Responding to #AllMalePanels: A Collage

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International Feminist Journal of Politics
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Responding to #AllMalePanels: A Collage
Cai Wilkinson, Evren M. Eken, Laura Mills, Roxanne Krystalli, Harry D. Gould,
Jesse Crane-Seeber & Paul Kirby
To cite this article: Cai Wilkinson, Evren M. Eken, Laura Mills, Roxanne Krystalli, Harry D. Gould,
Jesse Crane-Seeber & Paul Kirby (2016): Responding to #AllMalePanels: A Collage, International
Feminist Journal of Politics, DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2016.1189673
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Responding to #AllMalePanels:
A Collage
JUST ADD WOMEN! BEYOND A QUICK AND VISIBLE FIX
CAI WILKINSON
Deakin University, Australia
Are all-male panels (AMPs) a symptom of continuing gender inequality that needs
calling out? Undoubtedly. Does ensuring the presence of women on every panel,
or even creating all-women panels, offer an effective solution? I’m unconvinced.
Insisting that all panels should include women finds support because it is a
direct and tangible response to a persistent phenomenon, made infinitely more
frustrating by the blithe thoughtlessness that underpins its recurrence. It
appears to be a small but welcome and quantifiable step toward correcting
the chronic underrepresentation that women in the majority of professional
fields still experience.
However, settling for this quick fix has some potentially serious side effects
for gender equity and diversity. Apparent practicality aside, a “just add women”
response to AMPs risks perpetuating not only the notion that gender is binary,
essentialized and visible, but also that gender parity between women and men
should to be prioritized over other axes of diversity.
The binary categorization of gender utilized in the AMP discourse, in which
“woman” is the sole logical other of “man,” closes down space for other
(non-western, non-binary) gender identities. It also reduces “women” to a
reified identity husk, with the complexity and multiplicity of individual iden-
tity stripped out in favor of a single monolithic generic label.
Gender binarism is a deficient basis on which to try and address difference and
inclusivity. In the case of AMPs, it is compounded by reliance on visible markers
of gender – principally appearance, but also names and gendered pronouns – to
determine whether panelists are men or women. This further reduction of gender
identity to what is not only visible but intelligible to the viewer is deeply
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2016.1189673
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troubling, reifying a highly normative conceptualization of gender that simplis-
tically assumes that all men look like men, and all women look like women.
Even more problematically, this binarist logic suggests that an assumed
common gender identity means any woman can speak for all women, since
there is purportedly something innately and universally distinctive about
women’s interpretations of the world. Women are thus naturalized as
“gender guardians” in a conflation of messenger and message. This shifts
the burden of working for gender equity in its full sense yet again onto
women rather than requiring all of us to take gender seriously.
In failing to problematize gender and only partially situate it within a wider
politics of more complex identity politics and social justice, the solution of
simply adding women fails to offer any substantive challenge to the socio-pol-
itical dynamics that have made AMPs so exasperatingly common in the first
place. Dzodan (2011) famously asserted, “MY FEMINISM WILL BE INTERSEC-
TIONAL OR IT WILL BE BULLSHIT!” Yet instead of revealing how stigmatiza-
tion of the feminine is part of wider patterns of privilege and marginalization,
encouraging a “just add women” approach ends up helping to mask the
unpleasant symptoms of patriarchal gender relations, leaving the underlying
structures – the patient, if you will – untreated.
Too often, granting select women seats on a panel is seen as somehow radical.
I’ll concede that it’s better than nothing, and even an important first step to
address women’s underrepresentation. But radical? Is a panel comprised of
white, economically safe, able-bodied women employed at western institutions
really such a radical departure from an AMP? What might a non-AMP look like
if it included race, disability, ethnicity, queer sexuality or employment status?
Enloe (2004) calls on us to utilize a “feminist curiosity” in order to examine
how naturalized concepts such as “men and “women” operate to legitimize
systems of power and marginalization. Viewed through this lens, aiming to
simply add women seems more like an expedient concession than a meaning-
ful and active commitment to engaging with complex and often uncomforta-
ble issues of diversity and representation. There are no easy answers, but
looking and thinking beyond quick fixes is vital.
