Gender and Political Analysis 9781350363571, 9780230214194

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To feminist friendships

Previous Publications JOHANNA KANTOLA AND EMANUELA LOMBARDO Gender and the Economic Crisis in Europe: Politics, Institutions and Intersectionality (Palgrave 2017, editors) JOHANNA KANTOLA The Oxford Handbook on Gender and Politics (Oxford University Press 2013, co-edited with Georgina Waylen, Karen Celis and Laurel Weldon) Gender and the European Union (Palgrave 2010) Changing State Feminism (Palgrave 2007, co-edited with Joyce Outshoorn) Feminists Theorize the State (Palgrave 2006)   EMANUELA LOMBARDO Stopping Rape (Policy 2015, co-authored with Sylvia Walby et al.) The Symbolic Representation of Gender (Ashgate 2014, co-authored with Petra Meier) The Europeanization of Gender Equality Policies (Palgrave 2012, coedited with Maxime Forest) The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality (Routledge 2009, co-edited with Petra Meier and Mieke Verloo) Constitutional Politics in the European Union (Palgrave 2007, coauthored with Dario Castiglione et al.)

List of Figures and Tables

Figure 1.1 Political analysis as the link between theory and praxis

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Tables 2.1 Five approaches for doing feminist political analysis  9.1 Assessment of the five approaches for doing feminist political analysis 9.2 Feminist approaches to political analysis: the link between theory and praxis

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22 190 199

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of conversations between two feminist academics, one from the north and the other from the south of Europe, on the importance of mainstreaming gender into political analysis, on what such political analysis might look like, and what it contributes to our knowledge of politics. Palgrave Macmillan’s series Political Analysis gave us the chance to turn these ideas into a book, the co-writing of which was a fun learning process. This book project gifted us with travels between Finland and Spain, which placed our talks in snowy and sunny settings, in front of hot chocolates at the Café Engel or Thursday croissants in the house where the suffragist Clara Campoamor was born in Madrid. Our feminist friendship goes back to the beginning of the 2000s when we started attending European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) conferences in different parts of Europe. This was a time when it was still possible to read from an ECPR conference brochure for the Standing Group on EU Politics in Bolonia that the city is famous for its ‘three Ts’: ‘tortellini, towers, and tits’. As humour is important to any feminist project, we had fun planning an equivalent brochure for a conference in Palermo: ‘famous for pizza, pasta and… (a third masculine “P”!)’. Times have changed somewhat in this respect, mostly thanks to the work of gender and politics scholars within political science professional associations and universities. With the ECPR Standing Group on Gender and Politics and the ECPR Conferences on Politics and Gender (ECPG) attracting more and more participants every time, such a sexist welcoming would hopefully be unthinkable in a conference programme. Yet gender and politics scholars continue to struggle for a more equal discipline – as evidenced by very recent and continuing controversies around all-male and all-white panels in politics and international relations conferences. To such struggles, and the feminist friendships underpinning them, this book is dedicated. Working on this monograph allowed us to read and discuss ideas on gender and political analysis with many knowledgeable academics whom we wish to sincerely thank. Two anonymous reviewers of the book manuscript provided us with excellent comments and encouragement that greatly helped us to improve the contents – many thanks! Gender and politics

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xii Acknowledgements Gender and Political Analysis colleagues in Helsinki and Madrid gave us feedback on first ideas and drafts. In particular, we wish to thank María Bustelo and MariaCaterina La Barbera, as well as the researchers participating in the Gender and Politics PhD seminar at the Department of Political Science and Administration 2 at Madrid Complutense University, and the SKY PhD seminar in Helsinki. We are thankful to the convenors of the ECPR Standing Group on Gender and Politics and organizers of the ECPG conference in Uppsala (11–13 June 2015), Isabelle Engeli, Elizabeth Evans and Liza Mügge, for providing us with excellent expert forums to discuss our work. We wish to thank the GEPP (Gender Equality Policy in Practice) research network convenors Isabelle Engeli, Joni Lovenduski and Amy Mazur for the stimulating workshops they have organized over the past few years, which have offered us chances to discuss theories and concepts on gender and political analysis with a wide range of experts. We are also grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers of Feminist Theory for their helpful constructive comments on a paper that articulates the ideas we develop more extensively in the book. Johanna would like to thank Heike Kahlert for inviting her as the Marie-Jahoda Visiting Professor in International Gender Studies to Ruhr-Universität Bochum in the summer term 2015, which gave her the chance to present the book chapters in different universities in the area. Johanna’s research was funded by the Academy of Finland five-year Academy Research Fellowship (decision no. 259640). Emanuela wishes to acknowledge the travel funding received from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad through the Evanpolge research project (Ref: FEM2012-33117), the European Commission QUING research project and Erasmus teaching mobility fund, and the University of Helsinki. We want to express our gratitude to colleagues with whom we have discussed the concepts and ideas we develop in this book throughout the years. In particular, we would like to thank Judith Squires for having been part of this project in its initial stages and for being so supportive for us to take it further. We would like to thank all our feminist colleagues and friends for making gender and politics such an exciting field and for inspiring us in our own thinking, in particular: Gabriele Abels, Carol Bacchi, Elin Bjärnegård, Rosie Campbell, Rosalind Cavaghan, Karen Celis, Sarah Childs, Rossella Ciccia, Drude Dahlerup, Jonathan Dean, Elena Del Giorgio, Marina Della Giusta, Lucía Echevarría, Ana Espirito Santo, Myra Marx Ferree, Lucy Ferguson, Maxime Forest, Lenita Freidenvall, Yvonne Galligan, Roberta Guerrina, Anne Maria Holli, Agnès Hubert, Meryl Kenny, Andrea Krizsan, Mona Lena Krook, Roman Kuhar, Sabine

Acknowledgements

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Lang, Eléonore Lépinard, Fiona Mackay, Petra Meier, Lut Mergaert, David Paternotte, Elin Peterson, Conny Roggeband, Lise Rolandsen Agustín, Malin Rönnblom, Maria Sangiuliano, Birgit Sauer, Birte Siim, Hege Skjeie, Maria Stratigaki, Ann Towns, Flavia Turatello, Sylvia Walby, Mieke Verloo, Anna van der Vleuten, Anouka van Eerdewijk, Ursula Vogel, Georgina Waylen, Laurel Weldon, Stefanie Wöhl, Alison Woodward, Viola Zentai and Kathrin Zippel. We would like to thank Alba Alonso, Tània Verge and Angelika von Wahl for their bibliographic suggestions too. At the University of Helsinki Gender Studies, Anna Elomäki, Marjaana Jauhola, Nina Järviö, Marjut Jyrkinen, Ville Kainulainen, Anu Koivunen, Venla Oikkonen, Johanna Oksala, Elina Penttinen, Tuija Pulkkinen, Jemima Repo and Milja Saari made up a thriving intellectual home from which to write the book. In Spain, inspiration for mainstreaming gender into political science came from the Gender and Politics Standing Group of the Spanish Political Science Association, especially Eva Alfama, Marta Cruells, Isabel Diz, Aranxta Elizondo, Julia Espinosa, Marta Lois, Ainhoa Novo, Sonia Ruiz, María Silvestre; and colleagues at the Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología and the Instituto de Investigaciones Feministas at Madrid Complutense University. We are grateful to Lisa Disch, Mary Hawkesworth, Heather MacRae, Leticia Ruiz and Elaine Weiner for offering us chances to rethink some of the issues we debate in the book by inviting us to collaborate in projects and publications. Emanuela is very grateful to Petra Meier and Mieke Verloo for the inspiration and joy that working with them for many years has gifted her with. We are thankful to the Palgrave Macmillan editorial team for their professional and kind support: Steven Kennedy, Stephen Wenham, Lloyd Langman, Tuur Driesser, Chloe Osborne, and Gogulanathan Bactavatchalane. We also received valuable support from our research assistants who helped us with the bibliography and index: Hanna Kauppinen and Elisabeth Wide in Helsinki and Mar López in Madrid. Finally, we wish to warmly thank our partners and families for being so encouraging during the period of writing this book, for emphasizing the fun part of the work, and for happily accompanying us in our Nordic and southern travels: Anni and Ella Kantola, Anders Vacklin and Eduardo Jáuregui, that we also thank for his editorial suggestions. Emanuela would also like to thank Adriana, Licia, Maria La Farina and Francesco Lombardo for their affection and life lessons. Helsinki and Madrid 31 August 2016

List of Abbreviations

APSA American Political Science Association CDU Christian Democratic Union of Germany CEDAW Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women EC European Commission ECtHR European Court of Human Rights ECPG European Conference on Politics and Gender ECPR European Consortium for Political Research EU European Union GEPP Gendering Equality Policy in Practice ILGA International Lesbian and Gay Association IPSA International Political Science Association IR international relations LGBTQ Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer MAGEEQ Mainstreaming Gender Equality in Europe MP(s) Member(s) of Parliament PS political science QUING Quality in Gender Equality Policies RNGS Research Network on Gender and the State SRW substantive representation of women UN United Nations VAW violence against women WID women in development WPR ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’

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Chapter 1 

Introduction

This book explores questions about feminist political analysis. What does it mean to do political analysis from a gender perspective? Why and how to do it? By political analysis – borrowing from Colin Hay (2002) – we mean the diversity of analytical strategies developed around ‘the political’. Since the political has to do with the ‘distribution, exercise, and consequences of power’, political analysis focuses on the analysis of ‘power relations’ (Hay 2002: 3). Power itself is a contested concept that is theorized and studied in a variety of ways with variety of methods (Lukes 2005). Thus, the conceptualization of the political is inextricably connected to distinct interpretations of power.   For those who conceive power as conflictual, ‘the political’ is a space of ‘antagonism’ and contestation ‘constitutive of human societies’ that ‘politics’ tries to organize through institutions and practices (Mouffe 2005: 9). Those, by contrast, who are inspired by a more consensual notion of power such as Hannah Arendt (1970: 52), for whom power arises ‘whenever people get together and act in concert’, see the political as a site of collective empowerment through public deliberation and coordinated action to achieve a common goal.   Feminist theorists often prefer a definition of power as the ‘interplay between domination and empowerment, between power and counterpower’ (Allen 1999: 18) and see the political as a space where unequal relations are continuously produced and transformed and where the public sphere is just as important as the private (Pateman 1983). For scholars taking a poststructuralist approach inspired by Michel Foucault (1978), power is an omnipresent relation that produces subjects through practices and discourses, and the political is the result of an ongoing process of discursive construction between social actors that define what is important and what is to be challenged (Onuf 1989; Bacchi 1999; Rönnblom 2009). This is just a brief account of the many different conceptualizations of the political that have been proposed. 

