Teaching Gender and International Relations

This article describes the author’s experience integrating gender as a topic in various international relations courses. It explains the author’s initial reasons for approaching gender issues, describes how gender is used to expand the experience of students in class, and considers some of the problems the author has faced. It concludes that gender is a useful way of approaching some ethical issues in world politics as well as providing a good critique of more common theories, but that it should be presented as a coherent theory and not just a side-issue if students are to take it as seriously as they do realism, liberalism, and the like.