Global Gender Politics: From Invisibility to Hyper-Visibility
Anne Sisson Runyan
Professor Emerita, School of Public and International Affairs, University of Cincinnati
This keynote addresses the past, present, and future of global gender politics inquiry derived largely from six editions of what is presently entitled Global Gender Politics, which I have authored or co-authored since 1993. Beginning life under the title of Global Gender Issues co-authored with V. Spike Peterson, it was among the first scholarly theorizations and surveys of and widely used texts for the study of feminist International Relations (IR). Over various permutations accompanied by some title changes (to Global Gender Issues in the New Millenium followed by Global Gender Politics). changes in authorship (Peterson and Runyan for the first three editions, Runyan and Peterson for the fourth, Runyan for the fifth, and now Runyan, Mhajne, Whetstone, and Yilmaz for the forthcoming sixth), and publisher changes (from Westview Press to Routledge), it has tracked advances in and setbacks to taking gender seriously in field of IR and world politics practices. In the process, it shifted from hypothesizing why gender as an analytic was so absent in IR theory and practice to critiquing how it has been taken up so problematically by state and intergovernmental institutions in the neoliberal era and now becoming a central target with the rise of (neo)authoritarian regimes and politics. This shift from the invisibility to the hyper-visibility of gender, understood though intersectional, transnational, and decolonial feminist lenses, in global politics will be the central theme of this address, which will also consider what the present moment of hyper-visible attacks on so-called “gender ideology” might mean for the future of global gender politics inquiry and practice.
Bio
Anne Sisson Runyan is Professor Emerita in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Cincinnati, where she also headed the Department of Women’s Studies and the Taft Research Center. She is a recognized eminent feminist international relations scholar and contributor to women’s international thought whose most recent co-edited and co-authored books include Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites and Resistances, Third Edition (with Marianne H. Marchand, Routledge 2025) and Global Gender Politics, Sixth Edition (Routledge, forthcoming). Her co-edited book, Feminist (Im)Mobilities in Fortress(ing) North America: Rights, Citizenships, and Identities in Transnational Perspective (Ashgate/Routledge 2013), arose from a faculty and student exchange program among institutions in Mexico, the US, and Canada she initiated and was supported by federal grants from the three countries. She has published most recently in such journals as the Fletcher World Forum of World Affairs (for its 50th anniversary issue), Latin American Policy (for a special issue critiquing Mexico’s “citizen security”), International Affairs, Human Rights Review, Review of International Studies, and the International Feminist Journal of Politics, for which she served as an associate and guest editor, continues on its editorial board, and leads the International Feminist Politics Association formed to support it. She has also held leadership roles in the International Studies Association, including as a Vice President, Chair of the Research Workshop Grants Committee, and among the founders and early leaders of its Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section, and in the American Association of University Professors, which gave her its national award for advancing the status of women in the professoriate and in faculty unions. In addition to several forthcoming and commissioned book chapters focused on gender in world politics and global economic governance as well as involving personal narratives about her feminist IR inquiry and research, her current book project focuses on Indigenous women and the nuclear fuel chain where gendered settler and nuclear colonialism intersect, research for which was supported by a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair position at York University in Canada and a Taft Research Center Fellowship at the University of Cincinnati. This research has been bolstered by her participation in the international “femnukes” collective of scholars engaging in feminist critiques of global nuclear politics and which, among other things including a special issue on this topic in International Affairs to which she contributed, produced an open access online course on “Decolonizing Nuclear Studies” that resides on the Carnegie- and Ploughshares-supported Highly NRiched website and for which she led the creation of the environmental (or “More Than Human World”) politics module. She continues to serve on thesis and dissertation committees and co-created an ongoing research group with faculty and doctoral students at the University of Cincinnati, most of whom teach for or have pursued the Political Science doctoral concentration in Feminist Comparative and International Politics she initiated, on “Collectively Reimagining Global Politics” that has hosted symposia, engaged in joint reading and writing projects, and continues to host a blog site open to contributors elsewhere.
