Fem Cards for Robortitochackitopapotitolito

Materialism Turn
Feminisms focus on gender as a social construction ignores the material conditions that separate each individuals lived experience Cheah, 96. graduate student in English at Cornell University, 1996 [Pheng, Review
Essay: Mattering, Diacritics 26.1, Project Muse] In the immediate instance, Grosz's and Butler's return to the body can be understood as a reaction to the inadequacies of social constructionism as a paradigm for feminist theory. Simply put, social constructionism espouses the primacy of the social or discourse as constructive form over preexisting matter which is said to be presignificative or nonintelligible. Butler and Grosz are critical of this position for various reasons. For Butler, social constructionism oscillates
between two untenable positions. In presupposing and so retroactively installing the category of "nature" in the prelinguistic position of a tabula rasa, social constructionism can consider sex either as natural and thus unconstructed or as the fictional premise of a prediscursive ground produced by the concept of gender [6]. In

the first scenario, sex cannot be accounted for and political contestation is confined to the level of gender conceived as the interpretation or meaning [End Page 109] of sex. The second scenario leads either to a linguistic monism that cannot explain how the bodily materiality of sex can be produced by language/discourse or to the anthropomorphizing of "construction" into a nominative subject endowed with the power of self-causation and causing everything else. Grosz points out that feminists
concerned with the social construction of subjectivity recode the mind/body opposition as a distinction between biology and psychology and locate political transformation in psychological change where the body either is irrelevant or becomes the vehicle expressing changes in beliefs and values [17]. This effectively ignores the point that the body is a unique social, cultural, and political object. It also bears the mark of differences (sex and race) that are not easily revalued through consciousness-raising precisely because they are material differences which are not eradicable without disfiguring the body [18].

This destroys womens agencyrelegating them to another form of masculine domination Cheah, 96. graduate student in English at Cornell University, 1996 [Pheng, Review
Essay: Mattering, Diacritics 26.1, Project Muse] As Grosz observes in her succinct account of Cartesianism, a mechanistic understanding of the body is harmful to feminist theory because it deprives women's
bodies of agency by reducing the body to a passive object, seen as a tool or instrument of an intentional will rather than a locus of power and resistance [9]. But

while a teleological account of nature invests bodies with activity, this activity is always the predication of intelligible form. This can lead to a biological-deterministic
justification for the oppression of women particularly because the form/matter distinction originating from Greek philosophy is always articulated through a gendered matrix where the productive or creative agency of form is associated with a masculine principle while matter, which is passively shaped, is coded as feminine [Grosz 5; Butler, ch. 1]. Thus, Butler suggests that "[w]e may seek a return to matter

as prior to discourse to ground our claims about sexual difference only to discover that matter is fully sedimented with discourses on sex and sexuality that prefigure and constrain the uses to which the term can be put" [29]. One might further argue

that despite the Cartesian sundering of intelligence from nature in the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa as ontologically different substances, Cartesian and Greek ontology are continuous insofar as the form/matter and mind/matter distinctions are subtended by a common opposition between intelligent activity and brute passivity. In a mechanistic understanding of nature, the form/matter distinction which was interior to bodies in Greek ontology becomes an external relation, either practical-causal or theoretical-contemplative, between rational consciousness and objective exteriority. Thus, by rethinking the body as

something invested with a transformative dynamism or agency, Butler and Grosz also question the pertinence of the oppositions between intelligible form and brute matter, culture/history and nature.

Essentialism Turn
Must be case-by case essentializing the feminine diminishes potential for reform their method is unquantifiable Tickner, feminist IR theorist and a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of International Services, American University, 01
[J. Ann, Gendering World Politics, p. 20, MM] In a critique of trends in womens studies in the 1990s, Renate Klein claims that the
new focus on gender studies threatens to make women invisible again; a lack of connection to the real lives of women endangers the political project of womens emancipation . Klein suggests that while we need to listen to women from other

cultures, we must focus not only on difference, but on commonalities.45 Agreeing with early critics of liberal feminism that the removal of legal barriers will not end womens subordination, many contemporary feminists are urging a sensitivity to difference and a respect for contextual knowledge that does not lose sight of the emancipatory goals to which various feminist approaches have been committed. This overview suggests a multiplicity of feminist approaches. Rosi Braidotti describes feminism not as a canonized body of theories but a widely divergent, sometimes contradictory, amalgam of positions.46 For IR, a discipline that has been concerned with cumulation and working toward a unified body of theory defined in terms of propositions that can be tested, this array of positions appears unsettling . Indeed, the concerns and debates in feminist theory that I have outlined seem far from the agenda of conventional IR. These positions have, however, been central to providing important insights and guidance for IR feminists as these scholars have constructed feminist critiques of the discipline and begun to develop feminist research programs.

