4. George Kennan‘s (1946) Long Telegram
•The Soviet’s exert “insistent, unceasing pressure for penetration
and command…who are used to dominate national associations
including women’s organizations.”
•“Kremlin’s erotic view of world affairs is traditional and
instinctive…”
•The US should resist “intimate collaboration” with the Soviets.
5. Cohn‘s (1987) Analysis of Defense Industry
Discourse
•„Erector launchers, thrust-to-weight ratios, soft lay-downs, deep penetration,
and comparative advantage of protracted versus spasm attacks...“
•„Orgasmic whumps...“
•„Nuclear virgins“
•Nuclear silos are „Christmas tree farms“ and „cookie cutters“
6. Research Questions
1.Do gendered metaphors appear in the post-Cold War American
foreign policy discourse?
2.If so, what are these metaphors and what function do they serve?
3.Is there a discernible shift in the way gender shapes the discourse
between the Cold War and post-Cold war period?
7. Hypotheses
1.The end of the Cold War produces a marked decrease in the frequency and
veracity with which gendered metaphors are used to conceptualize American
FP.
2.Feminism will produce a sense of „gender awareness“ among foreign
policy-makers and therefore gendered metaphors will decrease.
3.While gendered metaphors typical of the Cold War rhetoric will decrease,
gendered metaphors will continue to play a role in FP discourse, but in
subtler ways.
8. Theoretical Contributions
1. Introduce feminist perspective to CMT.
2. Demonstrates how gender retains its symbolic salience in social and
political life despite feminist intervention.
9. Methodological Contributions
1. Conceptual Metaphor Analysis (CMA), with a critical and feminist bent.
1. Use this method to analyze Presidential foreign policy and State of the
Union Addresses from the Carter to the Obama administrations.
10. Central Empirical Findings
1. Gendered metaphors DO NOT decrease after the end
of the Cold War.
1. Gender continues to inform the logic of the addresses
in a surprising and consistent way:
Women and women‘s rights used as metaphors for
democracy and/or successful policy BOTH in the context
of foreign policy AND domestic policy.
11. My Adaptation of Harding (1986)
Harding, Sandra. 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.
12. Definition of (Gendered) Metaphor
According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980):
“understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another”
According to Sandra Harding (1986):
“cultures assign a gender to such nonhuman entities as hurricanes and
mountains, ships, and nations.”
Thus:
“understanding and experiencing an ungendered concept in terms of a
gendered concept”
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Kindle ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
(Amazon.com); Harding, Sandra. 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.
13. Conceptual Metaphor Theory
Metaphors are essential to our cognitive system.
We think metaphorically by comparing abstract concepts to more
concrete experiences.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Kindle ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
(Amazon.com).
14. Conceptual Metaphor Theory
Metaphors have a SOURCE and a TARGET.
The source provides metaphorical “material” that is then applied to the
target.
The SOURCE of a gendered metaphor therefore, is the gendered concept,
and the TARGET is the ungendered concept.
Example: Nuclear Virgin (Source: Virginity; Target; Non-Nuclear States)
16. Other Theoretical Payoffs for IR and Feminism
Feminist Theory can be thought of as Conceptual Metaphors:
• He as Person (generic masculine)
• Use this a baseline to measure the “gender-awareness” of a
particular discourse
• State as (Wo)Man
• Nation as Family
• State as Hero
• State as Rapist
24. Conclusion
“As we have for over 60 years, America takes these actions
because our destiny is connected to those beyond our
shores….That’s why we stand with the girl who yearns to go to
school in Afghanistan, why we support human rights of the women
marching through the streets of Iran…Abroad, America’s greatest
source of strength has always been our ideals. The same is true at
home.”
-Obama 2010 State of the Union
The timing of this presentation is quite appropriate because just today I assigned my students a reading on Women and Foreign Policy in the pages of Foreign Policy magazine. The basic argument may actually be a familiar one to some of you: that women’s rights must be a cornerstone of American foreign policy, because doing so promotes both economic growth and national security. In fact, this article used a particularly powerful metaphor to discuss the premise: that women’s rights must be “weapon” in America’s foreign policy arsenal. I found this metaphor to be quite interesting since the majority of the article was discussing “soft” power and diplomacy. But the article is yet another example of my research interests and the topic of my dissertation: the use of gender and women by American foreign policy elites to discuss and legitimize foreign policy, particularly in the form of gendered metaphors. I became interested in this topic because one of the major findings of feminist IR scholars is that gender is a powerful cognitive frame that frames foreign policy discourse. Most of this work has focused on the rhetoric of American policy makers during the Cold War.
