The Sociology Research Forum hosts Dr. Terrell Carver (University of Bristol) for his talk, “Masculinities, Gender and International Relations.”
This talk is based on my forthcoming book which addresses great-power politics through the gender ‘lens’ of both masculinity and femininity. It adapts current theorisations within a novel conceptual framework that presents gender as an asymmetrical binary. Moreover gender is theorised as an ordered and ordering hierarchy. In that way the foundational concepts of International Relations are gendered as ‘nested’ hierarchies of domination and subordination. This empirical formation is understood intersectionally as hierarchies of race, class, gender, (dis)ability and similar categories of superiority and inferiority. These processes and institutions operate within complex hierarchies maintained by complicity and consent. Weapons industries, the arms trade, and nation-state militaries have a common legitimacy deficit, since injury and death require justification. Concepts of warrior-protector and bourgeois-rational masculinity are crucial to understanding how the most destructive forms of militarisation are auto-legitimated. To explore these processes in detail, this book takes readers behind closed doors and into international arms ‘fairs’. Ethnographic and performative analysis work together to expose rarely seen physical, affective and political-economic relationships. At these exhibitions masculinities and femininities are deployed to sanitise and thus erase any suggestion of death and destruction. Protestors against militarism are excluded and marginalised. The gender ‘lens’ also exposes critical issues of divergence and conflict in activist politics. Rather than typologising ‘alternative’ masculinities this book addresses queer protests that target the gender-order hierarchy itself. In that way they attempt to destabilise the weapons trade through which great-power politics is crucially defined.
Terrell Carver biography
Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol, UK. He has published widely on Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, including texts, translations and biography; and on sex, gender, and sexuality, including masculinities, feminist theory and queer studies. He is co-editor-in-chief of Contemporary Political Theory, and co-general-editor of three book series: Routledge Innovators in Political Theory (Taylor & Francis); Marx, Engels, and Marxisms (Palgrave); Globalization (Rowman & Littlefield). His latest books are Marx (Polity, 2018); Engels Before Marx (Palgrave, 2021); The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th anniversary edition (Palgrave, 2021); Masculinities, Gender and International Relations (Bristol University Press, 2022). He also teaches discourse and visual analysis as interpretive methods for an IPSA summer school at the National University of Singapore