the impact of the researcher and their social location vis-à-vis the object of study” (McCourt 2016b, 41). In many ways, feminist curiosity also echoes several points noted by third-generation constructivists, as defined in Oliver Kessler and Brent Steele’s recent symposium on the topic (2016), most importantly “an ambivalence toward ethical theories purporting to apply to a real world possessed of fixed and certain properties, not least of which is the fact-value distinction” (Onuf 2016a, 117). Even more, it can be said to be engaged in “a need to find again even a language for politics” against the fetishizing and “allure of technique, be it that of understanding politics in terms of design and production, or that of ‘conditioning’ by ‘signals’ or ‘habits’” (Kratochwil 2016, 135).
Knowing this, what gets accomplished when I say that adopting a feminist curiosity makes my work constructivist? Does it matter that I (or others) label my work as such? In the introduction to this volume, the editors set out clearly that “methods are the way in which we promote and protect our ideas and arguments about the world. Methods have to generate trust – both in the subject being explored and in (and by) the analyst doing the exploring. In some ways, “the deck is ‘stacked’ against perspectives or approaches like Constructivism that depend upon, or are even defined by, interpretive methods” (this volume: page 1). It emphasizes a social process of recognition by others (trust), but also the importance of personhood (analyst). This volume’s proposition starts with the premise that Constructivism is in a marginalized position inside the discipline, a proposition that has been contested by some (e.g. Montgomery 2017; Maliniak et al. 2014), but one that betrays the situatedness of the claim, namely the elite of US academia and mainstream publications venues. Constructivism is not much of an issue at Johns Hopkins University or at the University of Minnesota. Yet, it might be seen as quite radical in “the top 15 or 20 US departments” that have not “found a representative of this third legitimate way (Constructivism) ‘worthy’ of also joining the temples of science” (Kratochwil 2016, 133). As publications in top IR journals are increasingly seen as the measure of success in a tightening job market, being aware of the fact that publications are dominated by a handful of these top institutions (Kristensen 2015) rather than being representative of US IR academia at large, tactical use of Constructivism itself might still be warranted as a broader strategy for graduate students3 inside the American discipline.
As a result, one explicit question we were asked to reflect on for this volume was “how methods might be the ultimate tactic for persuading, or at least drawing in, communities and groups who otherwise might be skeptical of constructivist-influenced/shaped research”, and on “how, perhaps, and despite all the concerns regarding the disintegration of the field of International Relations, perspectives like Constructivism are interdependent upon the abilities of scholars to embody, express, and defend their work when it is scrutinized and interrogated” (Introduction). These statements suggest two things: (1) that Constructivism is marginal and/or “under attack” by skeptics in the discipline of IR, and hence needs “reinforcement”; and (2) that mobilizing specific tools of inquiry (interpretive methods) can convince specific communities of the “scientific rigor” and value of Constructivism. What these two points highlight is the “disciplinary machinery” of IR, the very disciplinary politics highlighted at the beginning of this intervention: what does it do, for instance, to say that using feminist curiosity as a method makes me a part of the constructivist “family” (Peltonen, 2016)? Should I say so in the first place, if only as a “tactic”, as highlighted in the Introduction, to bring people to appreciate the insights of “constructivist-influenced/shaped research”?
On the one hand, as mentioned previously, observations of the actual environment you find yourself in can require you to use labels tactically “to be taken seriously” by a specific community and impact it with the work you want to do. This tactical move seems even more important for students, who are already part of unequal power dynamics with those who can give or deny them recognition, such as advisors and professors. On the other hand though, doing so perpetuates the very problems of exclusion, erasure and legitimacy we identified: Constructivism would here make sense as a “reasonable” alternative in the face of more “radical” alternatives, such as simply labeling one’s work as Feminist. This issue is certainly not limited to feminists. Srdjan Vucetic reminds us for instance that accounts of the history of Constructivism in IR starting in the 1980s display obliviousness to the work of Black scholars such as W.E.B Dubois. Vucetic points to Robert Vitalis’ work (2016) to underscore the serious limits of the tactical use of certain works, identities and labels for disciplinary benefits, especially for African-American scholars: “Some remained faithful to critical thought at great personal and professional cost [the career of Merze Tate, the one female scholar in the group, stands out], and others gave up on it, in exchange for both disciplinary and extra-disciplinary benefits that white supremacy often bestows upon those who accept its terms of thought and action” (Vucetic 2017).There is thus real danger that tactical uses of Constructivism can erase the vocabulary and politics of feminist curiosity – and perhaps more crucially, its aim to challenge the status quo and promote social change.
