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Invisible while visible: an Australian perspective on queer women leaders in international affairs
Abstract
In among the silencing and invisibility of their stories, queer women operate as critical leaders in international affairs. They face multiple marginalisations: (1) challenging the archetypical diplomat or security leader as a heteronormative (white) male; and (2) operating in different cultural contexts with varying negative attitudes towards women in power and homosexuality in general. Providing both empirical and theoretical contributions to the fields of diplomacy, feminist and queer theory, this article gains unique access to Australian lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender diverse, and intersex diplomats and attachés to understand: what are the experiences of queer woman leaders in international affairs?
Key messages
Queer women experience deep exclusion in diplomacy, often ‘invisible’ despite their highly visible roles.
Even if not queer, women diplomats are often typified to be queer, which is emblematic of othering.
Diplomatic privilege protects queer women, providing opportunities to work in contentious spaces.
Women with wives may be best able to perform the ‘dual roles’ of diplomacy but challenges remain. </ul
... Looking to the instrumental reasons diversity is important, diversity in international affairs has been accredited to everything from lowering the propensity for interstate war to increasing collaboration and consensus, improving development outcomes, resulting in more "feminist" foreign policy, and more ( Stephenson 2020 ). In intelligence, the case for diversity follows similar lines, but has some unique, specific features and benefits for the practice of the IC. ...
... Atkinson sees this infantilization as part of the gender ordering of patriarchal control, reinforced and negotiated through informal rules and norms like workplace banter and office culture. It also supports Stephenson's ( 2020 ) research on gendered institutions, where Australian women in policing were often siloed into "soft" areas like surveillance. ...
... There is an overrepresentation of research focused on the United States and the United Kingdom in the literature, and a tendency to present historical analyses over more contemporaneous accounts that could demonstrate how intelligence is adapting over time. For instance, research from parallel fields like diplomacy is finding that despite more women occupying roles in diplomacy, gender patterns have not eroded over time ( Kreft, Niklasson, and Towns 2022 ), and women often experience a diplomatic glass cliff, being appointed in precarious positions and locations where risk is high and the chance of failing is greatest ( Stephenson 2022 ). More research is clearly needed around gender and the IC to interrogate how gender is "done", influences institutions, and evolves over time. ...
Intelligence services are important sites of contestation, often the foci of reform and calls for greater transparency. Yet, while growing attention has been paid to intersectionality, gender equality reform, and progress in other areas of international affairs, little of this same transparency and attention has been paid to diversity in the intelligence sector. This paper seeks to bridge the gap, comprising a systematic review of the literature on diversity in the intelligence sector to improve our understanding of what is known and what can be known about the history and current make-up of the intelligence sector—and those who “do intelligence work”. By identifying strengths and gaps in the literature and setting an agenda for future research within these “secret institutions”, this paper argues that the lack of transparency, data, and knowledge on the interplay of gender, race, and sexuality, among other aspects of diversity in intelligence, is deeply troubling. It hampers our knowledge of how the sector may be “gendered” or otherwise experienced, as well as how this particular area of the security sector may or may not be integrating gender and other perspectives into their work. This paper finds that diversity in the intelligence and national security sectors is both an asset and a liability to be managed. Diversity is seen as a source of intelligence gathering and analysis strength, as well as a potential threat to hegemonic masculinity in intelligence practice. Further, language and processes for promoting diversity in intelligence can reinforce stereotyped knowledge of marginalized groups that ultimately hamper calls for greater representation, diversity, inclusion, access, and opportunities in the intelligence sector.
... Gender and diplomacy literatures (Aggestam and Towns 2019; Cassidy 2017; Standfield 2020) offer insights on both "gender" and diplomacy. Focusing first on "gender"-race, postcolonial, and queer scholarship on diplomacy broadens our understanding of gender to show how diplomacy is racialized and hetero-patriarchal (Blaschke 2021;Opondo 2018;Stephenson 2020). Regarding diplomacy-gender and diplomacy literature broadens our understanding of the actors, acts, and practices that constitute diplomacy through representation, negotiation, mediation, and communication. ...
... Constructions of networking were also interlaced with heterosexual coupledom (Standfield 2020;Stephenson 2020;Towns 2020, 574): Dacian [Ciolios] had a big role in acting as a direct conduit, he's very close to Emmanuel Macron because, Dacian was agriculture Commissioner and, through that he's quite well known in France, his wife is French or his wife does certainly, have a connection to Macron's wife, so they know each other very well, and he helped us convince Macron to support an extension. (Renew MEP M 081119, UK; see also ECR MEP M 040320 EU27) An additional way of facilitating international contacts is through parliamentary friendship groups. ...
