This chapter examines several feminist approaches to the study and practice of international relations. It highlights the similarities between these approaches, but also the differences. It does this first by tracing the interventions made by feminists into international relations and the creation of a distinctly feminist IR agenda. Second, it uses the ‘gender lens’ to demonstrate and analyse how experiences and understandings in international relations can be ‘gendered’. Finally, it explains and examines the critiques made by the different feminist approaches to international relations.

Twelfth Night engages audiences in exploring the failure of hospitality from the positions of shipwrecked strangers seeking refuge in Illyria. While the law polices against strangers presumed hostile and households remain oblivious to the plight of the refuge seekers, household hospitality, grounded in patriarchal property relations, remains open to mercenary perversions from within. With Viola and Sebastian assuming nonthreatening roles as domestic servant and tourist, the play stages comedy’s marriage drive as the means by which society assimilates strangers deemed desirable and excludes individuals deemed undesirable. This repurposing of plot device effectively probes the will’s affective disposition to others in prompting a range of action from hospitable to hostile. The process reveals inhospitality not just to strangers without but also to members within the household; it also renders imaginable instances of mutual and even unconditional hospitality. In posing the problem of hospitality, Twelfth Night speaks to the global migrations—climate, economic, political—we confront in our communities today. Viola stands for the migrant here, her wit and resourcefulness countering stereotypes that normalize fear and inaction, even as her stalled nuptial indicates the need for systemic social inclusions based on mutual hospitality, fueled at heart by a transformation of the will.

Women have paid a historically high price under the patriarchal Irish Catholic church. The wrongs of the church do not detract, however, from the rich vein of poems written by Irish women informed by Catholic spirituality. Traditionally, women have been scapegoats for the fallout from patriarchal theocracy, and any resistance has begun with acts of bodily reclamation. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill reaches into Celtic tradition for paradigms of female empowerment that overturn more recent misogynistic palimpsests, and Medbh McGuckian filters an anti-colonial poetics through an engagement with her radical and ecstatic strain of Catholic spirituality, re-envisioning the leaders of the 1798 rebellion as ‘feminine Christs’. Earlier women poets engaging with religious material have fallen into neglect – Katharine Tynan’s Catholicism is often cited in evidence against her – and large bodies of work now pass unnoticed, such as the heavily female contributions to the Jesuit-edited The Irish Monthly. Restoring their work to visibility, and that of more recent writers such as Eithne Strong and Anne Le Marquand Hartigan, helps us read the work of Ní Dhomhnaill and McGuckian in a more informed and spiritually literate context.

This chapter highlights the crucial function of gender at its intersection with race in discourse about slavery and abolition. It takes two case studies of ‘white slavery’, which received substantial press coverage: the enslavement of Circassian women as concubines in the Ottoman Empire and ‘the white slavery panic’ about sex trafficking in the US.