WHITE MAN’S OYSTER
EVREN M. EKEN
Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Female academics are conspicuous by their absence at All-Male Panels, but Non-
Western academics, no matter what their gender, are inconspicuously absent.
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These reflect institutional and discursive boundaries that limit their academic
engagement with the West, and in turn, the myths of academia on equality,mobi-
lity and diversity. Below, I give a personal experience of how this proceeds.
Obtaining the right to travel internationally is a costlier process for those
outside the western world. One must incur various expenses to be deemed
safe to be unleashed and accepted by international authorities. One needs to
arrange all the records positioning oneself in the world: health insurance,
legal and financial documents, photographs and family records, in addition
to the costs associated with hotel and flight bookings, conference fees and
the hefty differences between currencies. Put simply, one must prove oneself
a responsible, non-threatening individual.
It was 2014. I was in Bursa, Turkey, when I received the acceptance email for
the Global International Studies Conference in Frankfurt, Germany.
1
Feeling
excited, I started to arrange the documents needed to obtain a visa. Yet my
application was rejected, on the basis that though I am Turkish, I needed to
apply from the UK, as that was where I ostensibly resided at the time. Yet all
the visa appointment slots were full in the German embassy in London as
well. Getting desperate, I decided to go to Ankara, Turkey, to talk to
someone from the German embassy there to find a way out.
When I arrived at the German embassy in Ankara, however, nobody let me
in. At this point, my frustration with the struggle to get a simple visa to attend
a conference boiled over. A voice echoed in my mind as a subtle bureaucratic
interpellation: “Know your place! Know your limits! Even if you have an invi-
tation and funding, you can’t just hop on a plane and go to attend a confer-
ence. The world is not your oyster.” As a last resort, I emailed the conference
organizers at Frankfurt University, to ask them whether they could assist me
somehow. Yet the only response I received was nonchalant, reminiscent of
“You’re on your own, mate.” In the end, I missed the conference and learned
that the hierarchic nature of international conferences, contrary to their rhe-
torical claims, continues to cohere through good old inconspicuous absences:
overpresences of white-western-male, fewer presences of white-western-
female, and many absences of the rest.
The panelists you see at conferences go through a careful filtration process
– by academic merit, but also through an invisible bureaucratic strainer which
leaves the academy as diluted as possible to keep its hierarchical-colonial
structure going. And as only select subjects pass the borders effortlessly and
mostly in a white-western-male form, knowledge-sharing spaces continue to
be areas of restriction in disguise. Because if and only if you are not larger,
but finer, than life – and possess the normative grammar skills that govern
academic life – you can speak freely in conferences. That normative
grammar defining the academic canon expects you to fit into certain subjec-
tivities, and hence to cover your subjects through certain ways of being effi-
cient, articulate and academic. As Foucault (1988, 14) argued, “in order to
be recognized as scientific discourse, thought must obey certain criteria.”
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As Gramsci put it, hegemony is a peculiar relationship between spontaneous
grammars and the “[w]ritten normative grammar” which “always presupposes
a ‘choice’ [ ... ] and is thus always an act of national-cultural politics” (1975,
2344). So, we should bear in mind that all-male panels are not only an issue of
color, gender, race, place and mansplaining but also an issue of hegemony.
Because, under the beguiling guise of “diversity” discourse (m)uttered in con-
ference corridors, those very conferences lose out on diversity itself. Hence, the
issue is also about the unseen yet systematically hegemonic ways of filtering
out processes that determine the contours and subjectivities of academic utter-
ings in conferences.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank L.H.M. Ling and Namalie Jayasinghe for their supportive
feedback and comments.