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Our aim in this book is to provide ways to navigate through these various definitions of the political and power from different feminist perspectives. The book will explore the contribution that gender approaches offer to the analysis of political phenomena and concepts. Since any political science perspective offers only a partial and partisan analysis of political and social reality, we will also discuss some of the limitations of each approach for doing political analysis. Our intention is to explore questions of feminist political analysis with a ­self-conscious and reflexive openness, which involves not only making explicit our own analytical and contextual origins but also recognizing the variety of gender and politics approaches as something valuable in itself.   The field of politics has created its own canons and hierarchies, which do not always make it easy for different approaches to enter the mainstream of political science and be legitimately recognized and adopted despite their analytical purchase. In other words, dominant approaches in political science today still tend to consider gender and politics a marginal field of political science, and influence the type of feminist approaches that are more accepted within the mainstream of the discipline. Let’s take an example from what is, in our view, a text on political analysis that is more open to analytical pluralism. In his mapping of the mainstream of political science, Colin Hay (2002: 7–29) argues that rational choice theory, behaviouralism and new institutionalism are considered the main approaches in mainstream political science. Hay’s textbook includes a broad definition of the political that covers both public and private issues and welcomes the emergence of alternative analytical approaches to political analysis.   Considering this openness to analytical pluralism, two points are worth noting to situate today’s approaches to political analysis: first, feminist approaches, despite being mentioned as a challenge to ‘malestream political analysis’, are not given much relevance for doing political analysis. Indeed, gender and sexuality do not even appear in the index of Hay’s book and the term ‘queer’ is not used once (Smith and Lee 2015: 53). Second, while constructivist and postmodern approaches are discussed more extensively, Hay states that the inclusion of constructivism and postmodernism in the mainstream is ‘more contentious’ (Hay 2002: 14). Despite its ‘inexorable rise’, constructivism supposedly ‘still has much to prove – not least its scientific status and its substantive contribution to the understanding of world politics’ (Hay 2002: 14, our emphasis). Postmodernism is even less potentially part of the mainstream because it is a ‘challenge to the very notion of a mainstream’ (Hay 2002: 16).  

Introduction

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This mapping of approaches to political analysis, coming from a scholar who welcomes analytical pluralism, is interesting for the purpose of our endeavour because it informs what approaches are more legitimate and ‘canonical’ in the discipline of politics today and what are still considered more controversial. It also speaks of absences in the mainstream, which do not come as a surprise but nevertheless need to be made visible: feminist approaches do not appear in this mapping. Gender scholars have criticized political science textbooks for their inaccurate account of gender and politics concepts. This is, for instance, the case with Andrew Heywood’s introductory Politics textbook (2013, 4th edition) that has received a protest letter from the gender and politics standing groups of US, UK and European political science associations with regard to its inaccurate treatment of the concept of descriptive representation. The protest letter challenged Heywood’s claim that the concept of descriptive representation, especially through electoral quotas, would be dangerous to democracy because supposedly only women could represent women and only members of minority groups could represent the interests of that group, a claim which the gender and politics literature does not make at all (PSA Women & Politics Specialist Group 2016). The letter clarified that what women and politics research actually claims is: that the argument for descriptive representation was developed to promote the participation of historically underrepresented citizens, and that therefore methods for correcting women’s exclusion from elected bodies can foster democracy rather than undermine it. This is not to say that all political science ignores gender theory. The follow-up of the protest letter of the Women and Politics Specialist Group was a positive response on the part of both the author of the Politics textbook and Palgrave Macmillan, assuring that in the next edition of the volume they would address the concept of descriptive representation in light of the received comments. Another example of increasing concern for gender issues in political studies is the American Political Science Association’s recommendation, in ‘The Wahlke Report’, to mainstream gender into politics courses (Wahlke 1991). Textbooks that mainstream gender into political science are growing (see, for example, Goertz and Mazur 2008; Abels and Mushaben 2012; Lois and Alonso 2014; Abels and MacRae 2016), and articles on the mainstreaming of gender into political science research and teaching helpfully provide a state of the art and practical recommendations for gendering the discipline (see the special issues by Mügge, Evans and Engeli 2016, by Ackerly and Mügge 2016, and by Lovenduski 1998; Siim 2004; Tolleson-Rinehart

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and Carroll 2006; Dahlerup  2010; Eerzel and Mügge 2016; Mazur 2016). Drawing on the rich and diverse gender and politics research, the argument of our book is precisely that feminist approaches have much to contribute to political analysis and political science in general, since they offer important insights ‘for the understanding of politics as a whole’ (Mügge, Evans and Engeli 2016: 2). 

Feminist political analysis: a link between theory and praxis  What is distinctive about feminist political analysis? What can gender analysis contribute to understanding and explaining politics? Brooke Ackerly and Jacqui True (2011: 63) suggest that ‘gender analysis opens up a whole landscape of new research questions as well as giving us tools to rethink old research questions’. They continue to explain how ‘gender as an analytic category can illuminate new areas of inquiry, frame research questions or puzzles in need of exploration and “provide concepts, definitions and hypothesis to guide research”’ (Hawkesworth 2005: 141). In other words, gender requires political analysis to rethink research questions, what is studied and how it is done, the concepts, theories and methods.   Our book is very much about these analytical concepts and the thematic issues that feminist approaches require political analysis to rethink. Hence in the substantive chapters we focus not only on ‘gender’ but on the key concepts of political analysis – power, agency and institutions – and the key issues in political analysis – polity, politics and policy. While this is not a book about methods, the concepts are closely tied to broader methodological questions (Ackerly and True 2011).   We approach political analysis as the analytical strategy that helps the researcher to move from theory to practice and back again. A fundamental tenet of feminism is that ‘theory is always coextensive with practice’ (Hirsch and Fox Keller 1990: 2). We suggest that, in the field of politics, it is political analysis that does this job and that gender analysis is particularly apt for linking the two (Figure 1.1). 

THEORY ← → POLITICAL ANALYSIS ← → PRAXIS

Figure 1.1  Political analysis as the link between theory and praxis

Introduction

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One can also argue that politics as a discipline is in special need of connecting theory and praxis. We are living in times of austerity politics adopted in response to the ongoing economic crisis, war at the borders of the European Union, the rise of nationalisms, refugee crises, xenophobic and populist parties in Europe, processes of de-democratization, and at a global level the consequences of climate change, among other challenges. To be able to make sense of these political developments, their effects and gendered, classed or racialized significance, we need to establish a connection between theory and praxis, between what we theorize and what we practice. Some would say this connection is also needed if we wish to contribute to making this world a more just and equal place. To reiterate, political analysis in general, and feminist political analysis in particular, can be understood as attempts to maintain this link between theory and praxis.   Feminist analyses contribute to link theory and praxis for a number of reasons. First, they talk about equality between people, addressing both the theory of equality and how to put equality into practice. They deal with problems of increasingly diverse societies and complex intersections between class, gender, race and sexuality inequalities. The search for more sophisticated political analyses is aimed at making policies that are more inclusive of people’s diverse concerns. Since dealing with equality and diversity in practice is at the core of feminist analyses, it has made the discipline more open to continuous contestations of unequal norms and practices within the discipline itself. Theorizing equality, then, is not detached from what is going on in the real world but rather engaged with it, questioning power hierarchies and looking for ways to put equality into everyday practice. As Carole Pateman would say: ‘Democratic ideals and politics have to be put into practice in the kitchen, the nursery, and the bedroom’ (Pateman 1995: 222).  Second, feminist analyses have expanded the borders of ‘the political’ to include gender relations and issues formerly considered private. The famous feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ is a good example of the link between theory and praxis. Feminist scholars have demonstrated that power relations are not abstract but rather embodied in gendered subjects. Two main consequences for conceptualizing ‘the political’ follow from this: the first is that power relations and values are considered gendered, as well as racialized, classed or sexualized, because they reproduce gender norms and biases against women; the second is that the political includes both public and private/personal issues, which means that care, violence against women or sexual and reproductive rights are political issues as important as finance,

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agriculture or defence (Pateman 1983; Okin 1989; Benhabib 1992; Hawkesworth 1994; Fraser 1997). In other words, feminist analyses consider issues formerly defined as personal – or that are still de facto marginalized in politics in spite of their inclusion in existing legislation – such as sexual violence or childcare, as highly political.   Third, feminist political analysis is particularly apt to link theory and praxis because of its normative component. This component, on the one hand has made feminist political analysis vulnerable to critiques of being ideological in the eyes of mainstream political science. On the other hand, however, the normative aspect of the feminist project is a distinctive character that adds to the strength of the feminist project for explaining, understanding and changing the real world through political analysis. Feminism implies activism because it is a commitment to change relations of male domination of women and promote gender equality (Ferree 2006; Ewig and Ferree 2013). It is also possible to do gender and political analysis without subscribing to the feminist project of societal change (see Chapter 2 on the use of gender as a variable; see also Ackerly and True 2011), though in this case the link between feminist theory and praxis is weak or absent, depending on the studies considered.   Rather than simply aiming at describing and explaining ‘the political’, feminist political analyses, then, seek to promote gender equality, difference or diversity (Squires 1999, 2007) in social relations. This interest in transformative political practice marks feminist political analysis as both an empirical and a normative project. Feminist political analyses on the one hand study how gender power relations are constituted, reproduced and counteracted by political actors in a variety of political processes, institutional settings and policymaking; and on the other assess how these institutions, processes and policies could be changed to contribute to a more gender-equal world. This normative element that is present in political theory is extremely relevant for the praxis too, because as Wendy Brown reminds us, political theory is speculative work that provokes thinking and imagination through the ‘production of a new representation’ of the world (Brown 2002: 574). Political praxis needs to be fed by theory to envision what to do. Feminist scholars often link theory and practice – engaging in activism – in their daily work as political scientists studying inequalities and striving for social transformation towards greater gender equality in their home, their work and their social and political community (Celis et al. 2013).  

Introduction

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If political analysis is an attempt to keep the link between theory and praxis alive, and feminist analyses of the political contribute to this endeavour for the reasons we have discussed so far, gender and political analysis are also beneficial to political science as it exists today (Ackerly and Mügge 2016; Erzeel and Mügge 2016; Mügge, Evans and Engeli 2016). As Wendy Brown (2002) argues, connecting theory and political praxis is, indeed, needed to prevent debates within increasingly professionalized disciplines such as political science, from becoming self-referential and thus narrow their analytical and imaginative capacities. Brown’s critique is that US political science has become a professionalized discipline that is accountable only to itself, where political scientists are their own audience and judges, and whose existence is justified by peer-reviewed journals, conferences and prizes (Brown 2002: 565). According to Breny Mendoza (2012: 47), ‘this has led to a political theorization that is more preoccupied with electoral systems, political parties, governance, polls, and only marginally with political cultures and disenchantment with liberal democracy’. Electoral and party issues are indeed important objects of political analysis, also from a gender perspective. What Mendoza criticizes is that due to this electoral focus ‘issues of gender, race, and sexuality are painfully absent from political science curricula’ (Mendoza 2012: 47). Since most countries have US political science as the referent, argues Mendoza (2012: 35) from the Latin American context, the question is how can political science and ‘how can political theory be decolonized?’. Addressing issues of equality and diversity that directly affect people’s lives, as feminist political analyses do, is one way to reconnect political science to social reality. But to what extent is ‘feminist political analysis’ a recognized field within political science? 

Feminist political analysis within political science  Political science and International Relations (IR) are an important context for the development of studies on feminist political analysis. Dominant approaches in the disciplines of politics and world politics affect the recognition of gender studies in the field and influence the emergence and marginalization of particular feminist approaches to political analysis. Liza Mügge, Elizabeth Evans and Isabelle Engeli (2016: 2) argue that ‘Gender scholarship is gradually becoming part of mainstream political science, while retaining its distinct identity’.

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Indicators of this are the fact that gender and politics publications are increasingly present in political science journals that do not specialize in gender; new gender-specialized political science book series have been created; and gender and politics research is now embedded in the work of national and international political science associations.   At the same time, many studies have illustrated how teaching gender is marginalized or non-existent in most UK and US political science departments (Childs and Krook 2006; Foster et al. 2013: 13; Ackerly and Mügge 2016; Mügge, Evans and Engeli 2016: 2). In their study of citational practices in political science, titled ‘What’s Queer About Political Science?’, Nicola Smith and Donna Lee (2015: 50) write: Far from being the broad and inclusive discipline it purports to be in modern textbooks, today’s political science is consciously marginalising issues of gender and sexuality and hardly doing justice to the political analysis of social relations that queer theorists have been successfully doing for quite some time. They argue that there is a sharp discrepancy in this sense between political science, on the one hand, and other social sciences and humanities, on the other, suggesting that the policing of disciplinary boundaries, epistemologies and analytical approaches is stronger in politics than in other disciplines (Smith and Lee 2015: 50).  The marginalization of gender and politics approaches in political science, despite their recent gradual integration into the discipline, argue Celis et al. (2013), still exists because men are overrepresented in the field, and because the discipline reproduces androcentric biases. Concerning the first point Tolleson-Rinehart and Carroll (2006: 512) write that: women are underrepresented at virtually every level of the discipline, from graduate school to APSA [American Political Science Association] leadership, and they continue to face gender-related obstacles in their professional lives. Moreover, women and politics scholarship remains somewhat marginalized in the discipline. (also see Lovenduski 1998; Bates and Savigny 2015) In the European context, Drude Dahlerup (2010) relates the progressive institutionalization of gender and politics within the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), through the creation of a standing group and a specialized conference on politics and gender.

