Joshua S. Goldstein: War and Gender. How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa

Abstract

https://networks.h-net.org/node/5376/reviews/37016/damico-goldstein-war-and-gender-how-gender-shapes-war-system-and-vice Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. The Science of Gender The Science of Gender In War and Gender , Joshua Goldstein attempts a synthesis of disparate analyses addressing the "near-total exclusion of women from combat" over time and across cultures (pp. 5, 58). This intriguing approach is largely effective, and the text makes an important contribution to the burgeoning literature on gender and war/international relations. In this bridge-building effort, Goldstein employs analytic tools from multiple disciplines, including history, biology, psychology, sociology, and political science. He argues that war and gender are mutually constitutive, although Goldstein does not use the constructivist term; he prefers the more positivist language of "reciprocal causality," viz., "[c]ausality runs both ways between war and gender" (pp. 6, 191, 410). Although explicitly aimed at an academic audience, this analysis will also be of interest to military professionals, government policy makers, and general interest readers, as Goldstein debunks many of the myths surrounding war and gender that have shaped past policy decisions and public perceptions. His analysis is refreshing in its challenge to the artificial boundaries of academic disciplines and to accepted but ungrounded assumptions about gender and war, yet it is bounded by the positivist approach of social science methodology. Goldstein begins by challenging the dichotomous construction of sex/biology (nature) vs. gender/culture (nurture), arguing that the two are "highly interdependent" and that biology "provides diverse potentials" while cultures "limit, select, and channel them" (p. 2). He articulates this concept succinctly, "[b]iology is diversity" (pp. 131, 191), and demonstrates this variability across societies in detail in Chapters Two and Three. Goldstein defines war as lethal intergroup violence and feminism as an ideology opposing male domination and promoting gender equality (pp. 2-3). He then reviews the historical record of men and women in war in simple and complex societies. He concludes that the cross-cultural consistency of gendered war roles is pervasive, albeit not quite universal: women have fought in wars but are (or are portrayed/perceived as) exceptions to the gender rule that men are warriors. To explain the consistency of this link between war and gender, Goldstein turns to variants of feminist theory-Liberal Feminism, Difference Feminism (including Ecofeminism), Postmodern Feminism-and the two dominant mainstream conventional international relations (IR) theories-Realism and Liberalism. Goldstein uses these theories to generate a set of twenty "testable" hypotheses about the relationship between gender and war. Notably absent from this inventory are