Being recognized, acknowledged and validated as a “group member” often implies not asking certain questions, framing them in a certain way or presenting them in a certain way that makes them “acceptable”. If we are to follow Onuf’s advice to not take metaphors lightly (Onuf 2016a, 113), then we can appreciate the need to be curious about the idea that we should consider “social Constructivisms as a family” with “resemblances” (Peltonen 2016, 78), as feminists have rightly point out that families are not necessarily safe spaces exempt from hierarchies and relations of power. Resemblances and filiation make certain things possible, but how is difference or dissidence dealt with?
Being aware of this is part and parcel of the reflexive process inherent to feminist curiosity. Consider for instance Carol Cohn’s seminal article “Sex and Death in the World of Defense Intellectual” (1987). Her decision to research the military, and to mingle with them, allowed her to write one of the most classic feminist IR pieces, providing invaluable insights on the gendered language used to discuss nuclear options. In it, Cohn recalls how the feeling of the words she was using ended up affecting her relationship to the very topic she was studying – and even being critical of. Talking about discussing nuclear war and nuclear strategy in a military setting, Cohn points out to the (over)use of acronyms in conversations. Being part of the group, she found out that the experience of doing so revealed something unexpected: that the vocabulary she used and its mastery to be “part of the group” lent itself to a sense of power:
But still, one could argue that might contribute in reshaping the dominant meaning currently ascribed to Constructivism in IR, which is mostly loosely associated with norms and rules or, even more broadly (if not crudely), “idealism”. We could note, for instance, how several self-identified constructivists have identified links, when not a clear debt, between their own work and feminist inquiries. Nick Onuf, for instance, claimed that his “feminist doctoral students changed [his] life in a great many ways, and were largely responsible for [his] turn to social theory” (Onuf 2016b), Brent Steele said that “prospects for dialogue between feminists and other IR scholars are better than many feminists or their critical scholar kin, might realize” if, instead of thinking of dialogue (or fights) as going between schools, we think of them as taking place “through the different questions that each generation of emerging critical scholars foreground in their work” (Steele 2011, emphasis in original).
These suggest promising meeting points where mutual learning could take place between scholars. But in practice, this view assumes that both start on an equal footing, and fails to recognize the identity politics and institutional power dynamics of recognition inside the discipline, even when it comes to Constructivism. Zalewski’s words of caution apply here, namely that as individuals, we might “over-estimate our powers when we think we can prise apart meanings from words at will … and make things mean what we want them to mean. Acting ‘as if’, I think is extremely important in one’s own everyday life, but institutionally the story is a different one” (Harcourt, Ling, Zalewski and Swiss International Relations Collective 2015, 162).
In other words, it is not enough to say “Feminist curiosity is constructivist” to suddenly be embraced as such: recognition involves more complex relations of power. We can strive to give (new) Constructivism a more-encompassing and more multilayered meaning than what came to be associated with the second-generation scholarship (see McCourt 2016a for a call to include practice theory and relational theories under this new label), but that does not mean that such effort is a simple move, deprived of politics and institutionally easy – even inside the very community that would like to welcome this. Trust and personhood, two key elements mentioned earlier, are involved in social relations of power, often in complicated ways.
To briefly reflect on this, let me recall yet another anecdotal experience. In 2014, I was invited to attend a workshop on Constructivism by the very editors of this volume. All of the organizers were known to be sympathetic to the non-mainstream work of feminist, poststructuralist or postcolonial scholars, to name but a few examples. Nevertheless, I was initially reluctant to attend. “But your work is actually constructivist!”, insisted the organizer I personally knew, Oliver Kessler. He made the case that my reaction perfectly illustrated the problem of Constructivism having been hijacked of its original richness and openness to the point of being reduced to a narrow school of thought (see also McCourt 2016a). He actually wanted to see feminist, postcolonial, poststructuralist (among others) scholars there as well, to precisely show that Constructivism was a broad tent that could accommodate diversity of methods and thinking. I thus went, and prepared a paper on a topic more closely related to my research interest, on emotions and the body in relation to Constructivism and the “new materialism” literature. In theory, the project was precisely built on the premise of inclusion and openness that are called for by constructivists, and the necessity to focus on questions and issues of mutual interest. In practice, the experience clearly revealed to me that what might be a promising strategy for recognition inside the US field of IR limited the very reach of the feminist curiosity method itself.
