Mrs Victoria Scheyer1, Mrs Jessica Cheung2
1Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, 2Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Biography:
Jessica Cheung is a PhD Candidate at the Freie Universität Berlin and a policy officer at the Department of Social Services where she works on ending gender-based violence. Her research adopts a critical feminist and anti-colonial approach to analysing feminist foreign policies and its function as a source of identity construction.
Victoria Scheyer is a PhD Candidate at Monash University, her research focuses on white supremacy, international antifeminism and feminist foreign policy.
Abstract:
The growing adoption of explicit feminist foreign policies (FFP) around the world has been heralded by practising feminist states as an ethical and collaborative approach to thinking about and doing international politics. Located at the forefront of these self-titled FFPs is the long-standing work of feminist civil society, academics and activists who have continuously advocated for an alternative approach to foreign policymaking. However, despite the increasing acceptance of feminism as a legitimate approach to international affairs, concerns as to the co-optation of feminism and the complicity of feminists in the reproduction of normative colonial power relations have emerged as an urgent and pressing issue. Feminist methods within the field of IR have emphasised the importance of examining the relationship between different political actors, particularly when it comes to understanding how power is distributed and manifested. This paper contributes to critical discussions by identifying the actors involved in the FFP space and their relationship to one another. We contend that by analysing the relationships that are produced by and productive of FFPs, the (in)capacity of those who are able to be known and seen as legitimate actors is made visible. Thus, this paper seeks to untangle and navigate the precarity of FFPs by questioning the complicity of some feminist actors and white feminism, as a dominant system of knowledge, in informing state policies reproducing colonial dominance over Others.