Description
The historical absence of women in canonical IR texts is widely documented (Owens 2018; Lake 2016; Hansen 2011) and demonstrates that the process of constituting the IR canon is gendered. The focus of this work has thus far concentrated on documenting absences. However, these absences are not a natural reflection of who is thinking and writing about IR, and there are increasing calls to examine how women’s work is actively written out of the IR canon (Owens 2018, 2; Lake 2016, 116). Examining the processes through which women’s international thought has been erased from the (largely Anglo-American) IR canon addresses one site of epistemic violence. This paper begins with ten key texts in disciplinary history, often cited as documenting or re-writing canonical thought, and examines the processes through which the texts themselves actively write women’s writing out of the canon. This paper draws on the work of Starnes (Starnes 2017) and folkloric approaches to the processes of canon negotiation to explore how women have historically been not just absent, but actively written out of IR. The novel use of Cinderella stories to perform folkloric readings of the texts helps to reflect back onto IR marginalizing practices that have become invisible in their familiarity and to reveal how innocuous-seeming ways of writing can in fact be violent. Understanding the marginalizing practices embedded in how we write reveals how gender marginalization is written into IR’s canonical boundaries, but also introduces an approach that can be applies to understanding racialized, colonial and ableist forms of epistemic violence in disciplinary writing.