Parliamentary diplomacy (PD) is a contemporary feature of modern parliamentarism but remains, thus far, underexplored from a gender lens. PD incorporates the relationships that parliamentarians or parliaments as institutions have with other parliaments, parliamentarians, and nonstate actors to foster peace, democracy, understanding, dialogue, legitimacy, and scrutiny of governments. Parliaments are spaces of parliamentary and international negotiation and communication, practiced through rules, practices, and symbols. This article draws on a single case study of the European Parliament (EP) and of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) gendered PD, at the time of Brexit—a period when international agreements and relationships were shaped and how gendered PD was culturally legitimized. It is based on a unique qualitative dataset of 140 interviews and ethnographic research (2018–2020) generated at the time of the withdrawal of the United Kingdom’s MEPs from the EP. Based on this analysis, it further considers what a feminist PD might look like.
... Some of them focus on climate diplomacy as a tool for consensus-building and establishing regional (Nagabhatla et al. 2021) or transnational alliances (Strachová 2021), others look at cases where climate diplomacy takes a form of humanitarian aid and educational cultural activities of powerful country leaders, like the U.S.A, in the developing regions (Copeland 2009). Other issues attracting diplomacy scholars include disability activism (Galmarini 2021), lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans (LGBT) global rights advocacy (Stephenson 2020) or transnational feminism movements as a part of CD activities (D. R. Wang, Hajjar, and Cole 2019;Frazier 2017;Rossetti 2015). ...
This article is based on a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the academic literature on cultural diplomacy since its official inception during the midst of the Cold War, in 1959. It draws on mapping, chronology building, and thematic analysis of all scholarship published on cultural diplomacy in the Scopus database, the largest academic database in the world. The research explores how the discipline has evolved, what geographies and thematic areas it covered in the past, and what is the future of this discipline. These explorations start a conversation on cultural diplomacy as an independent academic discipline that most recently has gained a wider and stronger attention and reached a higher stage of scholarly maturity. This article is evidence that the research on CD is rapidly progressing with time, incorporating new thematic areas for exploration as well as covering wider cultural and political geographies. The research findings suggest further trajectories for the development of cultural diplomacy as an academic enquiry, focusing on different diplomatic channels, modes of operation, structures, actors, meanings, and implications.
For the first time in history, women in Australian diplomacy have equal or near-equal representation in leadership whilst the institution they represent is shrinking — in funding, footprint and status. Even if simply a natural shift in policy priorities, this diplomatic ‘glass cliff’ has specifically gendered effects. Indeed, ‘hard’ militaristic agencies — where funding and prestige flow — remain pockets of gender resistance in Australian international affairs. This article employs a combination of qualitative interview analysis as well as quantitative longitudinal data on gender representation and agency funding across four case agencies to argue that women are gaining positions of diplomatic leadership just as diplomacy’s relative power, influence and funding decreases. It contributes to women’s leadership research in finding that women’s increased opportunities in leadership are therefore constrained by the declining status or shrinking nature of the institution to which they are gaining access.
The practice turn in diplomatic studies has focused on how and when diplomats recognise others’ practices as competent. I argue that gendered, raced and classed power shape who is recognised as competent or virtuosic. Denial of recognition reveals how normative conceptions of competence reproduce inequalities in diplomacy. I trace the development and assessment of competence through the autobiographical narratives of Dame Margaret Joan Anstee, a British diplomat, diplomatic wife, international civil servant and then UN special representative in Angola in the 1990s. I find that developing social capital through education was key to allowing Anstee to transcend her working-class origins and enter the upper-class milieu of the post-World War II British Foreign Office. However, as the UN’s first female head of a peacekeeping mission, she struggled to be recognised as a competent actor, even as she took what could be seen as virtuosic action to resource the failing mission.
This article argues that the (re-)constitution of diplomacy is intimately linked to gender and the practices of exclusion and inclusion of women and men over time. While the big debates in both academia and among practitioners concern the change and continuity of diplomacy in the last hundred years, gender has received scant, if any, attention. The overarching aim of this article is therefore to advance a new research agenda, which can spur future gender studies and contribute to rethinking diplomacy. It presents an original narrative about three distinct bodies of diplomatic scholarly work that focus on (1) diplomatic history; (2) descriptive representation; and (3) gendered institutions. We conclude that first there is a need to move out of Europe and North America to provide greater focus on Africa, Asia and Latin America. Second, there is a need to move beyond the descriptive single case studies towards more systematic comparisons, which can trace change in institutional gender dynamics over time. Ethnographic work can provide novel insights to gendered micro-processes and the daily mundane institutional practices. Third, as part of the gender turn in the field of diplomacy international feminist theory can generate significant theoretical contributions to the transformation of diplomacy.