“GOOD POINT WELL MADE!”: EPISODES FROM EVERYDAY ACADEMIC
LIFE
LAURA MILLS
King’s College London, UK
“GOOD POINT WELL MADE!” EPISODE 1
In late 2015, an email greeted me with the words, “Good point well made!” I was
invited to be a panelist in a Guardian
2
debate on US policing but unfortunately
was unable to participate. I instead availed myself of the opportunity to high-
light the all-maleness of the panel on several fronts, for not only did this
all-maleness extend to the then-confirmed panelists but also the content of
the debate. Posing the question, “Is US policing out of control?” with particular
reference to race and the Black Lives Matter movement, the debate represented
an important constructive space to critically explore this highly pertinent issue.
And yet, its focus, as I pointed out, was completely limited to men. I drew atten-
tion to just a few of the women of color who recently died in US police custody –
Sandra Bland, Tanisha Anderson, Michelle Cusseaux, Kayla Moore – and the
#SayHerName campaign. Such absences are not merely irksome, but also
dangerous; these erasures enact violence. My female correspondent’s immedi-
ate response indicated her hearty agreement: “Good point well made!” with
promises to incorporate these points into her briefing of the panelists.
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While promoting the event to students, I openly discussed these concerns
and urged them to ask such questions should they not arise otherwise. Attend-
ing the debate (with a panel of five men and one woman) and finding silence
on the issue of women and race, one PhD student indeed dared to pose this
“good point” as a question. The outcome? She received the longest response
of the entire debate. The sole female panelist was eager to pursue the topic
and emphasized how US police further abuse power over women via sexual
assault. The majority of the panel recognized the importance of this “good
point”; however, they overwhelmingly relegated and sequestered it to the con-
fines of the “woman question.” The impact on women was excused away by
statistics indicating that men constitute the majority of deaths.
How often do we see such points neatly reduced to the “woman question,”
where lip service to (an exclusionary) inclusiveness is paid in order to move
on – with an easy conscience – to “what really matters” because the numbers
supposedly say so? How often is the “good point well made” acknowledged
but swept away for that which is deemed quantifiably more pressing? It is as
though the numbers themselves are not incredibly problematic and politicizing
for all men and women concerned, rendering them at once invisible (nameless,
faceless, meaningless) and hypervisible (this anonymity facilitates their numer-
icalization, an objectification rendering them visible as that to be calculated and
governed). The radical possibility of that seemingly inclusionary moment, that
important constructive space, is curtailed and disavowed. The violence of this is
significant for its implication that only certain black lives matter – only male
black lives matter. It speaks, moreover, to how supposedly “progressive”
realms like the Guardian (and academia) harbor and advance gendered power
differentials and privilege that are structural and insidious.
“GOOD POINT WELL MADE!” EPISODE 2
Rewind to late 2014. During a workshop, a male PhD student interrupted me and
claimed my argument for his own, albeit not pushing it as far as I had intended. I
tried repeatedly to re-interrupt, to make my point, to have a voice, and then,
after several attempts, I gave up. Later in the session, a male senior academic
referred back to the good point that he (the student) had made. This men’s-
club mentality and mansplaining dynamic have been well documented; so
too, importantly, has the fact that they are in no way a “universal flaw of the
gender” (Solnit 2012)
3
– not all men engage in such behaviors, and, likewise,
some women do. That said, however, this workshop incident was far from an iso-
lated event; I have shared “war stories”
4
of similar encounters with many female
academics at all career stages. (I have heard and experienced worse for that
matter.) In this particular instance, female colleagues afterwards expressed
their indignation to me, and yet in that moment, we all remained silent.
I need to move to make my point, to reclaim my point, to own my point. To
take up space. The energy that this requires is fierce. The exhaustion incurred
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by everyday academic life is disproportionately felt by women, even more so
by women of color.
5
And the inner turmoil that such an encounter induces – first, via self-con-
sciousness: the rudeness I felt at “interrupting” him when simply trying to
finish my point; second, via self-doubt: was this my point?; third, via self-
loathing: Isilenced myself – I did not fight to make my point, I am unworthy
of a good point well made. Even now, when writing this critique, I am at war
with myself; that inner fight continually disrupts, seeking to justify and excuse
away their actions and my inaction: he is a nice student; he is a nice senior aca-
demic. But surely this renders this all the more insidious? Dangerous dis-
courses of manterruption and bropropriation (Bennett 2015) are left
buttressed and unchecked by years, decades, of normalization and internaliz-
ation, for my challenge is not only to them but also to myself.
