Textbooks
Explore our diverse range of digital textbooks designed for course adoption and recommended reading at universities and colleges. We publish over 140 textbooks across the social sciences, and an annual subscription to digital textbooks is possible via BUP Digital.
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Books: Textbooks
This chapter introduces and contextualises the international arms trade. It explores the links between the activities of state and corporate elites through the lens of warrior-protector and bourgeois-rational models of masculinity. The legitimate arms trade is defined and monitored, over and against illegitimate trading as a criminal activity, through ‘nested’ hierarchies of male-dominated elites. Visual analysis shows how the overtly gendered masculinity of moralised patriarchy interacts with covertly gendered humanness. In that way money-making in the national/international arms trade is sanitised as patriotic. Taking the UK as a particular state-agent, the chapter shows how legitimating strategies invisibilise policy contradictions and human rights-violations.
This chapter takes readers to the very pinnacle of global power where nation-states, military establishments and commercial interests come together at international arms fairs. At those venues arms traders and weapons-manufacturers address their legitimacy-deficit. Their strategies are stabilised by reinscribing the heterosexual certainties of the gender-order hierarchy of masculinity over femininity. Gender-sensitive ethnography, informed by performativity, explicates this in detail, with particular attention to the role of women. In turn weapons-company promotional videos do this similarly with the race-class order to stabilise themselves politically. This conjuncture is dominated by American ‘defence’ spending and thus by ‘western-liberal’ norms. Legitimation then works against any idea of hypocrisy and subterfuge.
This chapter considers the anti-militarism activisms which confront the imbrication of weaponry and masculinity that the preceding chapters have outlined. Those activisms include both men and women. However, they have a particular and often problematic relationship with feminisms and with feminist activists. Moreover those groups and movements include a variety of understandings of, and internal conflicts about, critical approaches to masculinity. Rather than typologising any masculinities therein as somehow ‘alternative’, the analytical focus here is on grassroots efforts to delegitimise weaponry and militarism. Some queer activists attempt to do this by destabilising the gender-order hierarchy directly. This chapter avoids descriptive typology and relates instead to great-power politics.
Gender is widely recognized as an important and useful lens for the study of International Relations. However, there are few books that specifically investigate masculinity/ies in relation to world politics.
Taking a feminist-inspired understanding of gender as its starting point, the book:
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explains that gender is both an asymmetrical binary and a hierarchy;
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shows how masculinization works via ‘nested hierarchies’ of domination and subordination;
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explores the imbrication of masculinities with the nation-state and great-power politics;
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develops an understanding of the arms trade with commercial processes of militarization.
Written in an accessible style, with suggestions for further reading, this book is an invaluable resource for students and teachers applying ‘the gender lens’ to global politics.
This chapter genders the supposedly gender-neutral founding concepts of the study of international relations. The security dilemma arises in and through the ordered hierarchies of male-dominated institutions. The state is rightly conceived as masculine and masculinising. The great-power politics of the international system is thus coincident with the militarisation and weaponry through which nation-states compete. This international ‘normality’ is legitimated by the gender-order hierarchies of male dominance. That order of dominance is legitimated in turn by the nation-state in masculinising practices and weapons-displays. States without a military establishment are thus queer, yet normalised into the ordered hierarchies of militarism by other means, such as national sporting prowess.
This chapter explains that gender is not simply a binary. It is also a hierarchy of masculinity over femininity. Within that hierarchy there are ‘nested’ hierarchies of some men over others. This chapter also distinguishes between domination and hegemony, which is domination by consent. And it explains that masculinity and femininity are asymmetrical. Men can stand for generic, de-gendered humanity. When they are gendered as overtly male, that representation is moralised as good. Moral badness is then displaced into a generic human nature. Women have only the overtly gendered option. Men thus accumulate power within hierarchies of domination and subordination by mutual consent.