Focusing on ambassador appointments, the aim of this pioneering article is to address some fundamental questions about where men and women are positioned in diplomacy. Most of the gender-related diplomacy studies are limited to individual Ministry of Foreign Affairs and say little about diplomacy as an aggregate set of practices. We draw on theories of gender and positional status to ask whether there are gender patterns in ambassador appointments—with men occupying positions of higher military and economic status than women—much like the ones found in other institutions. Our analyses are based on a unique data set containing almost 7,000 ambassador appointments, made by the fifty highest ranked countries in terms of GDP in 2014. The results show that female ambassadors are less likely to occupy high-status ambassadorships than men. In short, gender patterns, linked to power and status, are present also in ambassador appointments. Diplomacy studies need to do much more to address the presence and impact of gender in international affairs.
Over the past two decades, the body has emerged as an increasingly important focus of study in the social sciences generally, but little work has been done on it in International Relations. Drawing on a disparate yet voluminous literature on gender, as well as on Bourdieu's analysis of class, this article demonstrates the importance of gendered and classed bodies within the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). Part one, which is based on archival work and interviews, details the emergence of women within the diplomatic service. In part two, which is based on interviews and ethnographic data, I postulate the existence of three masculinity scripts and three femininity scripts within MFA discourse. I conclude that the gendering and classing of diplomats' bodies is a constitutive factor of the MFA hierarchic order and so differentiates diplomats' life chances. It follows that the body is of crucial importance to social life in at least one traditional site of IR study.
How are sovereignty and sexuality entangled in contemporary international politics? What understandings of sovereignty and sexuality inform contemporary theories and foreign policies on development, immigration, terrorism, human rights, and regional integration? How specifically is the ‘homosexual’ figured in these theories and policies to support or contest traditional understandings of sovereignty? This book puts international relations scholarship and transnational/global queer studies scholarship in conversation to address these questions and their implications for contemporary international politics. It traces how the ‘homosexual’ is conventionally figured—as either a perverse creature whom sovereign nation-states must secure themselves against or as a normal human being whom sovereign nation-states should embrace—to wield sexuality in support of conventional understandings of state sovereignty. It also traces how unconventional figurations of the ‘homosexual’ as both normal and/or perverse so defy either/or logics of sovereignty and of sexuality that these ‘normal and/or perverse homosexuals’ begin to unravel modern understandings of state sovereignty itself. By analyzing figurations of the ‘homosexual’ as the ‘underdeveloped’, the ‘undevelopable’, the ‘unwanted im/migrant’, the ‘terrorist’, the ‘gay rights holder’, the ‘gay patriot’ and Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst’s ‘bearded lady’, this book shows how the will to knowledge about the ‘homosexual’ is fundamental to contemporary international theories of sovereignty and of contemporary foreign policy.
Women in international affairs play powerful and influential roles in shaping laws and policies, negotiating on subjects of war, peace and security, and representing national interest. In Australia, women outnumber men at all levels of public service to executive level one. Yet, women remain under-represented in more senior ranks and appear to experience significant challenges gaining leadership in agencies involved in diplomacy and security. What are the gendered institutions at play in Australian international affairs? Using a comparative case study approach, this paper explores the experiences of senior executive level women leaders across the Australian Federal Government in four case agencies—the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), Defence, Department of Home Affairs (DHA), and the Australian Federal Police (AFP). Women’s gendered challenges in international leadership are not surprising within a diplomatic history that has often restricted women’s roles based off the ‘appropriateness’ of sending women as envoys to nations of varying safety and respect for their status. What is surprising is that women report greater sexism, discrimination and harassment from within their own agencies, not from countries in which they are hosted. This has important ramifications globally on gaining and retaining women in international affairs leadership.
Feminist institutionalism is concerned with the ‘rules of the game’ in political institutions. It is interested to explore how institutions create gender-just conditions in terms of the policies and actions they undertake and the make-up of the elected representatives they contain. It also has a growing interest in how institutions can resist or obstruct positive gendered change. It is argued here that employing the concept of ‘critical actors’ alongside a feminist institutionalist framework can further our understanding of why some institutions resist change. Using the example of abortion legislation in Northern Ireland, this article illustrates how the literatures on feminist institutionalism and critical actors can, when combined, help to build a fuller narrative of why gendered policy change does not happen.