Often, female scholars speak of such episodes “in private” – in conference
coffee breaks, lunches with colleagues, seminar wine receptions, but increas-
ingly, importantly, in “public” fora such as this and the Congrats, you have
an all male panel! Tumblr page. The structures that bolster and perpetuate
these everyday insidious episodes must continue to be challenged and dis-
rupted, so that the articulation of “good points well made” leads not merely
to their acknowledgment but to a reimagining where women can take up
space and own their points.
BEYOND THE ALL-MALE PANEL: TRACKING FACTORS OF GENDERED
CREDIBILITY
ROXANNE KRYSTALLI
The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, USA
Identifying an all-male panel is, on its surface, a simple matter of observation
and counting: who is on stage? Who has the authority to speak? As important
as it is to track the gender presentation of speakers, it is only the first step to
understanding the gendered politics of credibility in academia and beyond. As
Cynthia Enloe’s work underlines, feminists need to be curious about the pro-
cesses of trivialization and according “seriousness,” and the ways in which
they are gendered (2004, 74). In that vein, efforts to track the composition
of panels need to take into account factors that go beyond the gender identity
of the speakers. Table 1 depicts a list of questions through which those inter-
ested in gender analysis in higher education can collect data.
6
In this piece, I
discuss three key insights that have arisen from this effort to track gendered
factors of credibility.
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First, as the table shows, efforts to track gender identity should simul-
taneously track racial and ethnic identification, where possible, as well as
any other factors that are salient for understanding the politics of credibility
in each context. This is a complicated endeavor, given that gender, race or
ethnic presentation may not line up with identification – and may not be
immediately apparent or necessarily comfortable questions to ask. At the
same time, feminist efforts would fall short if they focused solely on gender
with no regard for other aspects of dominant narratives or forms of oppression
and exclusion in academia and beyond.
Second, the table shows the need to disaggregate data by department or spon-
soring organization where possible. Most information of the type requested in the
table is readily available in online mailing listsadvertising campus events. Diver-
sity is not the mantle of a single field of study or relevant only to specific topics or
departments. Obtaining these data is significant because it can allow for a more
disaggregated gender analysis: it would highlight, for example, if the majority
of the female speakers in one institution are invited by a particular department,
or, conversely, if certain departments are consistent sponsors of all-male
panels. This would, in turn, allow administrators or student groups to work
with particular departments or student groups to diversify invitation lists.
Third, the table highlights the need to pay attention to factors of credibility
that may ostensibly not appear gendered, but which are indeed related to
power and perceptions of importance. For example, what is the gender break-
down of events for which the administration or faculty send emails encoura-
ging students to attend, compared to events advertised without additional
prompts from these perceived authority figures? The table encourages the col-
lection of data that would highlight gender and other differences in speaker
composition for events that are part of distinguished lecture series, events at
which food is served or events accompanied by receptions – all of which
require a commitment of institutional resources, and all of which may make
it more enticing for faculty and students to attend.
Table 1 Beyond the all-male panel: Recording data on gendered credibility
Name and institutional affiliation of the speaker
Gender, race and ethnicity by which the speaker identifies or presents
Which department or institute organized the event?
Was the event organized by students, faculty, administration or other?
Did faculty and/or administration members attend the event?
Who introduced the speaker (faculty, administration, students or other)?
Did faculty and/or administration send an email to students encouraging them to
attend?
Was the event part of a conference, named lecture series or otherwise distinguished
event on campus?
Was food served at the event? Was there an accompanying reception before or after the
event?
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Finally, collecting these data and engaging in conversations about them
is not a one-time effort; rather, the information becomes more powerful if
data are collected and reported to administrators consistently over time. As
the table shows, a mere sex disaggregation of speakers on panels is
inadequate for understanding the gendered structures that enable all-
male panels to continue. Rather, a closer examination of the intersectional
politics of invitation lists, ranging from funding for events to the identities
of the hosts and attendees, can shed light on the gendered dynamics of
power, credibility and authority that affect panel composition at univer-
sities and beyond.