Alt fails collapses into generalizing (this card also takes out the aff) could be a K aff card against the K Tickner, feminist IR theorist and a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of International Services, American University, 01
[J. Ann, Gendering World Politics, p. 27-28, MM]
In her assessment of the potential for finding a space in IR for feminist theory in the realist and liberal approaches of the interparadigm debate, Sandra Whitworth has suggested that, to incorporate gender, theories must satisfy three criteria: (1) they must allow for the possibility of talking about the social construction of meaning; (2) they must discuss historical variability; and (3) they must permit theorizing about power in ways that uncover hidden power relations. Whitworth claims that, in terms of these three criteria, there is little in realism that seems conducive to theorizing about gender .76 The liberal paradigm that has sought to enlarge concerns beyond the

state-centric, national-security focus of realism might seem more promising;

however, according to Whitworth, it is ahistorical and denies the material bases of conflict, inequality, and power. Introducing women and gender to the liberal paradigm would also encounter the same problems noted by critics of liberal feminism. Attempts to bring women into IR feed into the mistaken assumption that they are not there in the first place . As Cynthia Enloe tells us, women (as well as marginalized people more generally) are highly involved in world politics, but
existing power structures, institutionalized in the split between the public and private spheres and what counts as important, keep them from being heard.77 Whitworth concludes by suggesting that critical theory is the most promising approach for feminist IR. Writing in 1989, Whitworth noted that the critical

approach was, at that time, still quite underdeveloped; she also suggested that creating a space within critical theory would not launch gender analysis into the

mainstream of IR, since critical theory is as much on the periphery as feminist analysis. While critical theory has become more developed and recognized in IR since 1989, in the United States at least, it remains on the margins. Although not all

IR feminists would identify themselves as critical theorists, most would define themselves as postpositivists in terms of the characterization of positivism outlined above. With a preference for hermeneutic, historically based, humanistic, and philosophical traditions of knowledge cumulation, rather than those based on the natural sciences, IR feminists are often skeptical of empiricist methodologies, for reasons mentioned above. While they are generally committed to the emancipatory potential of theory, which can help to understand structures of domination, particularly gender structures of inequality, they are suspicious of Enlightenment knowledge, which they claim has been based on knowledge about, and produced by, mena claim that seems particularly true of the discipline of international relations.

Turn the Ks essentialization of the male as belligerent and the female as peaceful collapses into patriarchy turns the K Tickner, feminist IR theorist and a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of International Services, American University, 01
[J. Ann, Gendering World Politics, p. 59-60, MM] In a context of a male-dominated society, the association of men with war and women
with peace also reinforces gender hierarchies and false dichotomies that contribute to the devaluation of both women and peace. The association of women and peace with

idealism in IR, which I have argued is a deeply gendered concept, has rendered it less legitimate in the discourse of international relations. Although peace movements that have relied on maternal images may have had some success, they

do nothing to change existing gender relations; this allows men to remain in control and continue to dominate the agenda of world politics, and it continues to render womens voices as inauthentic in matters of foreign policymaking. An example of the

negative consequences of associating women with peace is Francis Fukuyamas

discussion of the biological roots of human aggression and its association with war. Fukuyama claims that women are more peaceful than mena fact that, he believes, for the most part is biologically determined. Therefore, a world run by women would be a more peaceful world. However, Fukuyama claims that only in the West is the realization of what he calls a feminized world likely; since areas outside the West will continue to be run by younger aggressive men, Western men, who can stand up to threats posed by dangers from outside, must remain in charge, particularly in the area of international politics.79 Besides its implications for
reinforcing a disturbing North/South split, this argument is deeply conservative; given the dangers of an aggressive world, women must be kept in their place and out of international politics.80 The leap from aggressive men to aggressive states is also problematic. There is little evidence to suggest that men are naturally aggressive and women are naturally peaceful; as bell hooks reminds us, black women are very likely to feel strongly that white women have been quite violent and militaristic in their support of racism .81 Traditional concepts of masculinity and femininity that sustain

war require an exercise of power: they are not inevitable. 82

Turn Causes Violence

Feminist control triggers violent male retaliation Tiger 99 Professor of Anthropology @ Rutgers University, Ph.D @ U of London (Lionel,Fukuyamas Follies [Prehistory Returns], 1999, Foreign Affairs Volume 78, No. 1, January/February, http://www.metu.edu.tr/~utuba/Ehrenreich%20etal.pdf, Spector) It is possible, even if unlikely, that one response to greater female influence will be greater male belligerence and even violence against them. At the same time that the Taliban restricts women from kindergarten, radical activists restrict women from abortion in the United States. In the contemporary world, there is nowhere for women and children to go. We receive daily bulletins about the bewilderingly lethal intransigence of male leaders committed to some program of desperate importance to them. The struggle for social control may be one that women choose not to take up.

