Global Gender Issues

When we look at world politics through a different set of lensesones that reveal how the power of gender blinds us to the presence of women in international affairswe begin to see what lies below the surface of the interstate power exchanges called international relations. Some women wield traditional international power as heads of state. There are also women in positions of less visible state and nonstate power, many of whom seek a more equal and just global order. And there are billions of women who bear, feed, clothe, and care for the worldwhether as mothers, farmers, textile workers, electronics assemblersyet have no formal political power. Global Gender Issues connects the inequalities between women and men with the world politics of power, security, economy, and ecology. Through history, visual imagery, theoretical analysis, and other narrative techniques, V. Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan alert us to gendered differences of power, violence, labor, and resources. In doing so, they suggest linkages between and among so-called womens issues and such world political matters as wars of secession, arms proliferation, global economic recession, and environmental degradation. At the same time, the authors hold out for us a clearly articulated, undogmatic hope for redefining and reorganizing gender relations and international relations as we begin to embrace difference, demand equality, and develop new standards of power and progress.