The Terministic Filter of Security: Realism, Feminism and International Relations Theory Page: 18

                                
science based around determinacy which may never be achieved at best, or may be a
dangerous gamble at worst.
This study will also investigate the question of meaning inherent in terministic
screens. Does feminist inquiry challenge contemporary vocabularies in IR? If so, does
that inquiry focus around a particular term which surmises the question of debate? And
then, in what way(s) can we escape this terministic trap? Beer and Hariman speak
directly to this question, arguing that it is most important to expand existing languages of
action in order to formulate new and better solutions to complex international problems
(356). The primacy of language, they suggest, allows us more and more control over the
ways in which truth is disseminated and thus changes the social and political climate
increasing the possibilities for resistance. This study will outline how feminist
interpretations of security destabilize the conceptual center of IR theory and create new
vocabularies for describing emergent phenomena.
This study will analyze the new metaphoric connections to security provided by
feminist analyses and explain how such agents are indeed counterpublics for the purposes
of unlocking the assumptions underlying this type of academic public sphere. What sorts
of new understandings of the term are developing as a result of changing beliefs about
what constitutes a secure world? How does the term security weave together the yarns of
IR into a blanket of resistance and dominance? This study will outline the omnipresence
of social knowledge in the creation and perpetuation of existing security metaphors and
the capillary way power operates among people as a process rather than an independent
social force, manipulable by a skilled elite at the expense of the feeble minded lumpen.

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