“SO, YOU’RE ON AN ALL-MALE PANEL”
HARRY D. GOULD
Florida International University, USA
So, you’re on an all-male panel.
It didn’t start out that way, but here you are, days before the conference.
With no answers
Only questions
You feel pulled in multiple directions.
“The show must go on,” the lower-case “p” pragmatist part of you insists, ever
the careerist, he.
“This isn’t what I agreed to be part of,” another, better, part of you reminds.
“Can something good still come of this?” you ask yourself, but maybe it’s just as
a salve to your conscience.
Maybe I can address this as part of my presentation.
No. “Who am I to speak to this systemic problem?”
Yes. “I cannot give presence to the absent, but I’m structurally a part of this
problem, and I can help if only just by denouncing it and my own complicity.”
On the other hand, I can take a stand, I can join the absent.
There are real, tangible costs to not participating, not being complicit – the
dreaded one-year blacklist – and you’re not sure whether you have the
courage of your convictions.
(The convictions you always tell yourself you have.)
“Isn’t that just narrowly instrumental and careerist thinking?”
Why not wear that blacklisting as a badge of honor?
Let next year’s organizers know that if they reject you, they’re rejecting you for
taking a stand.
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Think.
What happened?
When the panel was submitted, it had broad representation across sexes,
genders and sexualities.
Participants withdrew. That’s not unusual.
Why did they withdraw from this panel?
Reasons you might find quotidian might actually be deeply gendered.
Their reasons might reflect things you pride yourself on not being blind to, but
actually routinely are.
“Over-commitment” means vastly different things across the gendered div-
ision of labor.
But ... “Maybe,” you say, “they were simply over their participation limit and
chose to give up this panel.”
That still leaves a “why this panel?” question, doesn’t it?
It also still leaves the question of why all of the women withdrew from the
panel.
Tell yourself it was innocent coincidence.
Tell yourself that the reasons were banal and quotidian.
You still know that something is rotten.
Can I ask the participants who withdrew?
(Assuming I even know them)
Regardless of how well intentioned the question might seem, it would still feel
to me like being pedantic and schoolmasterly.
I can hear the reproach in my question even though I don’t will it to be there.
Still lots of questions
Still no clarity about your direction
THE FEMINIST MANEL: NOTES TOWARD AN AMBIGUOUS UTOPIA
JESSE CRANE-SEEBER
a
AND PAUL KIRBY
b
a
North Carolina State University, USA;
b
University of Sussex, UK
GUERRILLA ESSENTIALISM
“On this, the occasion of the International Studies Association’s last ever all-
male panel ... ” The President-elect fumbled, cut short by a cacophony of
yells and cheers, whoops and boos. Unaccustomed to such outbursts, he
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returned to his seat. The other panelists were grinning but shifting uncomfor-
tably in theirs.
Attention in the auditorium turned to the rising Chair.
What does it mean that this is the last all-male panel the ISA will ever allow? I
argue that it means a step toward inclusivity, but like all efforts to redress
wrongs, we create new exclusions. Each panelist today brings a reflexive analysis
of such exclusions.
Scholarly good manners reasserted themselves after the tempest, panelists pro-
ceeding in the order of the program. There were stories of the struggle to create
the new policy, ethnographies of men and boys in feminist movements and a
tragi-comic tale of being genderqueer on the job market. Self-identified fem-
inist men, transmen, queers and allies, all minorities even in the periphery that
was IR feminism, had fought for the new policy. Their opponents had invoked
a “lost scholarly objectivity,” with man on man ad hominem attacks reverber-
ating across departments and the internet alike. Yet official resistance melted
quickly, with leading figures moving quickly to claim credit for the more ega-
litarian program directives.
The final speaker, a drag king and fierce critic of the International Studies
Association (ISA) leadership’s separation of the demands for global south
and racial equity from the so-called “gender question,” swaggered across the
front of the room. A projector slideshow, photos in rapid succession: ISA,
APSA, BISA, EISA panels from the ages.