A lot of scholarship in feminist IR has focused on the metaphors and other imagery in George Kennan’s communications, especially the so-called Long Telegram. Many feminists have argued that his portrayal of the Soviet Union is that of either a sexy playboy or a sexual predator bent on violating Europe. Kennan was the Ambassador to the Soviet Union and the so-called father of the policy of containment, which informed the US Cold war foreign policy for much of the period until détente and the Carter administration.
Similarly, Carol Cohn’s study of defense industry rhetoric in the early 80’s demonstrates rampant use of gendered and sexualized metaphors which she found to partly inform nuclear strategy at that time. These are some of the more interesting examples. Importantly, she shows that the arms race isn’t really an issue of so-called penis-envy but more about making an abstract scenario such as nuclear war more palatable and even “natural” by comparing it to sex and domestic life. These studies seemed to beg the question of whether gendered metaphors are a “normal” feature of American political discourse, or whether it is somehow unique to the Cold War. Which leads me to my research question:
Subsequently, I took on a rather risky project because I expected to find little to no gendered metaphors in the post-Cold War discourse.
In order to answer the research question and test my hypotheses, I first develop a theory which builds on feminist scholarship and metaphor theory. My main theoretical contribution is a feminist reformulation of Lakoff and Johnson’s well-known theory of metaphor, or what is called Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). I aruge that feminism is particularly adept at recognizing and analyzing metaphor. Therefore, to further the goal of uncovering metaphor in foreign policy rhetoric, I combine insights from both feminist theory and CMT. Despite having much in common, which I will also demonstrate, to my knowledge these two theories have never been systematically combined. Therefore, my first contribution is to introduce a feminist perspective to CMT.
Bringing a feminist perspective to CMT demonstrates convincingly how exactly gender operates as a powerful symbol in social and political life, despite feminist intervention. I show that gender retains its symbolic power because it is not only a metapor, but a CONCEPTUAL metaphor, not only a conceptual metaphor, but a particular type of conceptual metaphor…a noble synecdoche.
I do this by starting with one of the most simple yet powerful insights of feminist theory…with the generic masculine (the use of “he” for “people.”) I show that this isn’t just a grammatical feature of the English language, but a cognitive frame we use to make sense of the world. Importantly, it is particularly powerful as a synecdoche because it creates a part-for-whole relationship, as well as an ideal type. Thus, men and masculinity become the ideal type for the human experience.
Finally, in general, I reintroduce synecdoche back to metaphor theory, where in its most recent iterations synecdoche is largely ignored.
By infusing feminst and metaphor theory, I then go on to develop a method that builds on the insights and theoretical contributions of both traditions. I build on the technique developed by Charteris-Black, which he calls Conceptual Metaphor Analysis, but I tweak his technique a bit to account for feminism, which demands that we pay attention to the way in which power is substantiated in language. CMA gives us a window into the structure of a discourse and those ideas and themes that dirve it primarily, while also giving us some useful quantitative measurements.
I believe I may have also developed a potentially useful measurement, which I will explain in more detail later, that demonstrates the efficacy of a given discourse.
I then use this method to analyze Presidential foreign policy and State of the Union addresses from the Carter administration to the Obama administration.
So my main empirical finding is that Presidents, going as far back as the Reagan administration, consistently use women and women’s rights and progress as a way to demonstrate either desirable policy or successful policy. Thus, presidents o-opt feminist rhetoric to legitimize their preferred policies. To be more specific, I show that women’s rights are used a symbol of democracy in both the context of domestic AND foreign policies. Thus, women become the conceptual link between America’s vision of itself (or the vision President’s wish to portray) and the vision it wishes to create in the world.
