Feminist International Relations in Australia

I am convinced at every turn that the international is personal, and the personal is international too . 1Feminist International Relations (IR) scholarship has a small, but significant, presence in the Australian IR discipline. This presence, now over two decades old, has made important contributions to the re‐thinking of the agenda, methodology and ambitions of Australian IR. This article offers a guide to tracing the impact of feminist scholarship in the Australian IR discipline. It begins with an overview of feminist IR generally, and then moves to identify the work of Australian scholars in this field. It demonstrates the pioneering breadth and scope of this work and pays tribute to the scholars who broke down the traditional barriers of the discipline to reveal the identities, issues, and ways of thinking about world politics that had been previously unexplored. It doing so, it analyses feminist impact on the core of the discipline as well as its work on expanding the boundaries of IR. It will argue that, in Australia, feminist IR scholarship is often (though not exclusively) located within the pockets of scholarship committed to exploring critical approaches. However, this article also recognises that the discipline of International Relations in Australia has not always been welcoming of feminist insights and contributions. With this in mind, this article turns to the challenges and debates that face feminist IR both within the discipline and without, with a focus particularly on the dialogue between “critical feminism” and “mainstream International Relations”.