Diplomats are the face of their country abroad. One way that a country can represent and benefit from its diversity is through the diversity of its diplomatic representatives. Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has made a sustained effort to increase the diversity of its workforce and has improved the representation of some groups: for example, the increased number of women in senior positions in recent decades. A case study of DFAT’s Indigenous Recruitment and Career Development Strategy (2007–2015) identifies the following key factors needed for such efforts to succeed: sustained effort, high-level support, availability of peer support and a willingness to adapt programs over time. While there are challenges in implementing a diversity strategy, such as resource constraints and the broader organisational culture, the Indigenous Recruitment and Career Development Strategy provides a positive model of how to increase diversity among a country’s diplomats.
The ways in which women deliberately press back against practices of oppression and demonstrate agency in higher education institutions are highly contextual and culturally bound. The formal and informal networks that women develop and maintain are important elements of generating agency and enhancing women's access to and opportunities for leadership. This article presents a case study from research that explored women's leadership experiences in a higher education context in the Pacific Islands – Papua New Guinea. Situated within a feminist poststructural methodology, the research examined women's experiences of leadership and considered aspects that influenced women's access to formal leadership roles. The findings illustrated that the women faced numerous barriers to formal leadership opportunities. A range of culturally and contextually located approaches supported women to demonstrate agency with regard to their own leadership development and practice. This research highlighted the importance of considering the relationship between networks and agency and the impact of associated cultural and contextual practices within organisations, providing insights into the culturally located complexities of women's leadership in higher education contexts.
Women are demonstrably under-represented at senior levels in Australia's international affairs. Empirical evidence shows a continuing gender imbalance in leadership positions, including in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of Defence and academia. Two explanations commonly offered are that women are less motivated or lack interest in ‘hard’ international relations. These explanations are found to be unconvincing, given studies showing similar levels of ambition and interest at recruitment. Four alternative explanations are offered to account for the scarcity of female leaders in Australia's international affairs: the legacy of direct discrimination, continued indirect discrimination, inadequate support for women who balance work and family responsibilities, and socially constructed gender norms. Instead of the subject matter of international relations being too ‘hard’, or inherently masculine, it appears that it is the combined impact of these factors that has made it ‘hard’, or difficult, for women to progress to senior levels. In order to show how these barriers can be overcome, three case studies are presented of women who have achieved senior positions: Professor Emeritus Helen Hughes, Her Excellency Ms Penny Wensley and Professor Hilary Charlesworth. These examples suggest strategies that women can use to further their careers and measures that can be implemented in workplaces to improve the representation of senior women in Australia's international affairs.
Research Highlights and Abstract
The study of gender, sexuality—and, in particular, queer theory—is central to the social sciences and humanities. Our analysis of citation practices shows that queer theorist Judith Butler is one of the most cited social theorists of all time. Yet political science remains distinctly untroubled by queer theory, and gender and sexuality are frequently treated as marginal (not central) concerns. We argue that queer theory has much to offer political science, not only by highlighting the importance of sexuality and the body but also in analysing ‘power’ and in politicising ‘the political’ itself. We suggest that the ‘queering’ of political science is long overdue, not least through politicising processes of knowledge-production in the discipline.
There is something queer (by which we mean strange) going on in the scholarly practice of political science. Why are political science scholars continuing to disregard issues of gender and sexuality—and in particular queer theory—in their lecture theatres, seminar rooms, textbooks, and journal articles? Such everyday issues around common human experience are considered by other social scientists to be central to the practice and theory of social relations. In this article we discuss how these commonplace issues are being written out of (or, more accurately, have never been written in to) contemporary political science. First, we present and discuss our findings on citation practice in order to evidence the queerness of what does and does not get cited in political science scholarship. We then go on to critique this practice before suggesting a broader agenda for the analysis of the political based on a queer theoretical approach.
Purpose
– Theorizing that was conceived in the 1970s about gendered processes in organizations helped explain gender inequalities in organizations. This article aims to take the opportunity to re‐examine these processes – including the gendered substructure of organizations, gendered subtext, the gendered logic of organization and the abstract worker from the perspective of the original author in a present‐day context.
Design/methodology/approach
– A reflexive approach was used to consider how gender theorizing itself has become more complex as captured in the notion of intersectionality when gender process interacts with other forms of inequality.
Findings
– The key finding is the persistence of inequality regimes despite organizational changes, which still make developments in theorizing gender processes relevant.
Originality/value
– This article is an opportunity to reflect on the conceptualization and development of one's theorizing over three decades, which has suggested that there are still key questions that demand answers from academics and practitioners who want to challenge these inequality regimes.
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