“Who’s missing?” he called out.
“Brown people!” shouted an enthusiastic clutch of grad students in the
fourth row.
“What would it mean for the way we produce scholarship to insist that white
cismen can no longer speak about others without being ‘talked back to’?”
That question, hanging in the air, ended what was simultaneously the ISA’s
last manel of the old style and the first of the new. This revolution, such as it
was, was still to be diverted.
#NOTALLMANELS
There were to be no more all-male panels, for there was no area of world poli-
tics that did not engage female experience or female scholars’ expertise. No
area, that is, apart from the internal dynamics of masculinity. Here, it had to
be conceded, there would be at least some occasions where the most qualified,
the most representative, panel would indeed be all male. Under the influence of
an admittedly dissident strand of standpoint theory, it was thus decreed that a
special case – the feminist manel – would be permitted.
A year later, at the 61st ISA conference in Honolulu, there was only one
feminist manel, on which male scholars spoke earnestly about effective chal-
lenges to patriarchy. At ISA 2021 there were a few more. By 2025, almost half
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of Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FGTS)-sponsored panels were all male.
It had seemed so simple, parsimonious even. Create space for men (by all defi-
nitions) to conduct feminist analysis, to think critically about patriarchy and
homophobia. That was before the parodies, the mockery smuggled under the
justification of drag and the dude-bros’ sarcastic, spiteful papers.
Some took the assortment of masculine queerfolk at their word, even wel-
coming the return of the manel transformed. The intellectual arguments
were compelling enough. Gender is, after all, a fiction presenting itself as a
fixed property when it is closer to a fixation, a libidinal investment, and there-
fore in turn an asphyxiation. “Man” is as empty a category as “Woman,” if not
more so. Once the illusion of gender as thing-in-itself was dispelled, there was
nothing left to coagulate men as such.
By contrast, many women had argued that men cannot be feminist, given
the historical struggle by women against men for social power. Once manels
returned to ISA, their worst fears were made manifest: men colonized femin-
ism. An explosion in feminist theory PhDs by men laid the foundation for
rivalry and dominance, as was their wont: eschatological readings of Kristeva,
invocations of Gaga Feminism and trans identity, constant renunciations of
privilege, drowning everyone else out. And so the manel, briefly the exception,
again became common.
BOY FEMINISM AGAINST ITSELF
We offer these fleeting visions – a genderfluid utopia, a resurgent patriarchal
dystopia – as imagined moments in the future of IR feminism. In our efforts to
organize a feminist manel for ISA 2016, we encountered variants of both ideas
– that putative “male” identity should not matter if the presenters were enga-
ging with feminism in good faith, but also that feminist manels represented a
threat to – even an infiltration of – FTGS and feminist IR.
If gender is a system for the distribution of power and identity that is mul-
tiple, stratifying and adaptive – and we maintain that it is – there is surely
space to ruminate on the diverse contradictions of male feminist identity
without the legitimizing presence of an authentic (read: cis female) interlocu-
tor. Or so we thought.
The feminist critique, as articulated by de Beauvoir, is that one is “not born a
woman,” but “made” (1989, 267). The relational practices of everyday life help
produce and enact stable categories of sex, gender, race and class (West and
Fenstermaker 1993). In these recursive practices, particularly around gender
and sexuality, we see the effects of performativity: identities, so the majority
view has it, are the effects of accumulated enactments (Butler 1993).
Besides, don’t we also already know that masculine displays are structured
around fear of other men (Kimmel 2000); that hypothesized solidarities
between men or women as groups-in-themselves are strategic essentialism
at best, ideological figments at worst; that many people don’t fit in binary
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boxes of gender (Butler 1991; Halberstam 2005); that biological sex is neither
simple nor dualist (Fausto-Sterling 2000); and that evolution is no basis for
claims about the patriarchal present (Crane-Seeber and Crane 2010)? Gender
as both distinction and metanarrative structures our cultures and institutions
through dangerous illusions.
