United Nations bodies and large private companies have recently entered into partnerships for women’s empowerment in developing countries. Such publicâprivate partnerships have not previously been the subject of feminist scrutiny. In this article I examine three partnerships, feeding into research exploring business influence on global governance gender policies. The article demonstrates how partnerships assert their legitimacy through a proposed mutually supporting relationship between women’s empowerment and companies’ economic gains, in contrast to a human rights-based approach to development. I show how UNâbusiness partnerships for women’s empowerment mobilize discourses, policies and governmental techniques to create alignments between business objectives and individual women’s empowerment. Each woman is constituted as an ally of economic success by pursuing her education, increasing productivity and entrepreneurship. I argue that publicâprivate partnerships for women’s empowerment do not challenge the gendered structures of the global economy, though they may improve individual women’s economic situation in the short term. The critical and emancipatory potential of empowerment is weakened by the imposed boundaries of neoliberal market criteria and their demands for economic effectiveness.
Wartime sexual violence is especially egregious precisely because it is a sexualform of violence that causes particular harms. Yet, curiously, and in contrast to feminist theory on sexual violence more generally, the sexual has been erased from frames of understanding in dominant accounts of wartime rape. This article places the seeming certainty that “wartime rape is not about sex (it’s about power/violence)” under critical scrutiny and poses questions about the stakes of the erasure of the sexual in explanations of conflict-related sexual violence. It argues that the particular urgency that accompanies this erasure reflects the workings of familiar distinctions between war and peace, as well as efforts to clearly recognize violence and separate it from sex. Erasing the sexual from accounts of wartime rape thus ultimately reinscribes the normal and the exceptional as separate, and reproduces a reductive notion of heterosexual masculine sex (in peacetime) that is ontologically different from the violence of war.
This article makes the case for recovering women’s roles from the forgotten corners of diplomatic history, and for considering the consequences of the gap between feminist and non-feminist research. It shows how ignorance of the gendered nature of diplomatic norms and practices impacts our understanding of diplomatic history, and how specific biographies are hampered by gender blindness in particular. Using the history of Margaret van Kleffens and Dutch World War II diplomacy as an example, the article demonstrates how historians’ continued neglect of the role of women and gender norms has influenced representations of twentieth-century diplomacy. To dismiss the history of gender and of women as by definition irrelevant to the actions of states and of male statespersons is not simply part of a self-appointed focus on the political at the expense of the personal; rather, it omits much of the political history too, reproducing stereotypes and resulting in a skewed understanding of diplomatic history and foreign policy decisions. The article argues that both historians and feminist scholars need to historicize gender in order to recognize women’s roles in diplomacy, and so gain a better understanding of the history of international politics as a whole.
This article examines gender mainstreaming in Sweden, which is an interesting case because several favorable conditions make its implementation likely. It addresses two main questions: (1) to what extent has gender mainstreaming been implemented and (2) what are the consequences? The article first discusses the pros and cons of gender mainstreaming as reflected in the international feminist debate. It then briefly describes the favorable conditions of the Swedish case and subsequently maps out the introduction of gender mainstreaming since 1994, focusing on the process and its politics. It concludes with a discussion of the Swedish experience in terms of the promise and pitfalls of gender mainstreaming identified in the feminist debate and the implications of the Swedish case for feminist theorizing on gender mainstreaming.