ABSTRACT
Thirty years ago, Joan Wallach Scott (1986, 1988) issued a call to scholars to consider gender a “useful category of analysis” for understanding the power relationships that move politics, diplomacy, and war. Significant to Scott’s appeal was its implication that the work of social historians incorporating women into historical narratives was not enough. To truly grasp the construction of power, scholars must scrutinize the definitions of masculinity and femininity and examine the involvement of men and women in establishing, perpetuating, and challenging gender ideas. Since then, historians, sociologists, political scientists, and international relations scholars have responded by using gender analysis to understand the social and cultural constructions of masculinity, the obvious and hidden ways in which women have been key actors in what was once considered the male realm of high politics, and the ways in which intimate encounters both enforce and challenge international power relationships. What these scholars have found is that race and sexuality often intersect with gender to establish power hierarchies, so in some ways the three categories cannot be separated. This approach has also expanded scholars’ thinking about what constitutes war and diplomacy and who participates in the fighting and negotiating.