To be more specific, I show that women’s rights becomes a benchmark by which a country’s level of democracy is measured by Presidents in their speeches, thus allowing the US to demarcate the world into the “us” (democracies that respect women’s rights) and “them” (those non-democracies that don’t respect women’s rights). This utilization of “feminist” rhetoric has been widely recognized and criticized by feminists as it relates to the the Bush Junior administration, but I show that this is actually a much wider and deeper pattern throughout most of the post-Cold War administrations.
I begin my theoretical framework by looking at Sandra Harding’s very influential and oft-cited tri-partite definition of gender. She shows that gender is actually a “system” involving three levels: the symbolic, the structural and the individual. She actually uses the term “gendered metaphor” and even suggests that that these metaphrs are that which gives the other two levels their content:
…gendered social life is produced through three distinct processes: it is the result of assigning dualistic gender metaphors to various perceived dichotomies that rarely have anything to do with sex differences; it is the consequence of appealing to these gender dualisms to organize social activity, of dividing necessary social activities between groups of humans; it is a form of socially constructed individual identity only imperfectly correlated with either the “reality” or the perception of sex differences.”
Therefore, it seems to me that she is suggesting that if we can get our minds around the phenomenon that is metaphor, we might be able to understand gender in all of its manifestations. She goes on to ask, “How can metaphors of gender politics continue to shape the cognitive form and content of scientific theories and practices even when they are no longer overtly expressed?” (Harding 1986:24). I believe a theory of metaphor can answer that question. So while
Furthermore, although feminist theory and metaphor theory have not substantively engaged with one another, they have a common starting point: the importance of sumbolism and language in constructing our social and political worlds. They essentially agree on the definition of metaphor and thereby, gendered metaphor. Harding actually goes further in stating that gender dfferences operates a symbol system and that this system is the most ancient, most universal and most powerful origin of the way we make sense of the world around us. While CMT wouldn’t necessarily agree that GENDER is the most important symbol, it does agree that metaphor in general is a universal and deeply embedded cognitive tool.
So in order to unpack the symbolic level and show how that feeds into the other levels, it is necessary to show the basic tenants of CMT. The very basic idea of conceptual metaphor theory is that we THINK in metaphors, by comparing abstract concepts to more concrete experiences. Therefore, thought and speech arei mpossible without metaphor. Thus, metaphors aren’t just poetic devices meant to vividly illustrate something, but rather are part of how our brains operate. Many of the metaphors CMT discuss may appear on the surface not to be metaphors at all because they are such commonplace sayings and thoughts.
To better demonstrate how meaning is created using metaphors, I defer back to CMT where metaphors are dissected and shown to have a SOURCE and a TARGET. The source provides the “material” that then constitutes the target. In a gendered metaphor therefore, the SOURCE is the gendered part of the TARGET is the ungendered concept. So again, I will use Cohn’s example of the nuclear virgin. The source would be virginity and the target would be non-nuclear states.
Thus, CMT puts metaphors into the following formulation: TARGET as SOURCE. Non-nuclear states AS Virgins. States AS people.
The way we can understand how a metaphor works from the CMT and/or interactionist persepctive is through the notion of associated commonplaces. Acs as I will call them are thos eproperties culturally held to be true about the source, which are then held to be true about the target domain. This new understanding of the target arises out of the interaction between the source and the target.
The notion of Acs are important when considering how gender operates in a metaphorical construction. Not only do we identify a gendered metaphor when we see that gender is part of the SOURCE domain, but we further see HOW exactly gender constitutes the target by considering all the possible ACs. Here, the possible ACs that constitute the target might be naïvety, purity, innocence, temptation. You may also notice that other characteristics held to be true of the SOURCE, such as lack of sexual experience, is probably NOT transferred to the state.
Although feminist linguistics have done many studies on the generic masculine, very few actually identify it as a metaphor. But indeed, according to our defintion, it is both a metaphor and a gendered metaphor. Furthremore, if it is a conceptual metaphor, that indicates that it is a deeply ingrained cognitive frame that we use to make sense of the world. Men and masculinity, therefore, becomes the unmarked, ungendered, generic human, where as women become the marked, gendered special.
