Two Steps Forward, One Step Back?

This article offers a narrative of the author’s efforts to integrate gendered approaches more fully into an introductory course in international politics. It describes the author’s first tentative step to introduce gendered analysis into the syllabus at the end of the Cold War. Simply adding feminist approaches to a traditional format, however, proved too disruptive and disjointed, so the author developed a new, constructivist format that featured gender, along with sovereignty, capitalism, and national identity, as one of the key constitutive structures of contemporary world politics. After September 11, however, changes in the global agenda, as well as changes in the author’s priorities, led to revisions in this format that again left gendered approaches somewhat disconnected from other parts of the course. The article ends with ideas on how to reformulate the course to again bring gender back as an integral part of the syllabus as a whole