True, Jacqui. "Feminism and Gender Studies in International Relations Theory". In The International Studies Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Denemark and Renée Marlin-Bennett. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

True, Jacqui. "Feminism and Gender Studies in International Relations Theory". In The International Studies Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Denemark and Renée Marlin-Bennett. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

• Feminist IR theorists claim that all forms of knowledge, including IR theory, reflect masculine domination and exclude concepts and ideas deemed feminine. It seeks to critique current IR practice on this basis by looking at how mainstream IR perceptions do not account for the experiences of marginalized people, especially women.
• Feminist IR theory assumes that all theories support and justify a political worldview, and, while feminist theory is not an exception, it tries to be aware of the positions it supports. Feminist IR theory is designed to support the political claims of marginalized groups by being inclusive and focusing on power disparities.
• Feminist theory itself emerged during the 1960s and 1970s alongside second-wave activist movements. Feminist IR theory began to emerge in the late 1980s as part of a broader scholarly movement rejecting positivist assumptions in IR, marked by the foundation of the academic journal 'Millennium', in a small number of pieces that criticized the contemporary focus on competition, anarchy, and conflict as being overly masculine.
• Feminist scholarship in the 1980s attacked the positivist and state-centric basis of IR theory, claiming that the assumption of rational self-interested actors was based on masculine norms and ignored feminine perspectives.
• New theory also claimed that women and other marginalized perspectives and experiences were ignored by IR theory, with state-centric concepts not looking specifically at women.
• During the 1990s, the international feminist movement made gains in the UN, managing to get the institution to adopt concepts of gender-based violence and violence against women. The EU and other international organizations also started to include gender concerns in their work.
• The unexpected end of the Cold War opened positivist assumptions in IR theory up to heavy criticism. This turn away from the realist and liberal schools of IR theory helped legitimize feminist IR theory because it now had broader support for its epistemological and ontological arguments.
• Feminist IR theory since the 1990s has generally followed the same trends in interest as other schools of IR theory. During the 1990s, focus was largely on globalization and political economy, whereas focus has decisively shifted towards security and terrorism since the 9/11 attacks.
• There is a major rift within feminist IR theory over epistemology between the standpoint feminism, which is influenced by Marxism and believes that social inequalities have their source in material conditions, and postmodern feminism, which does not believe that an objective stance is possible due to the fact that different women experience different kinds of oppression and therefore generalizations about oppression are not possible.
• Feminist IR theorists disagree about the degree to which gender is important in IR theory. They also disagree on whether gender relations are the result of material conditions or if they develop independent of material factors, and what role human agency plays in the construction of gender relations. 
• The most popular perspective is that gender categorization is pervasive in politics and IR and done for political purposes by actors. They see masculine identities as being used to justify domination and control, and almost always prioritized over feminine identities.
• Neofeminist IR theory adopts positivist assumptions of IR and treats gender as an objective and set variable in this system. They use gender relations in domestic societies and the international system as a variable to explain other elements of IR.
• Some feminists look at the idea of hegemonic masculinity or femininity, examining how multiple different types of masculine and feminine stereotypes can coexist, but with being valued more than others in ways that affect politics. These different masculinities and femininities also intersect with race, class, and other social factors.
• Feminist theories cannot agree on what to do about the conclusions of their research. Some advocate for new institutions that include more women and elevate feminine perspectives and ideas, but others argue that the plurality of gender categories implies simply a society that does a better job respecting individual differences. The degree to which these solutions require or mandate state intervention is also disputed.
• Some of the major gulfs between feminist IR theory and other schools of thought are about perceptions of gender. Other IR perspectives treat gender categories as objective and natural variables that do not require transformation, whereas feminist IR theory usually sees gender as constructed and believes that gender dynamics can and should be changed.
• Feminists agree on most of these points with critical IR theorists, since both believe that societal relations are constructed and subject to change. The main difference is that, while recognizing the unique conditions of women and men, critical scholars believe that overall hegemonic structures are gender-neutral, whereas feminists believe that both local societal conditions and global hegemonic trends are gendered.