The requested URL /book.php?isbn=9780520243811 was not found on this server. Print version of this Talk (pdf) The second thing is, I was very affected when I was an undergraduate student by reading Hannah Arendt. Now mind you, when I was studying, she was still writing. I got to hear her twice as anI remember that day: she had just written Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and the faculty members at my college brought her not because we the students had ever heard of her, but because they had. I can still picture her up on stage, speaking a very German-accented English, and to tell you the truth, I took notes like mad, I don't think I knew what she was saying, but I knew that it was intellectually exciting. I just knew that what she was talkingAnd I can remember running to the university coffee shop after it was all over and I re-read my notes and I tried to put them in order; Then, when I went to Berkeley as a graduate student, I worked with a political theorist named Sheldon Wolin,
who was also very affected by Hannah Arendt. So I continued to read Arendt and, at the point, she was writing in The New Yorker magazine, with ads down the side, and she was also writing in the New York Review of Books. It was so important because at that time, around 1964-1968, she was one of the few women writing at either of these very male-dominatedShe was writing theory in a weekly news magazine, or a weekly book review magazine, which is where political theory should be happening; be happening with ads running down the sides, not because I am for advertisements, but rather to put the debates right in the middle of the publicI kept every Arendt article that appeared in those magazines. when I'm teaching Arendt, I come in and I show students and say: ‘Look, that's where political theory goes on.’ It's not just in university press journals, though I'm glad they publish them; it doesn't just happen at exclusive sites ofIt's in the public sphere.
One of the people who affected me deeply later, in my post-Arendt life, was Adrienne Rich. She was an activist, a poet, and a feminist thinker. I can remember the first book of hers I read. People were recommending it, saying ‘Cynthia, you are a little behind, here’, referencing my feminist development; I was never an anti-feminist, but I was a little backward. This was the '70s and I had friends who were much more feminist than I was; if you become a feminist, you should always have friends who are much more feminist than you are to keep pushing you and showing you books to read. So, one of the formative books was Adrienne Rich's book called Of Women Born (1976). It was a deconstruction not just of motherhood, but of women's roles in society and how potent that kind of construction was. I got to meet her and I got to listen to her talk, but also read poetry. I'm not a poet, but through her, I realized that there are so many different ways to express feminist thought.
Now the pivotal moment I started looking at feminism doesn't exist—I guess there is about two or three of them, and theyI subscribed to the very first issue of Ms. Magazine, an insert that was put into New York Magazine, which people now read to find out where the plays and movies are showing, I was getting New York Magazine because I was teaching in Southern Ohio and I was kind of homesick for the bright lights of New York, and here came this insert called Ms.! And Ms. was just beginning to be used by some people, not by me yet, and this insert had a whole way of looking at politics that was totally new to me. Then the other thing that happened to me is that I was put on a presidential search committee for my university as one of just two women on the committee, a graduate student and myself. Gail Hornstein and she was a graduate studentWell, she took me aside after the first two meetings. else in the committee was nice, but she said ‘Cynthia, you have to say
something or we're going to end up with an all-male shortlist.’ She said ‘It's your responsibility because as a graduate student, no one's really going to pay attention to what I say’. So even though I was a junior researcher, I can't remember if I was tenured, she said ‘it's your job. You have to speak for this.’ And really, it was the first time that I was asked, if you will, to make a feminist point, and to persuade other people of Finally, politics is much more complex than most of the conventional theorists can imagine. I remember there was a wonderful documentary that maybe you've seen called ‘The Fog of War’ about Robert McNamara, which is a quintessential object of IR theorizing. was a moment in the documentary about whether his wife agreed with him—by this time, he was defence secretary—about his approach to the Vietnam War in theShe clearly did not, as the film shows, but then the documentary filmmaker just kind of moved away from that.
But I thought ‘we want to knowWas she at all persuasive? Was he embarrassed when he couldn't persuadeI don't actually know anything about her political theory, I don't know anything about her political outlook or her ways of acting, but I just thoughtAnd it made me think that McNamara was himself in a web of relationships, and they weren't just relationships with the powers that be in Washington at the time. That said, I never envisioned ending up inWhat I did know is I wanted to stir things up. Now, that's not necessarily something to be proud of, but that just means that when I wrote Bananas, Beaches and Bases (2000), I was just trying to shake things up. I first wrote it as a non-academic book; it was published in London at a trade press called Pandora, and only then got picked up by the University ofWhat happened is that the women inside of the IR camp, picked it up and they did the hard work of using it to break open some discussions.
Spike Peterson and Ann Tickner, people who were already ‘inside of’ IR, said ‘We will take this and use it.’ Then, they kind of adopted me and brought me into IR. One could instead imagine security services through the more realistic notion of ‘providing security’. You would have all kinds of health professionals, all kinds of educators and environmentalists, climate change, sea level rise experts and so on—and they are providing security. But it's this narrow definition of what security is—military security—combined with a capitalist profit mode, combined with states not wanting to be directly responsible for, but wanting to have some kind of direction over, armed security forces, and they're all masculinized. you take the Swedish armed forces, the American armed forces, the Canadian, the Australian, the New Zealand, South African—and they have now anywhere from 6% in Britain up to 17% in New Zealand of women in the armed forces.