Your first paper is an analytical, argumentative essay (5-6 pp.) in which you consider how representations of an international issue in the print media are constructed to ignore, downplay, or dismiss gender.In “Gender Makes the World Go Round,” Cynthia Enloe asserts that “if we employ only the conventional, ungendered compass to chart international politics, we are likely to end up mapping a landscape peopled only by men, mostly elite men” (1).By focusing on men and ignoring women, conventional understandings of gender politics “hide the workings of both femininity and masculinity”; gender as a category becomes invisible (11).More perniciously, “how the conduct of international politics has depended on men’s control of women has been left unexamined” (4).Enloe encourages us to open up an analysis of international politics to include images of women since “if we listened to women more carefully…and if we made concepts such as ‘wife,’ ‘mother,’ ‘sexy broad’ central to our investigations, we might find that…international politics generally look different” (11).
 

For this assignment, I want you to think about how international politics might “look different” if one did place women at the center of the analysis.How would representations of political events and issues change?What sorts of questions would become central to an understanding of politics?Would the media cover world politics any differently?What would be the nature of these differences?
 

To do this assignment, first select an international event that has received media coverage in the past year.To find such an event, you may want to browse through newspapers or magazines (or the web sites of the same).I’d encourage you to choose an issue or topic that interests you; for instance, if your major is economics, perhaps select something having to do with the World Bank.Although your choice of topic is open, you should pick a current event that doesn’t immediately seem to be concerned with gender.That is, rather than examining female genital mutilation or the Taliban, both of which have to do with the treatment of women, choose a topic that seems “gender neutral” since the purpose of this exercise is for you to think about what in the coverage of this issue, topic, or event would change if women and gender were placed at the center of the analysis.
 

After you have selected a topic, find at least three articles about the topic in reputable news magazines or newspapers (The Economist and The New York Times spring to mind as reputable; USA Today does not).Doing a search on ProQuest or Lexis-Nexis should yield results quite quickly, as would a search of the Times’ 365-day archive (www.nytimes.com).Although it may be beginning to sound like it, this actually isn’t a research project.What you need to do, though, is educate yourself about a topic by reaching several articles, and then use these articles to critique and question the ways in which the media deal with gender in their coverage of global politics.In other words, you will be using the articles you find as the basis of your critique; if an article considers women’s experiences, then explain how the author incorporates gender in his or her coverage and analysis; if (as I suspect) an article does not deal with women or gender, explain how and why such coverage is incomplete.You are thus analyzing the articles themselves and thinking about how they succeed and fail, what they include and leave out.In addition, you are imagining an alternative way of writing an article about the topic:what questions would need to be answered so that women would become central and so that coverage of the topic would be complete?
 

Papers should be typed, double-spaced, and stapled.Use a 1-inch margin, number your pages, and remember to give your paper a title (no title page is necessary, however).Be sure to spell-check and proofread your paper before handing it in.Papers are due in class on Sept. 20.We’ll be having an in-class peer review on that day, and final (revised) versions of the paper are due on Sept. 25.