Introduction

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At the same time she reports ‘resistance and even anger’ on the part of ‘male oligarchs’ in the ECPR as gender studies developed and women demanded more leadership positions in the organization, because according to Dahlerup (2010: 91–92), this: represented an attack on the fundamental self-perception of academia as being free from any bias and being strictly based on merit as its selection criteria. The university seems to be the last institution in society to recognize that gender is a structuring factor in all institutions, even in academia.   Feminist scholars make similar diagnoses on the lack of integration of gender in the discipline of political science for a variety of different contexts such as the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Spain and Finland (Elizondo 2015; Kantola 2015b; Abels 2016; Alonso and Lombardo 2016; Bonjour, Mügge and Roggeband 2016; Evans and Amery 2016; Sauer 2016). Regarding the second point that Celis et al. (2013) make, feminist political theorists and epistemologists have shown that knowledge and science have been constructed on the basis of androcentric biases that have privileged the questions, issues and methods relevant to hegemonic men (Hekman 1990; Harding 1991). Political science is not an exception in this respect. The theory of political science has been developed within a line of thinking that, from Aristotle to Machiavelli, Locke and the contractualists, has justified the right of men to rule over women and public affairs and the subordinate position of women and their association with the private domestic sphere. Although feminist scholars have exposed and challenged the gender stereotypes present in male-dominated classics of political science (Okin 1991ab; Shanley and Pateman 1991; Pateman 1995), ‘the notion of a separation of the public and private spheres persists today’ (Celis et al. 2013: 7), with the symbolic association of women with the private and men with the public sphere of politics. The very concepts of politics, power, citizenship and the state have been conceptualized in androcentric ways, reflecting the experience, interests and values of embodied dominant male subjects (Brown 1988; Lister 1998; Pateman 1988). ‘These ideas have again affected what has been deemed suitable subject matter for the academic discipline of politics’ (Celis et al. 2013: 7).   What approaches are deemed most ‘suitable’ for political analysis, then? From an epistemological perspective, positivism is still quite predominant in mainstream political science, a discipline in which

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objective, not value-driven but facts-driven research is recognized as a suitable approach to knowledge of political reality, though in more nuanced forms than it was in the historical beginnings of the discipline. Empiricism and quantitative methods are valued and recognized in the field. While adopting positivist perspectives too, gender studies have pioneered development of social constructivist approaches, with an extensive corpus of studies following Simone de Beauvoir’s argument in The Second Sex (1949) that gender roles are constructed through social and institutional practices, and formal and informal norms that are not fixed once and for all but rather can be changed. Yet constructivism did not enter political science from gender studies but rather from influential sociological studies of the social construction of reality such as Berger and Luckmann (1967) and developments in IR (Wendt 1999). And it still has not reached the mainstream of political science. Today, despite developments in constructivist approaches both in European integration theory (Rosamond 2000; Christiansen et al. 2001; Risse 2004; Schmidt and Radaelli 2004) and discursive institutionalism (Schmidt 2010, 2011), constructivist approaches in political science must continue to prove they constitute scientific knowledge (Hay 2002: 14).    Feminist analyses in politics have contributed to challenge marginalizations and build bridges between different approaches in political science. According to Birte Siim (2004: 97), they have done so by adopting a ‘methodological pluralism’ that has challenged the ‘methodological split in political science between different schools, for example between “rationalists” and “social constructivists”’. Siim recognizes the existence of a dialogue within feminist political research between empirical studies, comparative context-aware analyses and discourse analysis inspired by post-structuralism (2004: 97). She traces the emergence of interdisciplinary ‘conversations’ in feminist political research between ‘political theorists, gender theorists and comparativists, as well as between neo-institutionalists and social constructivists’ that did not generate methodological splits but rather ‘productive tensions between different positions’ (2004: 98). These dialogues have contributed to building an agenda around three main elements: ‘the contested and constructed nature of key concepts; the principle of diversity and differences among women; the inter-relation between discourse, agency and institutions’ (Siim 2004: 99). In this way, feminist political research has shown political science the ‘potential strength of methodological pluralism’ (Siim 2004: 98).  

Introduction

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While we agree with Siim that feminist approaches have much to contribute to political science on the basis of their experience with dialogic and pluralist approaches, we also think that feminist approaches, while struggling to enter this androcentric field, can be co-opted by the dominant approaches in political science. This can in turn create marginalizations inside the feminist approaches to political analysis, so that some approaches obtain greater recognition and resources in the field of political science than others in terms of publications in political science journals that do not specialize in gender and in top-ranked gender and politics journals, or in terms of political science prizes. For example, some of the studies adopting a women approach (for instance studies on gender quotas) or a gender approach (for example feminist new institutionalism or gender mainstreaming research) are more recognized in the existing political science panorama. Yet prospects of greater recognition for constructivist – not to mention for postdeconstructivist – approaches as ‘scientific’ within the field of political science seem curtailed in this era of neoliberal demand for ‘applicable and marketable’ (Brown 2002: 573) knowledge. The value and contribution of feminist approaches to political analysis lies precisely in their diversity, because each of them is able to capture aspects of political reality that another perspective overlooks. 

Diversity of approaches to feminist political analysis   In this book we discuss the diversity of feminist approaches to political analysis under five headings: (i) women, (ii) gender, (iii) deconstruction, (iv) intersectionality and (v) postdeconstruction. Following Nina Lykke’s explanation for selecting the theories discussed in her book Feminist Theory: A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing, we see our selection not as representing a ‘canon’ that is the very core of the field of gender and politics but rather as situated nodal points: ‘as temporary crystallizations in ongoing feminist negotiations of located theory making’ (Lykke 2010: 49). The essence of feminist political analysis lies in the various definitions of gender that one can adopt and that later guide the analytical steps taken by the researcher in choosing her concepts, theories and methods for studying political realities. Our key aim in this book is to discuss and pay tribute to this very diversity of feminist approaches, discern the implications of each for political analysis, and pave way for new explorations.  

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Gender and Political Analysis

A few clarifications are needed to understand why ‘gender’ is present at the same time in the title of the book – ‘Gender and Political Analysis’ – and as the name of one of the five approaches. We have decided to employ the term ‘gender’ in the title because this is the term most often used to name the subdiscipline of ‘gender and politics’ within political science studies. However, to avoid confusions between the general perspective of the book and one of the five approaches for doing political analysis that we adopt in this volume, we will talk of ‘feminist’ political analysis when we refer to the general approach. While not all gender analysis is feminist in the sense that it is not necessarily committed to changing society towards greater gender equality, most of the research we discuss in this book is indeed committed to a feminist project of societal change. We will therefore refer to ‘gender and political analysis’ when we speak of one of the five sub-approaches employed in the articulation of our argument, and to ‘feminist political analysis’ when we refer to the general approach for doing political analysis that we propose in this book. We will now briefly introduce the five approaches for doing feminist political analysis included in this book. First, women and political analysis focuses on women’s presence, roles, action, interests, needs, rights and voices. The approach establishes women and men as coherent subjects of political analysis. It treats women and men as unitary categories whose interests, needs and beliefs can be identified objectively in research. In terms of political analysis, the women approach challenges the exclusion of women from analytical concepts such as power, agency and institutions, and from what is analysed, polity, politics and policy. Illustrative of this approach is its tendency to take mainstream political science theories, concepts and institutions as a starting point. Because of the still relatively precarious position of gender and politics within the discipline of politics, discussed above, ‘women’ retain considerable importance, as indicated by the titles of some recent key volumes such as Women, Gender, and Politics (Krook and Childs 2010) and Women, Politics and Power (Paxton and Hughes 2007). As Mügge, Evans and Engeli (2016: 283) put it: ‘although we speak of gendered analysis and gender studies, the ongoing attachment to women and women’s experiences remains central to understanding politics’.  Second, gender and political analysis calls for an understanding of the wider societal structures that reproduce the continuing patterns of domination and inequality. Gender is a contested concept that has been interpreted in many different ways (see Hawkesworth 2013). Despite

Introduction

13

their great variety and long history of debates, gender approaches to the study of politics include, in our view: (i) the need to understand gender always in relation to wider societal structures in order to comprehend domination and inequalities that are by definition structural, (ii) analytically, the need to study gender as a complex socially constructed relation between masculinities and femininities, and (iii) epistemologically, approaching gender from a ‘critical realist’ perspective, which means that deep gender structures are socially constructed and at the same time are considered real, and science and language are believed to be capable of describing the reality of these social structures and of providing access to them. As noted above, constructivist and poststructuralist perspectives are not yet well established in political science. When discussing the third approach, deconstruction and political analysis, we explore the ways in which gender is theorized as a discourse and a practice that is continuously contested and constructed in political debates. In deconstruction, gender is deemed to have no fixed meaning, but rather to assume different normative meanings in the conceptual disputes that policy actors engage with (Bacchi 1999; Verloo 2007). This approach has contributed to show that a problem such as gender inequality can be represented in many different ways, with many different solutions, and that a particular diagnosis of the problem of gender inequality is at the same time silencing other alternative representations of the problem (Bacchi 1999). Deconstruction, therefore, makes it possible to understand how some solutions are favoured over others and how gender can be silenced in political disputes, stretched to include other equality dimensions apart from gender, or bent to other goals that have nothing to do with gender equality (Lombardo, Meier and Verloo 2009). Some of the ideas put forward by the deconstruction approach – including the need to study ideas and frames – have been adopted in gender and politics research more widely, but the approach remains more contested within the field of gender and politics and its scientific status is disputed (Mazur 2011).  Fourth, intersectionality and political analysis perspectives explore the intersection of gender with other inequalities. Intersectionality has become a key approach in gender studies over the past decade, and gender and politics scholarship is also promoting its centrality to political analysis. Intersectional analyses study the inequalities, marginalizations and dominations that the interactions of gender, race, class and other systems of inequality produce. While the concept of ‘intersectionality’ may be a novelty, its key ideas have been articulated decades ago in Black,

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Gender and Political Analysis

lesbian and postcolonial feminist theorizing that exposed the limitations of women-only and gender-only analyses (hooks 1981; Lorde 1984; Hill Collins 2000; Mohanty 2003; Hill Collins and Chepp 2013). Kimberlé Crenshaw’s coining of the term ‘intersectionality’ gave it new analytical purchase this approach. Elaborating the concepts of structural and political intersectionality, Crenshaw (1991) studied how the intersection of inequalities of gender, race and class have consequences for people’s opportunities in life, in areas such as employment and gender violence, and how different political and social movements’ strategies focusing on one inequality are not neutral to other inequalities.   Fifthly, one of our key contributions with this volume is to pave the way for a postdeconstructivist approach to political analysis. Postdeconstruction and political analysis is used here to signal a diverse set of debates on feminist new materialism, corporealism and affect theory that come analytically (not chronologically, Lykke 2010: 106) ‘after’ reflections on the deconstruction of gender. We have suggested above that the deconstruction has received less legitimacy and popularity within gender and political analysis than the other approaches. Not surprisingly, then, the postdeconstruction that is so widely debated in feminist theory, gender studies and cultural studies is yet to emerge as an analytical strategy in gender and political analysis. It is not included in the most widely-used gender and politics handbooks or in theory and methodology books (see e.g. Squires 1999, 2007; Mazur and Goetz 2008; Ackerly and True 2011; Celis et al. 2013), nor is it mentioned in overview articles (Mackay 2004; Mügge, Evans and Engeli 2016).  We use the term postdeconstruction to signal approaches that are interested in understanding what affects, emotions and bodily material do in gender and politics. From the new materialist point of view, significant social change cannot be achieved solely by deconstructing subjectivities, discourses and identities. Rather, there is a need to understand and alter the very real socioeconomic conditions and the interests that these serve (Coole and Frost 2010: 25). In political analysis, this places emphasis on economic and political processes and their materiality and impact on bodies (see e.g. Wilcox 2015). Affects and emotions shape individual and collective bodies, cement sexed and raced relations of domination, and provide the local investments necessary to counter those relations (e.g. Spivak 1993, Bhabha 1994ab, Hemmings 2005). Importantly for political analysis, affects are not about individuals: they are deeply social and political formations (Ahmed 2004ab; Hemmings 2005: 565). In affective economies, affects align individuals with communities through the very intensity of their attachments (Skeggs and Wood 2012: 159). 