TurnDimorphism
IR feminists rely on dualistic notions of gender Theresa W. Tobin, Marquette University Assistant Philosophy Professor, The core of their critique is that the global feminist movement, Human Rights Review, 2008, SpringerOnline Database instrumental in redefining and promoting womens human rights, has really been a Western rather than a global project. The charge is that the global feminist movement to re-conceptualize womens rights from the lives of women, did so from the lives of particular women, namely those living in communities of the global North such as the USA and Western Europe. The concept of womens rights as articulated in documents like the Beijing Platform reflect a particular understanding of gender and gender-based oppression, as these are manifested in Western liberal democracies. Specifically, the concept of womens rights presupposes gender dualism, that there are only two genders (i.e., man and woman) and that the root cause of womens oppression is patriarchy, a situation in which men dominate women socially, politically, and economically. These particular interpretations of gender and gender-based oppression coupled with the tendency to focus on gender as the sole or primary axis of oppression for women around the world provides a moral lens that fails to capture accurately the nature of the moral violations and abuses many women suffer and thereby fails to recommend morally appropriate solutions. Sexual dimorphism leads to eugenics and denies the personhood of intersexed individuals M. Morgan Holmes, Sociology & CAST-MA, Wilfrid Laurier University, Mind the Gaps: Intersex and (Re-productive) Spaces in Disability Studies and Bioethics, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 2003, 28.4

Kathryn Pauly Morgan explains in her own parable, Gender Dimorph Utopia, that surgical and other medical technologies such as those employed in the management of intersexed infants and children are thought to stave off a form of gender-disability that clinicians assume to be the obvious outcome of any nonconformity to the usual, oppositional dimorphism imposed on everything from appearance, gendered preferences and individual behaviour to interpersonal relations and general societal membership: To maximize individual well-being and societal stability, diagnostic and interventionist technologies should be usedprenatally and postnatallyin order to eradicate genetically and/or hormonally gender-disabled fetuses. All gender ambiguous babies (i.e., babies with ambiguous genitalia) are to be labelled temporarily intersexed and surgically corrected as soon after birth as possible so that they may fit into the proper gender location [2: 301]. Regardless of how self-evident the current clinical approach to intersex seems, there are other, perhaps better, ways that we can treat intersexed children. That is, we have not to treat the child in the medical sense, but to revise how we think of treatment itself, and not to define it solely as a set of clinically grounded options but as a set of behaviours and attitudes that we can take toward a child, or toward a fetus perceived to have a chromosomal, hormonal, or genetic profile likely to express itself in some form of intersexuality. If we understand treatment as an attitude or as a behaviour/stance that we take toward one another, then we can proceed from there to see that any need for treatment arises not in the taken-as-obvious problem of intersex characteristics in the child; instead, there is a need for a change in attitude emanating from the parents, the wider family, clinicians, social workers, and so forth. The reason that we need to turn away from the standard clinical treatment, and toward a new attitude of acceptance is that the standard treatments undermine the (formerly) intersexed adults sense of authenticity as persons, and as gendered subjects. We must take as obvious the personhood of the intersexed child rather than take as obvious that the personhood of the intersexed child is somehow obscured by the state of the genitals. After all, it is worth remembering that any passer-by who sees the child will apprehend a person, not an it.

