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The ‘brutal fecundity of violence’: Feminist methodologies of International Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 March 2020

Helen M. Kinsella
Affiliation:
Political Science and Law, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, US
Laura J. Shepherd*
Affiliation:
University of Sydney, Australia
*
*Corresponding author. Email: laura.shepherd@sydney.edu.au

Abstract

This article highlights Marysia Zalewski's scholarship as reflective and generative of the multifarious sources and contributions of feminist IR and its ‘scavenger methodologies’, which seek to centre subjects, processes, and practices historically excluded, ignored, and minimised. The productive depth of her scholarship is evident in the uniqueness of each article in this collection, all of which distinctly document the uses to which Zalewski's writings can be uniquely put. Each of the articles performs a ‘turning operation’ of sorts on the elementals of feminist IR (gender/women/power/difference) and brings further elaborations of masculinities, sexualities, silences as well as screams, that shift and change what is taken to be feminist research/method – at each point disordering our sensibilities and our assumptions as to what we do when we do feminist work.

Type
Forum Article
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2020

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References

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17 This comparison belongs to Cynthia Enloe. See Cynthia Enloe, ‘Margins, silences and bottom rungs: How to overcome the underestimation of power in the study of International Relations’, in Smith, Booth, and Zalewski (eds), International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, pp. 186–22; Zalewski, Feminist International Relations, p. 127.

18 Zalewski, ‘All these theories’, p. 352, emphasis in original.

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