Introduction

15

We elaborate on the analytical purchase of these different approaches more extensively in Chapter 2. In the chapters that follow, we then apply the fivefold framework to the discussions of power, agency and institutions, and polity, politics and policy. Our contribution in this book is to differentiate the notion of ‘feminist political analysis’. Feminist analytical approaches to the political are a prism which gives rise to different research questions, concepts and methodologies. Each of the five approaches provides a very different take on, for example, studying the current economic crisis (Kantola and Lombardo 2017a and b). Analysing the economic crisis, we might ask different questions depending on the approach: what are the economic, social and political implications of the austerity politics on women and men (women)? Why is the crisis gendered (gender)? How is the crisis discursively constructed and with what effects, and how is the crisis gendering (deconstruction)? How are different groups at different intersections of inequalities, including race and class, affected by the crisis (intersectionality)? How do emotions and affects work through the crisis to entrench inequalities and how does the crisis work on different bodies (postdeconstruction)? Answering these questions requires different concepts, theories and methodologies and, as importantly, reveals different aspects of the crisis. For example, without postdeconstruction we might fail to understand how the crisis is emotionally laden and sustained through fear, hate, anger, empathy and sympathy for others (Kantola 2015a).  At the same time, the five approaches that we discuss in this book are by no means exclusive – for example, we ourselves carry out work that often adopts gender, deconstruction and intersectionality approaches. In the concluding chapter to this book, we explore the ways in which the approaches are and can be combined and what this reveals about the discipline of gender and politics. The five approaches are not exhaustive either. We could have included, for example, queer theory as a separate approach to political analysis instead of, as now, subsuming it under deconstruction. We are aware that this may reinforce positioning it ‘on the constitutive outside of the discipline’ (Smith and Lee 2015). At the same time, we hope that the overall thrust of the book towards inclusive approaches that take into account diversities, intersectionality, normativities, constructions, bodies and affects paves the way for a whole range of analytical approaches to which we do not do justice here.   But before delving into the diversity of gender approaches to political analysis, we wish to make explicit some elements of the context from which we speak. Our understanding of the field of ‘gender and politics’

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Gender and Political Analysis

is based on our location in European debates that are also strongly informed by Anglo-American gender and political science writing. These debates are well represented in the biannual European Conference on Politics and Gender (ECPG) that has taken place since 2009, and in other mainstream politics conferences such as those of the APSA, ECPR and International Political Science Association (IPSA); in journals like International Feminist Journal of Politics and Politics & Gender, and mainstream politics journals. The context in which we work influences our perception of what are the most relevant scholarly debates and, for this reason, we do not pretend to be exhaustive and to do justice to the great variety of existing scholarly works. We simply wish to recognize the limitations and opportunities that come from our situated knowledge. In this we draw inspiration from Breny Mendoza’s (2012) critique about the epistemic violence of Anglo-American political science on Latin American disciplines of gender and politics, in which many women and politics scholars in the West and the North take part.   Our knowledge is also informed by the approaches on which our own work mostly centres, which are those of gender, deconstruction and intersectionality. Making explicit some of the features of our own situated knowledge as political analysts has helped us to stay alert and open to the understanding of approaches we are less familiar with, but has certainly not prevented our own interpretations emerging in the discussion of the different approaches. We believe that self-reflections are much needed when doing political analysis. Reflexivity, Bacchi (2009) reminds us, can make us academics aware of the biases that shape our own thinking. This awareness in turn can moderate the possibility of unreflexively applying our normative assumptions to political analysis and open our mind to different approaches.   Feminist political analyses, though relatively open to linking theory with praxis, contain their own limitations too. These can stem both from taking mainstream political science concepts and theories as a starting point, or from feminist debates themselves. We think that dominant approaches in political science influence the emergence and marginalization of particular gender approaches to political analysis, but feminist theorizing in gender and politics when striving for recognition within mainstream political science also reproduces its own hegemonies and marginalizations. The question for political analysts is how to create new knowledge – at times like these in which economic crisis, war and xenophobia are shaking societies and politics in Europe – when you sit comfortably within your own approach. 

Introduction

17

Outline of the book  The chapters that follow are divided into two parts. First, we develop some key conceptual tools – gender, power, agency and institutions – for doing political analysis; and second, we address some key substantive issues in political analysis – polity, politics and policy. We have chosen to focus on power, institutions and agency not only because they are so often taken as the key conceptual tools in mainstream political analysis (see e.g. Hay 2002); they are also the concepts where feminists and the different analytical gender approaches that we discuss in this book make important contributions. Polity, politics and policies, in turn, are classic substantive areas of study in political science that are important to analyse from feminist perspectives. In each chapter we ask how the analytical concept or the issue at hand changes when we shift our feminist approach and what is to be gained and lost in the process.   Chapter  2, ‘Feminist Political Analysis’, develops our framework of the five approaches to political analysis that stem from gender and politics research. We discern the contributions, shortcomings and remaining challenges of the women, gender, deconstruction, intersectionality and postdeconstruction approaches to political analysis. We delve more deeply into the questions of which approaches are favoured over others and why, as well as and what we might gain and lose as a result of these choices. We also discuss the thorny relationship between feminist analysis and gender analysis, pointing out that to an increasing extent different forms of gender analysis are not necessarily feminist.   After the introductory and the theoretical chapters, the book is divided in two parts: Part I (Chapters 3–5) articulates the key political concepts that feminist political analysis contributes to, namely power, agency and institutions. Part II (Chapters 6–8) discusses key substantive issues that gender and politics research has explored through both theoretical and empirical debates. These can be classified, in our view, into: polity, politics and policy. Both sets of concepts and issues are analysed through the lens of the five approaches for doing feminist political analysis. Chapter 3 begins the first part of the book with the discussion of ‘Power’, the key concept in political analysis and in the subfield of gender and politics: if politics and the political are defined by power it clearly matters greatly to our very definitions of the field how we approach power. Not only politics but also gender studies, feminism and queer theory are about normative power relations. Looking at power through the prism of women, gender, deconstruction, intersectionality and postdeconstruction changes what is analysed as political.  

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Gender and Political Analysis

Chapter 4 shifts the perspective to the concept of ‘Agency’. Again, agency stems not only from political analysis but is also fundamental to feminism as a form of theory and practice. Women approaches have analysed both women’s individual and collective agency. A gender approach to agency places emphasis on the constraining gendered structures, and a deconstruction approach focuses on gendered discourses as constraining, to the extent that both the approaches of gender and deconstruction have promoted an intense debate about the dwindling of women’s agency. Intersectionality challenges the feminist agency debate through its analysis of classed, raced and sexualized agencies; and postdeconstruction questions what we normally term agentic and gives the power of agency to elements such as affects and materiality.   Chapter  5, ‘Institutions’, reflects the dominance of institutional approaches to political analysis and also their centrality in feminist debates. Feminist new institutional analysis has resulted in an ongoing debate and theoretical and conceptual developments through the women, gender, deconstruction and intersectionality approaches. Our framework enables an exploration of what came before the term institutions, what are the contributions of feminist new institutionalism and where to go next, including postdeconstructivist approaches.   In the second part of the book, we shift the focus to the key substantive political issues where feminist analytical perspectives are being applied. We start in Chapter  6 with ‘Polity’, arguably the key place where political analysis directs its gaze to, which is also under transformation. Here we explore what kind of polity – whether state, nation, democracy or autocracy – each feminist perspective foregrounds and analyses. Feminist analyses in their different approaches theorize polities as powerful constructs where gender and other inequalities occupy a central position. Scholarly debates address the inclusion and role of women in democracies, autocracies, states and nations, the genderedness of formal and informal institutions within polities, the heterogeneity of institutions and their different discourses, the ways in which intersecting inequalities are played out within polities, and the material gendered, racialized and sexualized effects on people of emotions that are mobilized in nationalist projects. In Chapter 7, we focus on ‘Politics’ and on the very different definitions of the term that the varied perspectives result in. We analyse politics as process, which means studying the dynamics of politics in action and their equality dimensions, differently expressed in the women, gender, deconstruction, intersectional and postdeconstruction approaches adopted in this book. Studying politics as process prompts

Introduction

19

us to explore the dynamics that are expressed in political processes such as policymaking, democratization, European integration, constitution making, decentralization, regime changes, judicial litigation and economization, as well as to consider issues of political leadership and political behaviour. The analysis of politics from the five feminist approaches contributes to expose power inequalities embedded in political processes that would otherwise remain unseen. Chapter  8 analyses ‘Policy’, covering the multiple aspects of the policymaking process from the five perspectives, and including implementation, a topic that has recently attracted a great deal of scholarly attention in gender and politics. The application of the five approaches for doing feminist political analysis to the object of policy allows analysts to scrutinize the gender and intersectional biases of public policies and of their own assumptions when they are analysing, making, implementing or evaluating policies. Feminist approaches discuss the impact policies have on women and that women have on policies, the gender and intersectional dimensions of policies, the discourses that public policies produce and their gendering effects on women and men. The chapter also points at the contribution of new materialist perspectives, recognizing the challenge of applying them to policy analysis from gender and intersectionality approaches. Chapter 9 concludes the book and discusses a number of important questions. Having tested the fivefold framework of women, gender, deconstruction, intersectionality and postdeconstruction on key concepts and issues of political analysis, what can we conclude about the approaches, their contributions and shortcomings? Which approaches are more dominant in the subdiscipline of gender and politics? Which are currently more marginalized and why? In the book, we have made an analytical distinction between the approaches but, in this concluding chapter, we ask to what extent the different approaches are compatible. The assessment of the fivefold framework for doing feminist political analysis allows us to draw out its implications for the subfield of gender and politics and, more generally, for political analysis and the discipline of political science.

