J. Ann Tickner's Gendering World Politics revisits—in the best sense of the term—many of the same themes she explored in her pathbreaking 1992 book, Gender in International Relations. The current volume comes almost a decade after that first book appeared—a decade during which both the field of international relations and the subfield of feminist IR have seen dramatic change and, especially in the case of the latter, exponential growth. Gendering World Politics brings us up to date on the current state of debates within IR and provides a thoroughgoing and sophisticated introduction to what is now a very sizable feminist IR literature. Perhaps the most important contribution of this book, however, is that it allows Tickner to move forward an agenda she has been exploring for a number of years now, to encourage “conversations” between mainstream and feminist IR, and, in particular, to ask why authentic conversations, despite a decade of both turmoil and growth, have not been more forthcoming. As she writes in the Preface, “I have spent much of this time trying to understand why the intellectual gulf between different IR approaches is so wide and why conversations between proponents of these various approaches can be so difficult” (p. x).
