Email to my IPE lecturer on how to teach feminist theory

So I feel like I'm getting in the habit of emailing my lecturers to complain about stuff way too much. My mum thinks I should be spending the time more usefully doing assignments. Maybe. But this one at least has given me context for how I want to do my next assignment, so its useful in that sense.

This is a response to the lecture I talked about at the start of my previous post (oops, by start I mean beginning in the 9th paragraph :P) when my IPE (international political economy - think international relations smooshed with economics) lecturer managed to get through an entire lecture on feminism without mentioning patriarchy and barely using female authors. 

I chatted to him about it afterwards, but I approached it more in the context of me wanting to find female authors, rather than critiquing his lecture. But it continued to bother me, so when he emailed me with a bunch of suggested readings (which was very nice of him, and he is a lovely guy) I really felt the need to respond with my thoughts.

Here's what I said:

Thanks for the suggestions, I appreciate you following up on this.

I've decided not to do that question. Instead, I'm going to do the question on the global financial crisis from an eco-feminist perspective. I think that while it is important to look at how our current system affects women, an equally important aspect of feminist analysis is looking at the way that the system as a whole is fundamentally flawed - not just in terms of how it negatively impacts women, but also its impacts on the entire planet. I plan to argue that feminist/ecological/radical/non-orthodox approaches have explained the GFC better than any of the mainstream analysis, but have not had a big enough impact on "the global politics of finance".

I have also been thinking about the lecture the other day, and realised I didn't articulate myself very well. I guess the point that I wanted to make (but didn't,really) was not so much that I was looking for feminist authors to use myself (although this is appreciated), but that I think it would have been really great if more female perspectives were used in the lecture. I think that the whole discipline of economics is biased in favour of men, and it is alarming that female perspectives are barely even used in the one lecture on feminism (let alone the rest of the course!!). What example does it set for young women if almost all the theorists we look at, even the experts on gender inequality, are men? To be clear, I think men engaging in feminism is absolutely fantastic. It is only problematic when this is done at the expense of women.

I was also interested that, although you gave a bunch of possible explanations for the gender wage gap, the concept of patriarchy was not mentioned (that I noticed). I think that patriarchy is probably the most fundamental element of any feminist analysis. Women are not paid less simply due to a bunch of related reasons that were mentioned, but because of the overarching social and economic system skewed in favour of men - patriarchy. We can't look at these factors as discrete issues and try to pinpoint "causes" for the wage gap without looking at this overarching system as an explanation.

Anyway those were just some of my thoughts in response to the lecture. This is not about your teaching in particular, but rather my frustration at the way that gender inequality continues to be entrenched in an academic setting, despite the gains that feminism has made. In fact, alarmingly, I think in many respects we are going backwards. I am aware that there used to be a paper on feminist economics, and now there isn't. In light of this, it is even more important to be include feminist critiques in every paper as much as possible. This is what I would like to see more of.

Cheers