Chapter 2

Feminist Political Analysis: Five Approaches

In the previous chapter, we argued that political analysis is concerned with different analytical positions on ‘the political’, that it needs to connect theory and practice, and that gender analyses are particularly apt for making such connection in their analyses of the political. In this chapter, we discuss how one can do gender and political analysis. Given the wide variety of gender perspectives, we will discuss the diversity of approaches to gender and political analysis under five headings: (i) women, (ii) gender, (iii) ­deconstruction, (iv) intersectionality and (v) postdeconstruction. In this chapter, we introduce the main characteristics of these approaches for doing gender and political analysis, their objects, questions and epistemological underpinnings, highlighting both their contributions and limitations (see Table 2.1). We pay particular attention to the diversity within the approaches, mapping the debates through which each of them has developed and changed and showing how ‘women’, ‘gender’, deconstruction’, intersectionality’ and ‘postdeconstruction’ contain a variety of different and sometimes competing perspectives. The  logic informing the distinctions drawn between the five approaches is primarily based on their epistemological and ontological characteristics. Moreover, the order in which approaches are presented is not chronological or hierarchical. Rather, our purpose is to make visible the contributions and limitations of each feminist approach in relation to the others. Through this classification of feminist approaches to political analysis we do not mean to say these five are the only ways to do gender and political analysis. There can be many more and they can be named and classified in different ways from the ones we suggest here. These are simply ways to group around specific nodal points those problematizations of feminist political analysis that we have found relevant in the literature on gender and politics (Lykke 2010). While we describe the approaches, with their pros and cons for doing gender and political

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Feminist Political Analysis: Five Approaches

21

analysis, we also wish to note that the differences between approaches are not always so neat, and that, for example, we see our own work as bridging different approaches, sometimes more centred on deconstructing gender, at other times more oriented towards intersectionality, or towards gender. We speak of ‘feminist’ political analysis in the book because most of the works discussed in this book are moved by feminist ideals, but we are also aware that not all research discussed in the five approaches will necessarily be feminist. Feminism, as Myra Marx Ferree (2006; see also Ewig and Ferree 2013: 437) makes clear, is a ‘goal, a target for social change’ (Ferree 2006: 6, emphasis in the original), that is aimed at challenging and changing unequal gendered power relations. While most gender approaches strive for transformation oriented to the creation of more equal societies, not all of the approaches will equally take up this challenge of social transformation. It is also possible to do gender and political analysis without subscribing to the feminist project of societal change as, for example, do scholars who take ‘gender’ as a variable that signifies women and men with minimal attention to the underlying deep structures and power relations that constitute these categories (see, for example, Jones 1996).

Women and political analysis Doing women and political analysis implies placing the analytical focus on women. This includes analysing women’s presence, roles, action, interests, needs, rights and voices. The object of study in this approach is mostly that of ‘women’, but also ‘men’ as a term of comparison. Scholars from a wide range of different theoretical perspectives write about ‘women’ and ‘men’. The approach relies on positivist epistemological positions and treats women and men as unitary categories whose interests, needs and beliefs can be identified objectively in research. For instance, a researcher adopting a positivist stance might be interested in testing how the number of women MPs in different countries relates to the characteristics of the electoral system in place. Adopting a women approach to political analysis gives visibility to subjects that have traditionally been ignored in politics. A key goal of liberal feminism is that of including women in politics and society, with early liberal feminists arguing for the right of women to vote (Okin 1989). One way of assessing inclusion is to study the extent to which women have been integrated into politics, what their presence is

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Women (men as comparison)

Object

Questions

Where are the women (and men)? How are women and men represented in political institutions? What is the impact of political or economic processes on women and men?

Epistemology Positivism

Women

Approach

Deconstruction of gender

Multiple

Gender intersecting with other inequalities

Intersectionality

Affects, emotions, socioeconomic and bodily material

Postdeconstruction

New materialism (material realism and cultural materialism) What do affects, How does gender How is gender How do social emotions and bodily interact with other discursively structures construct material do in inequalities? What constructed? What gender? What gender and politics? power inequalities, meanings does gender roles, How does the privileges and gender take in norms, policies, social organization marginalizations conceptual disputes? and institutions of emotions affect does the interaction What effects do are constructed? power inequalities? of gender with gender discourses To what extent How are emotions other systems of have on people and and why is gender mobilized in inequality produce? societies? mainstreamed into gendered, sexualized How does politics politics? or racialized political affect differently processes? intersecting groups?

Gender as contested/ Gender as social constructed structure and discourse socially constructed relation Critical ‘realism’ Constructivism

Gender

Table 2.1  Five approaches for doing feminist political analysis

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Limitations

• Essentialism • Essentialism • Leave unquestioned • Binary understanding the less visible of gender unequal structures of (opposed to sex male domination as unalterable biological given)

• Address/challenge Contributions • Show immediately unequal gender visible data gaps structures and on women and norms men (women’s underrepresentation) • Challenge biological • Show who is (not) in determinism power • Question • Provide numerical systemic causes of indicators of patriarchal power inequality • Incorporate multidimensional character of gender

• Relocate focus • Expose/challenge • Expose/challenge on the material complex inequalities, subtle gendered and not just the marginalizations norms and cultural roots and and dominations meanings present in consequences of that the interactions discourses inequality of gender, race, class • Destabilize gender and other systems of • Relate emotions essentialisms and affects to inequality produce • Expose how structures of power discourse prioritizes/ • Coin new concept and privilege that of intersectionality marginalizes policy produce racialized to address complex problems and or gendered effects power inequality solutions on people • Show the differen• Show gendering • Relate embodied tiated impacts of effects of discourses experience interacting systems on people (hegemof affect to of domination on onic vs marginalized potential of social people subjects) transformation • Not new, • Unsystematic • Undermine just updated application in women’s agency materialism political analysis and shared identity • Extensive (methodological • Overemphasize research yet to challenges) the symbolic and be undertaken in • Reductionist applidiscursive over relation to gender cation in policy the socio-political and politics practice (multiple power discrimination)

Table 2.1  continued

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Gender and Political Analysis

in politics. Rephrasing Robert Dahl’s (1961) ‘Who governs?’ question from a women’s perspective triggers a different set of interrogatives: which sex governs? How are women and men represented in political institutions? How many women are present in parliaments and governments of the world? Indeed, the word ‘gender’ can in many of these questions be replaced with the word ‘sex’, which here connotes the biological sex, a given fact that can be identified, classified and quantified. Also illustrative of these approaches is the tendency to take mainstream political science theories, concepts and political institutions as a starting point and approach them from the perspective of women. Sometimes this can lead to radical results. For example, Pamela Paxton (2008) shows that when women’s suffrage is added to the categorization of democratic systems, this drastically changes traditional political science regime classifications. The continuing significance of this women perspective in gender and politics research is evidenced by the upsurge of studies on women’s political representation. Since the 1990s a massive number of studies have been dedicated to the issue of women’s descriptive political representation, or the physical presence of women’s representatives ‘standing for’ (Pitkin 1967) women (Phillips  1995; Mossuz-Lavau 1998; Lovenduski 2005a). Empirical studies on women’s descriptive political representation have shown that men are overrepresented in most political institutions. Documenting women’s presence in political institutions contributes to revealing a numerically unbalanced distribution of political power between women and men that former approaches to political analysis had ignored. This diagnosis has led scholars to articulate proposals for sex quotas and similar political mechanisms that aim at increasing the number of women in political institutions (MarquesPereira and Nolasco 2001; Dahlerup 2006; Krook 2009; Franceschet, Krook and Piscopo 2012). Adopting a women approach contributes to political analysis in several ways. First of all it allows scholars to give visibility to women’s roles, often silenced in political analysis. Focusing on Cynthia Enloe’s (2014) question ‘where are the women in IR?’ allows research to look at international politics from the perspective of actors whose activities and positions are commonly excluded from the discipline, to discover the web of interactions between personal and political strategies. Women’s embodied agency, paid, unpaid, and political work, matters and needs to be made visible and analysed, not least to get a more complete, less partial understanding of reality, as feminist standpoint theorists argue (Hartsock 1983; Harding 1991). Second, a women

Feminist Political Analysis: Five Approaches

25

approach allows researchers – as Newman (2012: 4) writes – to ‘map some of the ways in which spaces of power are both mobilized by and negotiated through women’s labour’. Scholarly debates on women’s political representation have developed beyond descriptive representation to address issues of substantive representation exploring how female representatives ‘act for’ the represented in a manner responsive to them (Pitkin 1967; Celis 2005; Celis et al. 2008; Childs and Krook 2008). This has opened ways to explore what the role is of women as critical actors, despite their small numbers in political institutions, to promote women’s concerns (Celis 2009), from different political ideologies (Celis and Childs 2014). This in turn has further challenged the notion of ‘women’s interests’ that may get represented in politics (Celis et al. 2014). Studying women’s action allows scholars to understand political and institutional changes that would otherwise be inexplicable to the political analyst, such as advances in reproductive rights, equal employment or care policies (McBride and Mazur 2013; Mottier 2013; Annesley, Engeli and Gains 2015). Third, a women approach allows analysts to assess the impact of specific political or economic processes on women and men, for example how the economic crisis and austerity politics have differently impacted women and men (Karamessini and Rubery 2014; Walby 2015). A women’s approach also has limitations for political analysis that depend on how it is understood and applied. First, feminist debates have criticized a focus on women for its danger of essentialism, which assumes that there is such a thing as a true essence of women, with features that can be extended to all women despite their differences (Fuss 1989; Ferguson 1993; Squires 1999). This essentialism risks hiding different women’s experiences of inequality under specific, contextual experiences that often belong to more privileged women, as Black and postcolonial feminist researchers have pointed out (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1983; Harris 1991; Mohanty 2003). It is well evidenced in the continuing desire of gender and politics scholars to research and identify a priori women’s interests assumed to be out there and shared by all women (for a critique see Celis et al. 2014). Second, a women’s perspective may pay insufficient attention to the processes and structures of male domination and female marginalization in both societal structures that shape political phenomena, such as decision making, and in political science concepts, theories and methods. This ‘add women and stir’ approach has been criticized by feminist theorists for not leading to any substantive change towards greater gender equality as it does not fundamentally challenge deep structures

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of either politics or political science (Harding 1995; Beckwith 2005). If the gender biases that lie behind the concepts of politics and power are not challenged so to unmask their ‘androcentrism’ or association with men while claiming to be gender neutral (Hawkesworth 2013), mechanisms of inequality will be left unchanged because the ‘sites that women entered [have] remained structured by the understandings and interests of men, for women had been excluded from their design and management’ (Harding 1995: 297). Third, ‘women’, ‘men’ and ‘gender’ may be reduced to variables in studies that draw on these approaches. What is at stake here is well illustrated by feminist critiques of Adam Jones’s (1996) award-winning article ‘Does gender make the world go around?’ where he argues that feminists should make the ‘gender variable’ inclusive by incorporating men’s perspectives and inequalities in the analyses. Jones argues that feminist approaches are narrow and normatively based as they suppose that men are always the ruling class. According to Jones, feminists have failed to expose that men suffer disproportionately to women in world politics as refugees, victims of murder, suicide and state violence such as torture. Jones’s article triggered extensive debates about his notion of feminisms, mascunilities and IR (see Carver, Cochram and Squires 1998; Weber 2001). Usefully for our purposes here his work illustrates well what it means to treat ‘gender’ – or women or men – as variables. Cynthia Weber (2001) argues that gender as a variable for Jones means that gender can be isolated, incorporated, blended, balanced and broadened. One might also add that as a variable it can be measured and compared unproblematically. Weber suggests that Jones’s approach is one where gender can be approached outside of gender, from a ‘gender-free’ point of view, and gender becomes a discrete phenomenon. Weber asks a fundamental question: ‘What if gender is not something to be placed or added but something through which the world is viewed?’ (emphasis in the original). Such fundamental positions have been developed from a myriad of perspectives through a focus on gender as a ‘worldview’ where gender is a way of seeing the world and is placed in the world (Weber 2001) as we discuss in more detail below.

