Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium

Third Edition
by V Spike Peterson, Anne Sisson Runyan

Jul 13, 2009
Paperback
US $36.00
CAN $45.50
UK £20.99
ISBN: 9780813343945
ISBN-10: 0813343941
Published by Westview Press

 

Description

Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium connects the inequalities between and among women and men with the world politics of global governance, security, political economy, and ecology. Through historical, theoretical, and empirical analysis, the authors alert us to gendered divisions of power, violence, labor and resources, as well as the power of gender as a meta-lens that keeps gender, race, class, sexual, and national divisions in place, despite some re-positionings of some women and men on the world political stage. In this completely new edition, which reflects significant advances in feminist international relations and transnational feminist scholarship, the authors apply intersectional analysis to global governance, militarization, global economic restructuring, and environmental degradation. They explore how crises of representation, insecurity, and sustainability have widened and deepened—particularly in the post-9/11 period—while at the same time global gender policymaking (quotas, gender mainstreaming, and the advancing of women’s human rights) has increased. The authors focus on this apparent contradiction—the higher level of attention to gender and women’s human rights in a time of fierce militarization, savage economic inequality, and ecological crisis—but also address how the power of gender, as a meta-lens that orders world politics, can be deconstructed to rethink identities, ideologies, structures, and policies that rest upon gendered processes of imperialism, neoliberalism, racialization, and sexualization. The book emphasizes how hard-won attention to gender equality in world affairs can be co-opted when gender is used to justify or mystify unjust global governance, global security, and global political economy, but at the same time sees promise in coalitional struggles to re-radicalize feminist world political demands to change the downward conditions of women, men, children, and the planet. Thus, the authors also examine the challenges of forging transnational solidarities to de-gender world politics, scholarship, and practice through renewed politics of representation and redistribution.

Reviews


“Once again, this is the place to begin if you are organizing a course on gender and world politics.”
— Craig N. Murphy, Wellesley College

“This is exactly the book we all want to introduce students to feminist IR: it's global in its reach, it's down-to-earth in its style, it shows why ideas matter, and it offers students the most up-to-date scholarly findings. Spike Peterson and Anne Runyan are themselves the creators of this whole field, so who better to entice students into thinking new thoughts about this complex world?”
— Cynthia Enloe, Clark University, author of The Curious Feminist

Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium maps, summarizes and analyzes key insights of feminist work in a way that is thoughtful and challenging for both a general readership as well as for feminist scholarship. It raises important questions through a gender prism that allow us to reflect upon key global issues. ... This is an important and wide ranging contribution to the debates on international relations, international political economy and security studies.”
— Shirin M. Rai, University of Warwick

Praise for Previous Editions

“A highly readable textbook for undergraduates that describes both women’s roles in world politics and the impact of world politics on women’s roles...Highly thought-provoking and informative.”
Women & Politics

“Peterson and Runyan’s gender lenses will help many students and not a few professors to see the inequalities of world politics in provocative new ways. Feminist reconceptualizations of politics, power, autonomy, and violence are clearly explained and used critically to illuminate contemporary military, labor, resource use and environmental exploitation practices...an excellent supplementary text for multiparadigmatic introductions to world politics.”
— Hayward R. Alker, Jr., Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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