TurnImperialism/Eurocentric
Feminist IR objectifies non-Western womenreentrenching dangerous binaries John M. Hobson, Prof., Dept. of Politics, The University of Sheffield, Is critical theory always for the white West and for Western imperialism? Beyond Westphilian towards a post-racist critical IR, Review of International Studies (2007), 33, 91 116, Cambridge Journal Online Database. All in all, I think it fair to say that postmodernism presents an ambivalent critique of Eurocentrism, effectively stripping the self-designated sense of the Wests sovereign subjectivity but simultaneously closing off the avenue into retrieving a global politics in which Eastern subjectivity/agency is accorded significance. And in turn, this connects up with the ensuing discussion of Western feminism, insofar as a growing number of feminists are seeking to go beyond postmodern scepticism which, as Ann Tickner points out, could lead to an abandonment of the political project of reducing womens subordination that has motivated feminism since its earliest beginnings.43 Turning, therefore, to feminism and feminist IR theory, it is now some two decades since Chandra Talpade Mohanty chastised much of critical Western feminism for its Eurocentrism,44 and a quarter of a century since bell hooks chastised white feminist movements for their racism.45 But while some progress has been made to overcome this problem in the social sciences, the gap between much of feminist IR and non-Eurocentrism remains. In developing Mohantys argument further, there are a number of strands to note here. First, pioneering critical IR feminists such as Ann Tickner have located the specificity of gender by revealing how the world economy works to disadvantage women in relation to men, especially within the Third World.46 This is an undeniably important project and I in no way wish to denigrate it. But the problem here is that revealing gender exclusively in this way runs the risk of returning us back into the Eurocentric cul-de-sac of rendering Eastern women as but passive victims of Western power, thereby stripping them of agency. Second, much critical Western feminism presupposes a great divide between First and Third World women. The former are portrayed as educated, modern, having (relatively greater) control over their own bodies and the freedom to make their own decisions, while Third World women are (re)presented as ignorant, traditional/ religious-oriented, passive, pathetic and victimised. In returning us back into the cul-de-sac of patriarchal and Eurocentric discourse, this tendency leads many Western feminists to construct themselves as the higher normative referent in a binary schema.47 That is, Western women are represented as subjects while Eastern women are granted only object status, with Eastern women/societies consequently being judged negatively against the White Western female experience. And this problem is exacerbated even further given that women within the West are usually portrayed by feminists as having little or no agency.

TurnImperialism/Eurocentric
Western feminism creates a static image of non-Western subjectsthis robs them of their agency and reinverts the power relations feminists are trying to escape Ansari, Usamah 'Should I Go and Pull Her Burqa Off?: Feminist Compulsions, Insider Consent, and a Return to Kandahar', Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25:1, March 2008, 48 - 67 That the oppression of women was sold as a central reason for needing to topple the Taliban (Kolhatkar & Ingalls, 2006) also reveals that Orientalist imaginations are gendered. Indeed, the type of developmentalist intervention that Orientalism furthers is often predicated on helping women. Western feminism has not only been complicit in the Orientalist constitution of the non-Western woman as inherently victimized and in need of help, it has also constructed a Western feminist subject position in contrast to it. Western feminism has often produced a supposedly universally analyzable and monolithic Third World Woman who is bound to tradition and domesticity (Mohanty, 1991, p. 80). In contrast, Western women are portrayed as educated, as modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities (Mohanty, 1991, p. 85). We see how Orientalist notions of modernity, autonomy, and liberty are coded in gendered ways and we can recognize how they invite intervention, as Third World women have needs and wants but never solutions, choices, or agency (Mohanty, 1991, p. 83). Spivak (1990) reveals some of the problematics of the trope of non-Western women-as-victims through her focus on what way, in what contexts gender is used as what sort of signifier to cover over what kinds of things (p. 52). Spivak also explores how feminism has historically been complicit with colonialism through her idea of soul making as a means to contrast the individualism of the feminist subject with that of the formless Otherthe individualism of one is necessarily dependent on the erasure of the individuality of the other (in Morton, 2003, p. 87). Spivak (1999) counters this binary with her desire to move away from a focus on the subject-constitution of the female individualist (p. 117). In the context of imperialism, the desire for individualist subject-constitution is linked to the idea that to build the colonial foundation for a good society, women are needed to serve as objects of protection from their own kind (Spivak, 2000a, p. 1459). It is within these contexts that Spivak makes her famous claim that the subaltern cannot speak (Mohanty, 1991, p. 1459). As will be discussed below, this inability to speak has been recoded within a new modality of contemporary global economics, whereby dominant sites ask the subaltern to speak but precisely in a way that confirms the relations that constitute her in particular ways that are useful for global capital (see Spivak, 2000b). It can be difficult for non-Western women to articulate problems within their communities without providing validation for imperialist projects and Orientalist visions through native confirmations. As Abu-Lughod (2001) claims, [A]s long as we are writing for the West about 'the other,' we are implicated in projects that establish Western authority and cultural difference (p. 105). These points illustrate the context in which I am examining Return to Kandahar and how gendered Orientalist tropes

inform the film's representations but also inform the kinds of interpretations audience members are encouraged to make through the signifying strategies (Fuery & Fuery, 2002; Hall, 1997a, pp. 1-13; 1997b, pp. 13-74; 1997c, pp. 223-290) that mediate the Western audience's encounter with Nelofer Pazira's Afghanistan