Gender and political analysis In distinction to the ‘women’ perspective, a number of gender and politics scholars – as implied by ‘gender’ in the description of the field – adopt a gender perspective when analysing politics. In this section,

Feminist Political Analysis: Five Approaches

27

we want to both suggest that ‘gender’ can be and has been defined in a number of different ways and we provide an overview of these debates. At the same time, we want to map some crucial shared characteristics of these approaches in order to analyse in this book how they approach different phenomena in gender and politics and with what consequences. We suggest that despite their variety, gender approaches to the study of politics include, in our view: (i) the need to understand gender always in relation to wider societal structures in order to understand domination and inequalities that are by definition structural, (ii) analytically, the need to study gender as a complex socially constructed relation between masculinities and femininities; this broadens the focus from women to women and men, their roles and interdependent relations, and (iii) epistemologically, approaching gender from a ‘critical realist’ perspective, which means that deep gender structures are socially constructed and at the same time are considered real, and science and language are believed to be capable of describing the reality of these social structures and of providing access to them. Initially inspired by Marxist materialist approaches, gender approaches address social structures, such as family, labour or political institutions, and the gender norms they produce. Questions raised from gender approaches ask, for example, how do social structures construct gender? What gender roles, norms, policies, and institutions are constructed? Or to what extent and why is gender mainstreamed into politics? What differentiates the ‘women’ and ‘gender’ approaches is well captured by the sex/gender dichotomy. This distinction was constructed in the 1960s to counter biological determinism (Squires 1999: 55). While one’s ‘sex’ was still understood to be biologically determined, one’s ‘gender’ was analysed as socially constructed. The concepts of male and female came to refer to one’s sex, while femininity and masculinity indicated one’s gender. Most crucially, the distinction seemed to promise that gender is about social relationships and that women could choose their social identity – their identity was no longer to be determined by ‘natural’ sex, and could thus be changed (Prokhovnik 1999: 112). As Simone de Beauvoir (1949: 295) claimed in The Second Sex: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman’; that is, femininity and masculinity are not fixed by nature once and for all but are rather in a process of ongoing construction. Initially in feminist theories, gender was argued to result from structuralist social relations. Examples of privileged social relations include reproduction, caring, production and sexuality. The feminists

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advocating the above positions are often placed into the categories of Marxist, radical and maternalist feminists. For example, Marxist feminists gave gender a new interpretation as a historical and social construct and turned against previous understandings of gender as a universal, natural and biologically grounded concept (Lykke 2010: 93). For them, gender difference was produced through capitalism and its way of organizing production, reproduction and the economy. Gender differences were based on the historical division of labour in the bourgeoisie family that delegated women into the private sphere of family and care, and men into the public sphere of economics and politics (Lykke 2010: 94). Thus Marxist feminists criticized biologically determinist accounts of gender and the idea of femininity and masculinity as two totally separate and biologically determined sets of characteristics (Lykke 2010: 94). Radical feminists considered patriarchy as the most fundamental and universal structure through which men dominate women, producing gender inequalities in all areas of life, from employment, to culture, violence and politics (Millett 1970; Tong 1989; Walby 1990). Patriarchal norms about male domination and female subordination are maintained through processes of socialization in the family, education and society that make individuals internalize such values and learn specific gender roles from early childhood (Bryson 1992). Sexuality and reproduction are given a central part in radical feminist thinking about gender, as a source of women’s oppression, with women serving as objects of men’s sexual pleasure through prostitution and pornography (Dworkin 1981), biological childbearing being considered a burden due to the consequences for women’s childrearing roles (Firestone 1970; Piercy 1976), or liberation, due to what Rich (1979) and O’Brien (1981) call men’s fear of women’s reproductive powers. It is precisely the connection between what were formerly considered as personal issues – for instance, intimate relationships and childrearing – and a pattern of systematic men’s domination of women in all spheres, that moved radical feminists to claim that ‘the personal is political’, since they believed that problems arising from gender inequalities could only be solved collectively and that political decisions greatly affected personal lives (Morgan 1970 cited in Bryson 1992). These initial gender approaches contributed to political analysis because they defied biological determinism in the understanding of women, and usefully highlighted the relevance of structures and the socially constructed nature of gender, thus opening up possibilities to challenge unequal relations and transform gender roles towards greater

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equality. Through the use of structural concepts, gender research contributed to question the systemic causes of political phenomena that reside in capitalist and patriarchal power. However, two main critiques were raised based on the accusation of essentialism and the limitation inherent in the idea of sex as an unchangeable biological given and a binary understanding of gender. Concerning the first critique, these approaches were criticized for assuming the existence of a singular nature of the social structures which, in turn, created homogeneous concepts of gender or the belief in a sort of true essence of women (Squires 1999: 58). All women, just by being women, were thought to be oppressed in the same way. Towards the end of the 1980s, following criticisms especially from Black and lesbian feminisms, such simplistic positions became untenable (Lorde 1984; Hill Collins 1989). There was a general recognition of the differences within the category of ‘women’. Gender, while including a commonality of struggles of liberation, ‘must not mean a shedding of our differences’ – writes Audre Lorde (1984: 111). While, for example, Marxist feminists found the intersections between gender and class crucial, the categories of race, ethnicity, sexuality and age – along with class – came to be seen as important categories shaping one’s identity and interests. These multiple structures were acknowledged and the accounts of gender became more pluralized (Squires 1999: 59). A more theoretical critique of these initial gender positions suggested that they took sex as an unalterable biological given. It was a foundational, stable category upon which gendered identities were constructed. As a result, the accounts of gender became intensely theorized, while the category of sex was neglected (Squires 1999: 55). Furthermore, a one-way, causal connection between sex and gender was presumed and men and women were posited as exclusionary categories. One can be only one gender, never the other or both (Flax 1997: 175). Both the idea of unchangeable biological sex and the conceptualizing of women and men as binary exclusionary categories provoked the fixing and locking the expression of gender identities, for instance by excluding the concerns of transgender people from the gender activist and scholarly agenda, and blocking subjective and collective transformations (Connell 2002). Due to its capacity to incorporate and respond to the different criticisms that arose within feminist theories, the concept of gender has been maintained and developed, embodying the richness, complexity and multidimensionality of gender realities. Theorizing on gender has intensified and diversified: gender has been conceptualized as an

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analytical category (Hawkesworth 2013) that has been socially and historically constructed (Scott 1986); as a multidimensional structure that both constrains and enables people’s personal and collective lives (Connell 2002); as a gender regime (Fraser 1994; Walby 2009); and as a discourse (Butler 1990; Bacchi 1999). Mary Hawkesworth (2013) suggests that, at its best, gender as an analytic category ‘illuminates an area of inquiry, framing a set of questions for investigation’. These questions include interrogations about the ways in which power operates to produce sex, gender and sexuality within specific racial, ethnic and national contexts. She continues that, as an analytic category, ‘gender need not involve any explicit methodological commitment, merely identifying puzzles or problems in need of exploration or clarification, but it does provide concepts, definitions, and hypotheses to guide research’ (Hawkesworth 2013: 47). Joan Scott has been pivotal for developing gender as an analytic account. Importantly, she provides an account of gender where gender is not a universal causal force, but context specific and historical. She suggests that: ‘Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power’ (Scott 1986: 1067). Scott argues that gender operates in multiple fields that include cultural symbols and representations, normative concepts which help us to interpret the symbols; social institutions and organizations; and subjectivities and identities (Scott 1986: 1067–1068, Hawkesworth 2013: 48). For example, Joan Acker (1989) has developed an account of gendered organizations that is applicable to empirical analyses. She argues that gendered organizations operate in terms of four dimensions: (i) gendered division of labour, (ii) gendered interaction, (iii) gendered symbols and (iv) gendered interpretations of one’s position in an organization (see Chapter 5). Connell (2002) employs gender as a concept involving ‘multiple structures’ (2002: 57) and ‘dimensions in gender relations’ (2002: 56). While Walby (1990) identified six structures that reproduce gender inequalities (paid employment, household production, violence, the state, culture and sexuality), Connell’s gender system includes four dimensions (Connell 2002: 57–68): power relations, production relations, emotional relations and symbolic relations. Power relations operate in many ways: ‘through institutions’ (2002: 59), as in the example of gender biases in selection and promotion of staff, and through discourses, as the discourse of beauty exemplifies by pushing women to unhealthy practices of dieting and surgery ‘because they want to’ since ‘there is

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no Patriarchy Central compelling women to do all this’ (Connell 2002: 59). At the same time, power is contested and involves resistance, as the suffragettes’ struggles against discriminatory laws show. Production relations (Connell 2002: 60–62) are centred on the sexual division of labour, which refers to the fact that some tasks tend to be performed by women and others by men, and this establishes a hierarchy between these groups that tends to disadvantage women. The  main division is that between production and reproduction, with men occupying predominantly the sphere of productive and paid labour and women the sphere of reproductive and unpaid work. The division within the economy also has effects on the education system that prepares young women and men for their future tasks, by promoting the higher enrolment of men in engineering studies and women in humanities. Emotional relations (Connell 2002: 62–65) are centred on sexuality, which in current Western societies is organized around the division between homosexual and heterosexual relations, and where the household is based on the romantic love between two partners. Emotional relations shape gender roles also through oppressive homophobic practices. Gender relations are also symbolic ones, according to Connell (2002: 65–68), because a variety of social processes construct the meanings of what is ‘a woman’ or ‘a man’ through discourse, fashion and cultural practices, so that these acquire particular connotations in specific contexts. An example is that ‘When an American football coach yells at his losing team that they are “a bunch of women”, he does not mean they can now get pregnant’ (Connell 2002: 65). Connell understands these multiple structures that construct gender as interacting and only analytically separate, so that in people’s experience they could all be operating. Feminist scholars have also conceptualized gender as a regime, consisting of ‘the rules and norms about gender relations allocating tasks and rights to the two sexes’ (Sainsbury 1999: 5). The understanding of what the key relations and structures that define a gender regime are is contested. Many researchers have interpreted the relation between production (paid work) and reproduction (care and domestic work) as the most important element of a gender regime (Gottfried 2013). Others, such as Sylvia Walby (2009), think a gender regime is not only defined by the changing relation between paid work and care and domestic work, but also by a variety of other elements including economy, polity, violence and civil society. Gender regimes, according to Walby (2009), vary in relation to the more or less unequal form of gender relations that they produce. The main difference is between ‘domestic’ and

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‘public’ gender regimes. The domestic regime tends to exclude women from access to employment and political representation (few women in waged labour as compared to men, and a heavy burden of unpaid work of care for women; high percentages of men’s political representation compared to women’s low percentages). The public regime, while allowing women to be present in the public sphere, tends to segregate women in less influential and powerful positions. Nancy Fraser (1994) has articulated another influential analysis of gender regimes that considers gender inequalities in care as the central differentiating aspect of such regimes (Fraser 1994). Care is a good example to understand that gender involves interdependent relations, because it would not be possible to understand men’s predominant role in the labour market without taking into account women’s predominant role in care. Fraser presents three different ideal models of care that are at the core of gender regimes: the universal male breadwinner model, the caregiver parity model and the universal caregiver model. The universal male breadwinner model aims at achieving gender equality by promoting women’s employment to allow women to economically support themselves and their families. It includes the creation of employment-­enabling services to free women from unpaid work of care so that they can participate in employment on the same terms as men, and links benefits to employment. Fraser assesses this model as androcentric, as it is based on the male norm, the full-time worker who is free from care, and tries to include women in a male-defined world without changing its terms. The caregiver parity model aims at putting the caregiver on a par with the breadwinner role by supporting informal care work. Women in this model are not asked to be the same as men; double standards to accommodate gender difference are set. In practice this means care would cost less so that women who have care responsibilities can be allowed to support themselves and their families through carework only or through care plus part-time work. The model includes the provision of generous allowances to the caregiver to compensate for childbearing and other care works, equivalent to the breadwinner wage. This model is based on flexibility and a developed system of social benefits. It is less androcentric than the breadwinner model as it values caregiving, but it does not value it enough to ask men to change and do it as well. Considering that none of the former models promote women’s full participation in political and social life, Fraser proposes the universal caregiver model that she presents as follows: ‘A third possibility is to induce men to become more like most women are now namely, people

