Abstract
Gender could be defined as knowledge about sexual difference. This means that understandings about the appropriate relationships between women and men, the roles which they fill, even what it is to be “feminine” or “masculine”, vary across time, place and culture; that is they are social constructs. The important thing is that gender is not a neutral category but “femininity” is considered a lowering one.
It is said that International Politics of all the social disciplines has been one of the most resistant to incorporating feminist analyses of gender studies. There are a variety of reasons for this, the most obvious of which is that scholars of mainstream International Politics have taken the causes of war and the conditions of peace order and security as their central concern. Such concern appears to be antithetical to study of women. The “high politics” of international security politics is a man's world, a world of power and conflict in which warfare is a privileged activity and from which women traditionally have been excluded.
Eight authors of this volume daringly challenge to incorporate analyses of gender studies into International Politics. Firstly TAKENAKA Chiharu tries to use the intellectual tools of gender studies to analyze international politics. KARATANI Rieko focuses on the female overseas care workers under the point-system which the UK government introduced in 2008 as part of its attempts to modernize and streamline the British immigration system. WADA Kenji's paper demonstrates the ways in which the securitization of women can be relevant to the production of “bare life” in the state of exception rather than the rise of their security drawing on the concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics focused the post-conflict conditions of Afghanistan. OGAWA Ariyoshi evaluates a female politician Gro Harlem Brundtland (Norwegian Prime Minister 1981, 86–89, 90–96) who drove forward the dual development of environmental politics and gender politics in the national as well as in the international areas.
KAWAMOTO Kazuko and KOJIMA Kazuko study gender politics in the Communist world. KAWAMOTO examines how the public/private distinction was constituted in the Soviet Union of Khrushchev era and how it af-fected gender relations in society. KOJIMA's paper aims to depict gender politics in contemporary China by analyzing the relevant actors' discourses and behaviors towards the gender disparity in retirement age policy. TOMITA Akiko tries to make a new type of Gender Empowerment Measuring (an indicator that measures female participation in political and economic scenes) focusing on the importance of national, formal and transnational as well as local, informal level and individual woman and women in the group. Lastly NAMAMURA Yui asserts that microfinance, an innovative mechanism which aims at enabling poor women to improve their social wellbeing through a market-based approach, is now facing challenges because under the considerable influence of the for-profit sector in the recent microfinance world, there has been a growing concern over whether a normative agenda can be sustained in order to respond to the needs of poor women.
All the papers here demonstrate that their analyses are legitimate focus of study of International Politics.