The book has asked about gender equality in the UK welfare state, asking how equal are the rights and responsibilities, welfare and wellbeing between men and women? How does it compare with other welfare states? Equality matters because more equal societies allow individual gifts to flourish rather than trapping people into stereo-typical lives; and because more equal societies are (broadly speaking) happier, healthier and (Wilkinson and Pickett 2010) and more successful economically than those riven with socio-economic or gender divisions (Goodin 1999). In the post-war era, a particularly crucial era for developing the UK’s welfare state, many social policies assumed that equality could be built on gender difference, with the male breadwinner/female carer model underpinning social security and care. Such policies perpetuated gender differences, in particular women’s and mothers’ role as carers, through a lack of social support for childcare through most of the twentieth century. Later governments, from the 1970s began to recognise women’s increasing place in the labour market, legislating for equal pay and against sex discrimination, and protecting mothers’ employment through childbirth. Recent governments have placed different emphases on social mobility and/or social equality, but have made commitments to gender equality and fairness between socio-economic groups.
The book has argued for a universal citizenship model of the welfare state, which supports equal obligations to work and to care. It puts care at the centre of social obligations as well as social rights, seen as socially necessary work, as paid employment tends to be seen now. This is not about making everyone the same, but rather allowing individuals to flourish, in a framework of more equal social rights to power, to employment, to care, to income and to time, enabling people to support themselves while supporting others.
The relationship between gender and welfare states is of key importance in understanding welfare states and gender equality and inequality. Western welfare states of the post-war era were built on assumptions about gender difference: they treated men as breadwinners and women as carers. Now governments are committed in principle to gender equality. But how far have they come from male breadwinner assumptions to gender equality assumptions? How much do gender differences continue in UK social policy and social practice?
The book analyses the male breadwinner model in terms of power, employment, care, time and income, providing a framework for chapters which ask about policies and practices for gender equality in each of these. This new approach to analysis of gender equality in social welfare contextualises national policies and debates within comparative theoretical analysis and data, making the volume interesting to a wide audience.
In contrast to education, health and social security policies, care policies were not a major part of the UK’s post-war welfare state agenda, because women were seen as responsible for children and others needing care. Care was a private, family matter, in which governments should have little part unless parents were unable to meet their responsibilities. However, care has risen up the policy agenda for a wide range of reasons. Governments have seen increasing women’s employment – especially mothers’ employment – as crucial to economic growth and development, as well as to the ageing population. They have begun to see social investment in very young children as crucial to ending social exclusion and to enhancing educational levels among a more educated population, able to compete in the global knowledge economy. Care policies could be about care, about the needs of carers, and those needing care, but they tend to be more focused on other objectives (Himmelweit and Land 2007, 2008). Care policies could also be about gender equality. As we saw in the last chapter, policies to further gender equality through women’s employment have had varied effects. They have been most useful to highly-educated women keeping a work profile similar to men’s. They have been least useful to less –educated mothers, especially those breaking their working lives and returning to part-time work. If care services tend – in the UK – to be seen as serving other needs than care, care for older and disabled people has been lower in the policy hierarchy than policy for mothers and young children.
This chapter asks what part paid employment plays in gender equalities and inequalities. With government policies from the 1970s for equal pay, against sex discrimination and for employment protection to ensure mothers’ rights to return to work after childbirth is gender equality at work now a given? Is the one-and-a half male breadwinner (Lewis 2001b), in which women’s labour market participation does not bring equality in earnings or equal domestic partnerships still with us? Can today’s graduates at least, more than half of them women, expect equal pay, equal career opportunities? What is the experience of potentially disadvantaged women, minority ethnic women, disabled women, less well qualified women? And who are the most disadvantaged? Could they possibly be mothers? The chapter also asks what model of gender equality underpins current government policies. And, if government policies have not yet brought equal pay for equal work, even for the best qualified, what alternative models of gender equality in employment might do better?
Governments everywhere now hold to gender equality in principle, and pass legislation promoting it. But it often competes with other objectives, and may be little supported in practice. UK governments in the 1970s legislated for equal pay and employment protection around childbirth and against sex discrimination. New Labour governments in the 1990s and 2000s supported mothers’ employment through a range of strategies, including the National Minimum Wage, increased maternity rights, childcare, and Childcare Tax Credits. European policies and national government in this period aimed to reduce social exclusion, promote economic growth and respond to a wide range of issues, including reduced fertility, ageing populations and social inequality (Esping-Andersen 2009, Lewis 2008, 2009).