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who do primary carework.’ (Fraser 1994: 611) The key to equality is to make women’s current life pattern the norm for everybody. This would mean that men – and not only women as it is now – will combine breadwinning and caregiving. Parenting and caring would become more socially shared activities. The opposition between breadwinning and caregiving would be dismantled, everybody would have to engage in paid work less and dedicate more time to care. Deconstructing the division of breadwinning – caregiving between masculine and feminine roles would mean deconstructing the gender order that this division supports, that is deconstructing gender. As Fraser states: ‘Achieving gender equity in a postindustrial welfare state, then, requires deconstructing gender’ (Fraser 1994: 612). This capacity to incorporate the multidimensional character of gender that emerges in feminist contestations has helped the concept survive the criticisms, making gender a useful approach for political analysis, and a widespread one in the discipline named after it as ‘gender studies’, or the subdiscipline ‘gender and politics’. Despite the high level of sophistication and the complex theorizing of the gender structures, mainstream political science continues to see the gender perspective as ‘partial’, as focusing on ‘only on women’ (e.g. Jones 1996). More sympathetic feminist criticisms might evaluate the different gender approaches on the basis of which they succeed in accounting for intersectionality within the category of gender – to what extent the analysis incorporates variations in different women and men’s experiences. Here it is perhaps evident that it is still easy to continue to use ‘gender as a synonym for women’ (Carver 1996). Another criticism might come from deconstructivist approaches that seek to destabilize gender in order to understand how it works as a powerful discursive structure. At the same time these critiques might enquire about the extent to which the gender approaches are able to understand the hold of the broader – for example neoliberal – governance strategy on gender relations.

Deconstruction and political analysis Deconstruction of gender is an approach that makes scholars reflexive about the ways in which gender is constructed in discourses and practices that privilege some representations of the problem/solution of gender inequality over others and construct subjects in specific gendered ways. Epistemologically, this signifies that there is no reality out there but what there is is subject to constant discursive struggles informed by

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power relations. Deconstruction of gender has meant challenging some of the underpinnings of the previous approaches including anything that may be left of biological determinism or cultural essentialism. According to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, deconstruction disrupts and displaces hierarchies and binaries. This disruption is in itself the first contribution of this approach to political analysis. Language constantly tries to build up binary oppositions between terms, of which one has the tendency to establish itself as the signifier that defines the pair, while the other becomes profiled as a mere negation of the first (Lykke 2010: 100). Judith Butler furthermore explains that to deconstruct is not to negate or to dismiss but to call into question and to open up a term to a reusage that previously has not been authorized (Butler 1995: 49). In Butler’s words: ‘To deconstruct terms means to continue to use them, to repeat them, to repeat them subversively, and to displace them from the contexts in which they have been deployed as instruments of oppressive power’ (Butler 1995: 51). In this section, we explore the ‘deconstruction of gender’ approach that has been immensely influential in gender studies (see e.g. Hemmings 2005; Lykke 2010). It has led to an understanding of gender that has shifted away from gender as a noun – a fixed identity that individuals ‘have’ or ‘are’, towards understanding gender as ‘doing’. When gender is done, the analytical perspective of the researcher is directed towards processes that are gendering (Lykke 2010: 52). Deconstruction of gender has resulted in theorizing gender as a discourse that is reproduced and relies on performances of gender. Questions explored in this approach include, for example, how is gender discursively constructed? What meanings does gender take in conceptual disputes? What effects do gender discourses have on people and societies? As an approach to gender and political analysis, deconstruction of gender has been fundamentally shaped by Judith Butler’s (1990) deconstruction of the sex/gender distinction, the significance of which for the gender perspective was explored in the previous section. In Butler’s words: Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. (Butler 1990: 7) Whereas Michel Foucault – whose work was pivotal for Butler’s theory – argues that sex is an effect of sexuality, Butler states that sex is an effect of discourses on gender. Therefore, the theoretical distinctiveness of gender

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from sex, established by earlier feminist accounts, is untenable (Prokhovnik 1999: 106). Like Foucault, Butler stresses the role of heterosexualism in perpetuating the norm of two sexes and two genders. Compulsory heterosexuality is a regulatory practice that renders a uniform gender identity (Butler 1990: 31). The regulatory norms of sex work to constitute the materiality of bodies, and more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of consolidation of the heterosexual imperative (Butler 1993: 2). The cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of identities cannot exist – that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which the practices of desire do not ‘follow’ from either sex or gender (Butler 1990: 17). This focus on norms and normativities around gender, sex and sexuality make Butler so crucial for queer theory too. A second key contribution of the deconstructing gender approach, in terms of the identity of women, is the position that leads Butler to argue that there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender. That identity is performatively constituted by the very ­‘expressions’ that are said to be its results (Butler 1990: 33). The insight that gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true gender identity are constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character (Butler 1990: 180). Furthermore, the performative possibilities for alternative gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality are also hidden (Butler 1990: 180). Performativity is not a singular or deliberate ‘act’, but, rather, the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names (Butler 1993: 2). Doing deconstruction and political analysis has resulted in studying gender as a discourse that is continuously de- and reconstructed in political debates. This is part of the debates on ‘discursive politics’, which have to do with the attribution of meanings to terms in the conceptual disputes that a variety of policy actors engage with (Lombardo, Meier and Verloo 2009: 10). Discursive politics debates study gender equality as an open and contested concept that has no fixed meaning but is, rather, continuously challenged by a variety of actors (Bacchi 1999, 2006, 2009; Verloo 2007; Ferree 2012). This corpus of studies has contributed to showing that the problem of gender inequality can be represented in many different ways, with many different solutions, and that a particular problem conceptualization is at the same time silencing other alternative representations of a problem (Bacchi 1999).

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For example, in the European Union (EU), the idea of women and men ‘sharing tasks’, discussed at the beginning of the 1990s, gradually shifted its meaning to that of ‘women reconciling work and family life’ (Stratigaki 2004), in which a former, more gender-equal, frame was diluted into one of employment and competitiveness in which only women, not men and women, are asked to reconcile (Lombardo and Meier 2008). Discursive politics analyses have also contributed to show how contents of gender equality are reproduced in political debates in ways that can take it very far from feminist aims, for instance by promoting the goal of economic productivity and not of gender equality (Bacchi 2009; Rönnblom 2009; True 2009). In relation to violence, gender violence is not only something that is inflicted by men on women, but the very subjectivities of people are reproduced in discourse on violence, shaping the boundaries of their actions and how they are understood (Shepherd 2007). For example, in the UK context it has been important to construct women victims of violence as ‘survivors’ while in the Finnish context it has been more empowering to go against the discourse of strong Finnish women and create the space for being victims (Kantola 2006). The increasingly broad group of gender and politics scholars who apply this discursive politics approach has explored the gender discourses that different political institutions (such as parliaments, the EU or the World Bank), political processes and policies (such as Europeanization or gender mainstreaming), reproduce and rely on (Smith 1997; Kantola 2006; Shepherd 2007; Wöhl 2008; Bedford 2009; Dean 2010; Krizsan and Popa 2012; Jauhola 2013). One example includes how the World Bank’s aid programme relied on constructions of heterosexual romantic love that resulted in restricted subject positions for women and men in the aid countries (Bedford 2009). Another example is a discourse on welfare states in the Nordic countries that they are the women’s best friend. At the same time, this discourse has produced women the subject position of strong survivors, which has worked against recognizing the comparatively large extent of domestic violence in these countries and the poor service provision, for example in the form of lack of refuge places (Kantola 2006). Masculine violence or masculinized violence, in turn, points to the processes whereby violence is reproduced as masculine in different bodies (Kantola, Norocel and Repo 2011). For example, a study on the violent reproduction of gender in the school shootings in Finland in the 2000s finds how the processes of feminization and masculinization affect the

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constructions of the perpetrators, the police and the schools, and are closely tied to competing discourses about the state from a feminized nanny state to a masculine competition and security state (Kantola, Norocel and Repo 2011). Deconstruction of gender has generated heated discussion, much of which operates on the level of postmodernism versus modernism as Feminist Contentions (Benhabib et al. 1995) illustrates. First, critics, such as Seyla Benhabib, argue that the deconstruction of gender undermines women’s agency and shared identity upon which struggles against different forms of oppression may be based (1995: 29). Also, Martha Nussbaum (1999) argues that Butler’s work on destabilized gender categories makes it impossible to improve the material conditions of women (for challenges to this criticism see Blumenfeld  and Soenser Breen’s special issue of the International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies, ‘Butler Matters’, 2001). Like Benhabib, Nancy Fraser finds Butler’s position problematic and partial. She claims that: In its present form, Butler’s framework privileges the local, the discrete, and the specific. It is not well suited to the crucial work of articulation, contextualization and provisional totalization. Butler’s approach is good for theorizing the micro level, the intrasubjective, and the historicity of gender relations. It is not useful, in contrast for the macro level, the intersubjective and the normative (1995: 163–164). Thus, Butler’s work is argued to hamper feminist attempts to transform the deep economic, social and political structures of domination. Nussbaum argues that Butler’s position leads to ‘the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women’ (quoted in Brookey and Miller 2001: 141). Similarly, a sympathetic critic, Lois McNay, points out how Butler overemphasizes and systematically prioritizes the symbolic and the linguistic over the socio-political (McNay 1994, 1999). To illustrate the importance of the socio-political sphere McNay gives the following example: there is no doubt that the resignification of the term ‘queer’ has been a powerful catalyst in the emergence of a set of gay identities; however, these transformations are also predicated on a complex set of socioeconomic changes associated, on the most general level, with the detraditionalization of social relations in late capitalism (McNay 2000). Also, the

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discourse about the so-called ‘pink pound’, which signals the consumer power of especially gay men, reveals the importance of the material realm and the fact that the social location of the ‘queer’ is not unambiguously marginal. This has helped the ability of these social groups to collectively institute new forms of identity (McNay 2000). Finally, scholars working within women or gender approaches sometimes criticize discursive politics approaches for their lack of dialogue with other approaches (Mazur 2011) or because interpretative approaches would supposedly disregard the scientific method (Mazur and Hoard 2014).