The workshop turned out to be a strange experience not so much because of the content of the papers per se, as insightful discussions took place, and interesting ideas were debated. It was the gendered politics and power relations going on at the event that caught my curiosity and led me to reflect further on the tactical use of Constructivism. First of all, despite my colleague’s best intentions, it turned out that no other self-declared feminist, or poststructuralist colleagues had agreed to attend. Their refusal to attend was lamented by some of the organizers: we invited them, we wanted to include them, they just did not want to come or could not come! This argument definitively sounds eerily familiar to any feminist working in international relations: we wanted to include women, but they all said no – or could not come! Yet, what puzzled me was that at no point did this reaction lead to further curiosity and group discussion: why did they choose not to come? Why did so many people turn them down, even when presented with a discourse of inclusion? We say that “you” are welcome and that “you” belong here; why do “you” not feel that this would be a welcome or a safe space to present “your” work? Who are these people? Such collective absence was telling of something, but this silence and absence were not analyzed or discussed. Discussions went around how it was too bad that these scholars associated Constructivism with the “narrow second generation norm and rules” Constructivism, or limited their understanding of Constructivism identity claims.
Second, gendered dynamics affected the workshop’s dynamics in ways I had not anticipated. Participants included 17 men and 5 women, two of whom were graduate students. I myself had only been an Assistant professor for two years. It was clear to me that many in the workshop thought I was a graduate student, as I looked young – which probably justified their attitude of respectful distance. I spent most of the breaks chatting with the graduate students: the more the day passed, the more uncomfortable and out of place I felt. Of all participants, I could not help but notice that I was the only one who got interrupted during my presentation, to be asked if I could conclude please, even though others had spoken beyond their allotted time. I was the only paper who had chosen to engage the body, emotions, and gender in an open feminist stance, and no interventions or discussions were made in reference to my paper afterwards. Feminist curiosity is a way to study silence and what is not said (Enloe 2012). Why had my paper been met with such indifference? Was my work that terrible? What was it saying about the appraisal of its quality and relevance? About me? About the (constructivist) topics I had touched upon? Later during the day, one of the participants made an intervention about gender, and started by saying “Now I’m not a feminist, and I don’t know much about this scholarship, but perhaps …”, which was clearly meant as an in-group positioning, a disclaimer to signal that being a feminist would risk discredit.
It was only during the last break that the students came to me and profusely apologized and flustered: they had assumed I was a graduate student like them. It made me wonder: was it because of my looks? Because of the way my work was received? Because of the interactions I was having with my other colleagues? Because I talked a lot with them? The workshop ended with people feeling enthusiastically that the new wave of Constructivism was so much more inclusive and promising than the first wave ever had been, and that this event was proof of the great diversity of work that could fall under the Constructivism umbrella. I felt a dissonance between my experience and their celebratory mood. After the workshop, dinner proved to be another similarly strange experience: colleagues at my left and right started an intense discussion and began to talk to each other right past me. I had to push my chair to let them talk together. I suggested switching seats after ten minutes, but they said no, things were fine. I stood up, ready to leave. As I grabbed my coat, one of the students swiftly came to see me and asked if we could go back together to the hotel. She was not interested in spending the night out drinking (a somewhat gendered practice in academia), but she did not feel at ease leaving the group of professors who had invited her to join them early. She said would feel more comfortable leaving with another faculty member (which I understood to mean “more legitimized in her refusal to attend”), and we went back to the hotel together.
Now, let me insist how individually, most of the scholars who attended the workshop are kind, open-minded individuals, who would probably self-identify as feminists or whose work can be sympathetic to feminism. I am friends with several of them, and each of them would probably insist that Feminism fall under the purview of Constructivism. The very workshop was built on the premise of inclusion, and how Constructivism was particularly suited for this: my work had not been imposed, but solicited. Participants probably had no idea how I experienced this workshop, most likely never saw some of their actions as paternalistic or dismissive, and they probably feel horrified, sorry or scornful as they read the short account I just gave. Either way, what I want to suggest is that this experience, and reactions to reading about it, are definitively not unique to this “constructivist setting”. The politics of membership and in-group/out-group dynamics were still at play, and the relations of power could not escape this “family gathering”. The event could be premised on defining Constructivism, but it could not avoid identity politics at play in the discipline itself. They involved more refined power relations than merely methods (e.g., gendered politics, social hierarchies, etc.). Whether first or third generation, the different instances of Constructivism cannot eschew issues of dissidence already carefully laid out by Richard Ashley and R.B.J. Walker in 1990 (Ashley and Walker 1990).
