‘Mirror methods’, literary fiction, and the study of gendered tensions in diplomacy

Studying the operation of gender in diplomatic settings is a contentious task given the highly curated and generally performative nature of diplomatic practice. Recent scholarship tells us that significant gendered tensions exist in the diplomatic field, but points out methodological issues of getting at this personalised and emotionally loaded concept (e.g. Towns 2020). In this paper, I propose an alternative approach to studying gender in diplomacy through the installation of a methodological ‘mirror’ into the world of literary fiction. Through following ‘Angelica’ and an ‘Unnamed Interpreter’ – respectively the main female characters in David Lodge’s 1984 academic romance Small World and Katie Kitamura’s 2021 novel about the International Criminal Court Intimacies – I lay out how fictitious – yet not unreal! – narratives can illuminate (some of) the gendered tensions in both the substance and study of contemporary diplomacy. To ground this discussion empirically, I relate their experiences to my own experiences from the diplomatic scene in Brussels.