Engendering World Politics and Caribbean Studies

Abstract

Although the study of gender in the Western Hemisphere and world politics is still a new field, academics are increasingly raising the question: "Where are the women?" In the beginning, this vacuum was filled simply by adding women to the analysis. While it was argued that the study of politics, economics, and history should also include "herstory," this occurred without making any significant changes, either methodological or epistemological, in the analyses. In the last decade, however, feminist theorists have developed new, more probing questions and challenges. Theory from a feminist standpoint begins with the lived experiences of women to discover women's ways of knowing, which the social sciences have often denigrated as intuitive and emotional. Newworld views validated by this approach undermine, and clash with, the dominant methods employed by the social sciences, which seek to emulate the hard sciences.