Ultimately, if not ironically, I felt treated in ways that approximate how these “reflexive” constructivists feel – and lament – they are treated by mainstream IR: ignored, oppressed by hierarchical disciplinary practices, considered irrelevant and marginalized. If anything, my embodied subjective experience illustrate Nick Onuf’s sobering remarks that recognizing other(ed) and dominated voices as a method for reclaiming Constructivism
David McCourt is adamant that “if Constructivism is a philosophically incoherent yet still useful social space in U.S. based IR, then yes, U.S. Marxists [or even Feminists, we might add] are doing Constructivism in an important sense” (McCourt 2017, 22). This insistence reveals several things that should trigger curiosity: useful to whom? Useful to what end – better understanding specific issues or problems? What does it mean to say that Constructivism is a social space, if we want to reject it as a social identity? In line with such a call for opening ways of “doing Constructivism”, this chapter examined how, more than a mere intellectual disposition, feminist curiosity could be considered a method to conduct inquiry in international relations. However, to do so, I made the case for considering methods to be more than tools to gather knowledge about the world: methods are performative of worlds in and of themselves. In that sense, feminist curiosity is not only a tool to inquire about the world, but also a method that disrupts a world to make new ones come into being. Following Claudia Aradau and Jef Huysmans, methods should thus be conceived as political acts, as they cannot be uncoupled from epistemological, ontological and normative concerns. Facts and values cannot be neatly distinguished as two distinct zones for the sake of inquiry.
To the question as to whether feminist curiosity can be used tactically to draw people to constructivist-inspired theories and methods, I suggested that the reverse should sometimes be considered, namely, that young scholars seeking to deploy a feminist curiosity might resort to using Constructivism tactically to be able to gain recognition in a hostile disciplinary field. In other words, the same way that Alexander Wendt purposefully chose Waltz to make his case for social Constructivism, choosing to anchor feminist method inside Constructivism can be “informed by professional concerns and by an attempt of showing to the rest of the discipline that the new arrivals are no barbarians at the gates” (Kratochwil 2016, 131). This suggestion draws from the insight that Constructivism is understood to mean different things in different contexts: reclaiming the label to include but not subsume feminist work can contribute in legitimizing feminist work in an otherwise hostile context, the same way labeling one’s work as being “radical constructivist” can help gain recognition inside parts of the field (mainstream US academia) that the label “poststructuralism” might undermine.
Yet, by doing so, the very dissidence of poststructuralism and feminism gets erased to partake in disciplinary strategies or machinery. Even more, it might directly engage in what Cynthia Weber has called a “gentrification” of IR theory (2014), where “privilege continues despite an outward show of tolerance and equality” (Asworth, 2014), and where gentrification “softens and rounds off the hard critical edges” (Shepherd 2014). Ultimately, such tactical use of labels and identity betrays the fact that the field of IR is full of passions and that debates do not take place dispassionately to evaluate and ponder the merits of approaches, methods and ideas. Relations of power permeate different contexts, and such tactical uses also have limits. Issues of recognition and acceptance “as one of our own” involve more complex power dynamics that go beyond “simply” laying out common theoretical/methodological grounds or ontological commonalities (e.g.: the world is socially constructed, social relations form the basis of social life, etc.): issues of race, gender, language and class, to name but a few, cannot be ignored.
Do these considerations about the sociological dimensions of disciplinary relations mean, then, that, on theoretical grounds, Feminism and Constructivism have nothing to learn from the other, or that differences cannot be bridged to lead to potentially useful insights and conversations? Of course not (e.g. Steele 2011). Recent constructivist research has engaged with the centrality of emotions in world politics for instance, a topic which feminists have long been interested in. Such potential meeting points should not be dismissed outright, based on theoretical differences. Constructivist calls to attend to the centrality of everyday politics (Solomon and Steele, 2017 do square well with feminist claim that “the personal is political” and that “the bedroom’s hierarchy is not unconnected to the hierarchies of the international coffee exchange or of the foreign exchange ministry” (Enloe 1996, 193). Feminists could certainly learn from the theoretical insights and tools used by constructivists, such as practice theory for instance. Constructivists, on the other hand, could benefit from seriously considering bodies when engaging with emotions, rather than treating them in the abstract or studying them in relation to undistinctive (non-gendered, non-racialized) bodies. There is also a deep attentiveness to, and acknowledgment of, the messiness of the world, the contingency of events, and the complexities of power relations that are never unidirectional and unequivocal, that can certainly bring constructivists and feminists together, and lead to surprising conversations and insights.
I believe such intersections should be acknowledged and welcomed: they definitively can lead to fruitful theoretical and empirical developments and exchanges – and even tactically, help each other gain legitimacy inside the field on different issues. That being said, as previous intense debates about R. Charli Carpenter’s case for a constructivist gender analysis from a non-feminist standpoint testifies (see Carpenter 2002; Carver, Zalewski, Kinsella and Carpenter 2003), some bridges appear impossible to cross theoretically, from one side or the other. The overt political dimensions of feminist work, clearly present for instance in Ackerly and True’s steps for feminist inquiry mentioned in this contribution, is not necessarily embraced by Constructivism. It is not essential to their work, yet without such political commitment and acknowledgment, Feminism loses its very heart. But being aware of such distinctions should not translate in hampered dialogue: rather, it simply reminds us that any project of subsuming any theory under the other is bound to be counterproductive, sociologically, theoretically and politically.
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