I argue that even though it has become unfashionable to use the generic masculine in texts, as a conceptual metaphor it is still largely informing our conceptualization of the world. In fact, doing so adds depth and precision to a number of feminist arguments:
1. Scientific research that only studies men and then extrapolates the findings to all people.
2. Feminist IR studies that show that female leaders are caught in a double bind: as leaders they must act “masculine” in order to be seen as a leader of people, but being a woman this masculine performance is often not taken seriously.
3. It may also go some way in explaining why we send MEN to war (because they are dispensible and generic) where we tend to protect women as a special kind of human.
Another central metaphor that we take for granted is the idea of state personhood. We treat states as if they were feeling, acting human beings.
This is where my method begins…by looking at the various findings and insights of feminist IR and rewording them as conceptual metaphors, and then conducting a search of the data for how those metaphors are realized
I argue that CMA provides a good middle ground between CDA, which is purely quantiative and not easily replicated, and Content Analysis, which is mostly quantitative but usually fairly verifiable.
CMA is quantitative in that it counts metaphor and metaphor clusters and allows for statistical analysis on those counts.
CMA is qualitative in that requires interpretation and explanation with a sensitivity to power hierarchies.
The boxes on the left indicate steps on the data side of the analysis, while the right side indicates steps on the theory side. This analysis began with an unanswered question in the feminist IR literature, namely, whether gendered metaphors continue in usage after the Cold War. This then led me to consider what sort of data would be appropriate to answer this question. Going back to theory, one derives the prominent metaphors one is interested in investigating, and identifies the source domain of those metaphors. In the present work, I have identified from IR and feminist theory the following metaphors: STATE AS PERSON, STATE AS (WO)MAN, NATION AS FAMILY, POLITICS AS WAR, STATE AS FATHER-PROTECTOR, STATE AS RAPIST. Therefore, I can build keyword dictionaries based on the source domains of people, (wo)men, family, war, fathers, rape and specific women. One can then search the data for linguistic evidence of these metaphors to get a feel for whether your theory-driven metaphors are present. After this, a detailed reading of the data is conducted, where additional keywords are identified. We then end up having a large list of metaphors in the form of TARGET AS SOURCE, which can then be grouped based on similar sources, or targets, or other parameters crucial to answering one’s research question. Finally, we attempt to build a map to see how these metaphors work together, if at all, to produce the logic and structure of the discourse. These steps will be detailed below.
So this is just a chronology of generic masculine metaphors as they occur over the course of the corpus, which clearly shows an decreasing trend over time. If we are using the Generic Masculine as a baseline for measuring gender awareness of presidential speeches, as I suggested in the theoretical framework, this shows that indeed, presidents do seem to be getting more gender aware over time.
Some of you may be familiar with the feminist analysis of the Bush Junior policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which he specifically argued that America should invade both countries partly so that we could liberate women. I won’t go into much detail here, but this is a metaphor cluster I called Foreign Policy by Feminism, which includes the more specific metaphors such as WOMEN’s PROGRESS AS NATIONAL PROGRESS and WOMEN”S SUFFRAGE AS DEMOCRACY, RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AS WOMAN’S RIGHTS. As you can see, while feminists have dedicated a lot of talking about the BushW administration for this pattern, it is not exclusively a feature of his administration. And if we compare the rise of these sorts of “feminist” metaphors with the decrease in generic masculine metaphors, we can see that they correlate, which suggests that indeed presidential rhetoric is becoming more and more gender aware and perhaps even feminist as it tries to capture feminist themes of liberation and freedom.
But I also found that this is similar rhetorical strategy when used to communicate domestic policy. Women and their successes are used often to discuss the American dream or the general successes of the country. Therefore, WOMEN’s PROGRESS is again NATIONAL PROGRESS, but this time the nation we are referring to is America rather than another country. Not only are general women’s progress discussed as a symbol of overall national character, but specific women are often employed to do the symbolic heavy lifting as well. Struggling single mother is a very popular choice who is now an entrepreneur. Here you can see that with only two exceptions, women are used to communicate both domestic and foreign policy goals more than men.
So I’ll conclude by simply giving you a quote which I think demonstrate the trend and rhetorical framing I’m talking about. Thanks.