So what, we ask in our best mansplaining plea, about the feminist boys? Or
the lack thereof? What about genderqueering IR conferences? About jettison-
ing the all-male panel without reifying the male/female binary? About, in the
last instance, feminism as a project that seeks to dismantle the very conditions
that make its categories of critique and solidarity necessary, to abolish the
gender hierarchies and power differences which called it forth?
Cai Wilkinson
Faculty of Arts and Education
Deakin University
221 Burwood Highway
Burwood, Victoria, 3125, Australia
Email: cai.wilkinson@deakin.edu.au
Evren M. Eken
Geography Department
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham Hill
Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, UK
Email: Evren_eken@yahoo.com
Laura Mills
Institute of North American Studies, King’s College London
Strand
London, WC2R 2LS, UK
Email: laura.mills@kcl.ac.uk
Roxanne Krystalli
The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
Feinstein International Center, Tufts University
114 Curtis Street
Somerville, Massachusetts, 02144, USA
Email: roxani.krystalli@tufts.edu
Harry D. Gould
Department of Politics and International Relations
Green School of International and Public Affairs
12 I n t e r n a t i o n a l F e m i n i s t J o u r n a l o f P o l i t i c s --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Florida International University
SIPA 423, 11200 SW 8th St
Miami, Florida, 33199, USA
Email: gouldh@fiu.edu
Jesse Paul Crane-Seeber
School of Public and International Affairs
North Carolina State University
Campus Box 8102
Raleigh, North Carolina, 27695, USA
Email: jpcranes@ncsu.edu
Paul Kirby
School of Global Studies
University of Sussex
Sussex House, Falmer
Brighton, BN1 9RH, UK
Email: p.c.kirby@sussex.ac.uk
Notes
1 The theme of the conference was “Justice, Peace and Stability: Risks and Opportu-
nities for Governance and Development.” A further welcoming wording, including
an address to the Global South, can be found on the official website (WISC 2016).
2 The Guardian is a left-leaning national newspaper in the UK.
3 While Solnit distances herself from the term, her well-cited 2008 article, “Men
Explain Things to Me,” is often credited with inspiring the mansplaining neologism
(see Solnit 2014, 1– 16).
4 This war analogy echoes that employed by Solnit: “women fight wars on two fronts,
one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak” (2014,
10– 11).
5 Not to mention the additional encumbrances provoked by heteronormative, cultural
and class hierarchies (see, for example, Agathangelou and Ling 2002).
6 This table has been adapted from my experiences with leading a student-run
gender initiative at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy between 2012
and 2014. The initiative tracked data for internal school purposes on invited
speakers in ways that mirror those discussed in this piece. All opinions in this
piece are my own, and they do not necessarily reflect the attitudes of the insti-
tution or other student leaders.
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Notes on Contributors
Cai Wilkinson is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin Univer-
sity, Australia. Her research focuses on the intersections of societal security
and LGBTQ issues, especially LGBTQ human rights in the former Soviet Union.
Evren M. Eken is a PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London. His
research interests lie at the intersections of visual culture, critical geopolitics
and critical war studies.
Laura Mills is Teaching Fellow in American Politics and Foreign Policy at
King’s College London. Her research explores the cultural and the everyday
in IR, and she is currently completing her first monograph on post-9/11 Amer-
ican cultural diplomacy.
Roxanne Krystalli is a PhD candidate at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplo-
macy and Humanitarian Evidence Program Manager at Feinstein International
Center. Her research focuses on the politics of victimhood during transitions
from violence.
Harry Gould is Associate Professor at Florida International University. He is
author of The Legacy of Punishment in International Law (Palgrave Macmillan,
2010). His research addresses normative issues and ethics in international poli-
tics.
Jesse Crane-Seeber grew up in the woods of Ithaca, New York. He holds a PhD
in International Relations from American University and is currently finishing
Fifty Shades of Militarism, a study of the fetishization of all things military in
the USA.
Paul Kirby is Lecturer in International Security at the University of Sussex,
where he teaches on gender and war. His research focuses on feminist expla-
nations for wartime sexual violence, the body as weapon and representations
of gender violence.
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