Intersectionality and political analysis Intersectionality has become a key approach in gender studies over the past decade and the gender and politics scholarship is promoting its centrality to political analysis. The objects of intersectional analyses are the inequalities, marginalizations and dominations that the interactions of gender, race, class and other systems of inequality produce. These studies place the core concept of political science, power, at the centre of their analyses and approach it from multiple epistemologies ranging from positivist and constructivist to deconstructivist (as defined above in relation to ‘women’, ‘gender’ and ‘deconstruction’ approaches). While the concept of ‘intersectionality’ may be new to the field, its key ideas were articulated in the 1980s in Black, lesbian and postcolonial feminist theorizing, especially in the US, that exposed the limitations of women-only and gender-only analyses (hooks 1981; Lorde 1984; Combahee River Collective 1986; Anthias and YuvalDavis 1983; Harris 1991; Hill Collins 1991; Mohanty 2003), questioned race, ethnicity, sexuality and class hegemonies among women, and triggered a debate on which voices were in- and excluded within feminism and on how to deal with multiple systems of inequalities. As Audre Lorde inspiringly argued, difference between women ‘must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic’ (1984: 367). The central idea of intersectionality approaches, which is also the first important contribution to political analysis, is that the project to make the world more gender equal demands challenging existing power dynamics between women, ‘for the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ (Lorde 1984: 367). Gender equality can never be achieved as long as other inequalities of class, sexuality or ethnicity still exist (Lombardo and Verloo 2009a). Intersectionality

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approaches pose questions such as: how does gender interact with other inequalities? What power inequalities, privileges and marginalizations does the interaction of gender with other systems of inequality produce? Or how does politics affect differently intersecting groups? Kimberlé Crenshaw’s coining of the very term intersectionality in feminist legal studies gave new analytical purchase to it. Crenshaw (1991) studied how the intersection of inequalities of gender, race and class have consequences on people’s opportunities in life, in areas such as employment and gender violence, and how different political and social movements’ strategies focusing on one inequality are not neutral to other inequalities. She developed the concepts of structural and political intersectionality, which can be considered another important contribution of the approach to political analysis. Structural intersectionality refers to intersections that are directly relevant to individual experiences, as when a black woman is not considered for a job because the norm of the employee is that of a white woman or of a black man. The example Crenshaw gives comes from employment policy and concerns a case of intersectional race and gender discrimination in which five African American female workers took General Motors to court for making them redundant, claiming that they had been discriminated against on the basis of their gender and race simultaneously. Since the court only allowed them to be protected from one axis of discrimination at a time, and their experience of discrimination did not match that experienced by white women or by black men made redundant by the company, their case was rejected. Political intersectionality refers to how political strategies around one inequality are not neutral towards other inequalities. The example Crenshaw (1991) gives this time comes from gender violence policy. It shows that both the white feminist movement and the black anti-racist movement in the US were blocking the publication of police data on domestic violence because, due to the high geographical race segregation of districts in US towns, each group was concerned that if data showed a greater incidence of violence in African American districts this could create problems for their respective cause. White feminists wanted to send the message that domestic violence is a problem that affects all women and not one group in particular, and anti-racist movements were concerned that black men could be even more stigmatized. However, the lack of publication of these data created hurdles for addressing the problem of gender violence experienced by African American women at the point of intersection between race, gender and class.

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Intersectionality is nowadays considered in the literature as a key approach due to its contributions both to policymaking, for developing more inclusive policies in societies that are increasingly diverse, and to legal practice that deals with cases of multiple discrimination. A cascade of articles (e.g. Kantola and Nousiainen 2009; Walby and Verloo 2012; Cho, Crenshaw and McCall 2013; Hill Collins and Chepp 2013), special issues (e.g. International Feminist Journal of Politics 2009; Social Politics 2012; Signs 2013; Politics and Gender 2014) and book series (e.g. Palgrave; Routledge) have developed, showing the increasing popularity of intersectional approaches for political analysis. Researchers have explored the complexity of intersecting categories (McCall 2005), the interaction of systems of inequalities and domains such as economy, polity, violence and civil society (Walby 2009), the influence that inequalities historically constructed as hegemonic in particular contexts have on how politics and social movements deal with other inequalities (Strolovitch 2007; Ferree 2009; Bassel and Emejulu 2017), and the ways in which intersectionality has been institutionalized and applied in policymaking (Verloo 2006, 2013; Hancock 2007; Kantola and Nousiainen 2009; Krizsan, Skjeie and Squires 2012; Walby and Verloo 2012). Approaches that deal with multiple inequalities can do so in many different ways, having consequences at both research and political levels (Weldon 2008). Hancock (2007) distinguished between unitary (tackling one inequality as the most relevant), multiple (tackling several inequalities as equally relevant) and intersectional (tackling intersections among inequalities) approaches. Additive approaches treat inequalities as if they all mattered equally in a predetermined relationship to each other, saying basically that one person could be discriminated against on the basis of more than one inequality, for instance because she is a woman and because she is Asian (Hancock 2007; Kantola and Nousiainen 2009). In research on women’s political representation this approach could lead scholars to add the category of ethnicity to the analysis of women’s representation, analysing what a specific ethnic origin adds to the experience of being a female politician. Politically, an additive model can lead to what Hancock (2007: 68) calls the ‘oppression Olympics’, in which civil society groups compete for the title of being the most oppressed to get attention and resources from dominant groups. Institutional use of additive approaches to multiple inequalities has been criticized by Verloo (2006) due to its assumption of sameness of the social categories connected to inequalities that the EU ‘one size fits all’ approach exemplifies. Criticisms of additive institutional

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approaches to address multiple inequalities has moved researchers to explore the role of institutions in promoting or discouraging dynamics of competition between civil society groups that are concerned with different inequalities, through the analysis of institutional distribution of funding, discourses and procedures that privilege some groups over others (Rolandsen 2008; Lombardo and Verloo 2009b). Other studies of multiple inequalities have tried to explore how categories of inequality do not add up but actually intersect. The first studies on intersectionality adopted an ‘intracategorical’ approach, as McCall (2005) defined it, because they emerged from an interest in exploring the experience of marginalization of people within one category of inequality, gender-based or race-based, who encountered themselves at neglected points of intersection within a specific social group, as in the case of Crenshaw’s study. Intersectionality was needed to understand the experience lived by black women because former gender studies were centred on white women and former race studies were focused on men, and personal narratives and single group analyses started to develop. By contrast, ‘intercategorical’ approaches try to explain relationships among different social groups, placing at the core of their analysis structural relationships between groups and how they are changing (McCall 2005). The aim of studies that adopt an intercategorical approach to inequalities is, according to McCall (2005: 1785): ‘to empirically chart the changing relationships among multiple social groups’. For researchers this means that the subject of analysis is multiple social groups and the method is a systematic comparison of the relations between the multiple groups that constitute a particular inequality category, be it class, gender or race. For example, the incorporation of gender as an analytical category into such an analysis assumes that two groups will be compared systematically – men and women. If the category of class is incorporated, then gender must be cross-classified with class, which is composed (for simplicity) of three categories (working, middle and upper), thus creating six groups. If race-ethnicity is incorporated into the analysis, and it consists of only two groups, then the number of groups expands to 12. (McCall 2005: 1786) Walby (2009) has provided her own conceptualization of the complex interaction of inequality regimes and domains. Complexity of inequalities derives according to her from the simultaneous presence of negatively valued inequality and positively valued difference in social relations, so that, for instance in gender inequality, this means that unpaid work of care includes both inequalities and positively valued

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difference. Complex inequalities are systems of social relations that Walby calls regimes of inequality. There are multiple and intersecting regimes of inequality that coexist, including gender, class and ethnicity. Walby’s (2009) main argument is that each regime of inequality has full ontological depth and cannot be reduced to one specific domain; for instance, gender inequality cannot be reduced to the economy only or to family relations only, but each inequality regime needs to be theorized as a system that is constituted by the domains of economy, polity, violence and civil society. Intersectional approaches have suggested that outcomes of intersections between inequalities should be empirically explored because they cannot be assumed a priori (McCall 2001; Hancock 2007). Hancock (2007) recommends that scholars treat the relationship among inequalities as an ‘open empirical question’ because specific configurations of individual circumstances and institutional contexts can result in intersectional dilemmas. McCall (2001) suggests that observing the specific ‘configuration of inequality’ in each context is useful for pointing out the ‘unique combinations of gender, race, and class inequality’ that make each political context different in both intersection of inequalities and assessment of progress towards equality (McCall 2001: 30). Ferree’s (2009) work on intersectionality has helped scholars reflect on how the hegemonic role of one inequality in a given context, such as race in the United States and class in Germany, affects the historical construction of the political approach to addressing inequality and influences the institutionalization of other inequalities such as gender. Context matters for determining which inequalities are given relevance or silenced in policymaking, studying, for instance, how in the last two decades, in a European context of increased migration, the intersection between gender, migration, ethnicity, class and religion has been put at the forefront of European policymaking (Mügge and de Jong 2013; Lépinard 2014; Siim 2014). This ‘distinctive nexus articulating immigration, ethnicity, religion, and class’ reflects processes of racialization of Muslim identities often through the adoption of policies concerning types of gender-based violence that are considered specific to Muslim migrant women, such as female genital mutilation, forced marriages and veiling (Lépinard 2014: 125). As argued so far, the main contribution of intersectional approaches is to expose the interacting systems of inequalities, and the marginalizations and privileges that they produce for different individuals and groups. When applied in policymaking they have the potential of advancing more inclusive policies (Lombardo and Rolandsen Agustín 2016).

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The main limitation of an intersectional approach is that it is not systematically applied in political analysis, and in policy practice it tends to be applied as multiple discrimination, that is in a reductionist way. Doing intersectional analysis poses methodological challenges to researchers. How to operationalize the complexity of intersectionality for political analysis? McCall (2005) argues that one of the most frequently adopted methodological approaches to study intersectionality is the ‘intra-categorical’, which tries to grasp the complexity of social inequality within one specific social group, such as African American women in Crenshaw’s analysis. Its limitation is that it only sees intersectionality within people of the same social group. In the analysis of the crisis, this would mean, for instance, studying the impact of austerity on different groups of women, but not comparing these groups with men in equivalent groups. Another problem that intersectional analysis could face is that researchers, in their efforts to grasp the effects of intersectional inequalities on specific groups of people and in policymaking, neglect to consider the autonomous effects that each inequality might have (Weldon 2008), and the predominance that one specific inequality could have in each context due to the history and institutionalization of inequalities in which it is anchored, with its related consequences for the framing of public policies (Ferree 2009), so that, for instance, the impact of austerity policies in response to the 2008 economic crisis in the different European countries can be more severe for the less institutionally protected inequality axes in the country.

Postdeconstruction and political analysis The term postdeconstruction is used here to signal a diverse set of debates on feminist new materialism, corporealism and affect theory that come analytically (not chronologically, Lykke, 2010: 106) ‘after’ reflections on the deconstruction of gender (Ahmed 2004b; Hemmings 2005; Liljeström and Paasonen, 2011). These approaches are interested in understanding what affects, emotions and bodily material do in gender and politics. We thus use the term ‘postdeconstruction’ to explore these debates not in a chronological ‘post’ sense but rather as parallel debates about gender that are influenced by and contribute to the previously discussed analytical perspectives. As Nina Lykke suggests: ‘“post” is not a temporal after but rather both transgresses and includes that what came before’ (2010: 106). We find it intriguing that while these debates have generated heated debates in feminist

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theory, there has not been much interest in in applying them in gender and politics research (see e.g. Waylen et al. 2013). In this section and throughout the book we explore the possibilities that these approaches might offer. Some of the questions that could be explored from postdeconstruction approaches include: what do affects, emotions and bodily material do in gender and politics? How does the social organization of emotions affect power inequalities? How are emotions mobilized in gendered, sexualized or racialized political processes? The debate on postdeconstruction emerged as a response to the cultural turn in social sciences and humanities represented by this discussion on deconstruction of gender. We have already discussed how one of the criticisms directed towards the deconstruction of gender was its overemphasis on the linguistic and the ideational. From the new materialist point of view, significant social change cannot be achieved solely by deconstructing subjectivities, discourses and identities. Rather, challenging deconstructionist approaches, new materialists suggest paying renewed scholarly attention to the analysis of the very real socioeconomic conditions and the interests that these serve (Coole and Frost, 2010: 25). In gender theory, this (de)constructionist ‘allergy to “the real”’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 8) had the consequence that biological sex was left untheorized and too little attention was given to bodily materiality and ‘prediscursive bodily facticities’ (Lykke 2010: 107). Nina Lykke asks how to focus on the prediscursive without abandoning the insights of deconstruction discussed above. She proposes the term ‘feminist corpomaterialists’ to highlight the shared focus on materiality of bodies and corporeality but avoids the problematic linkage, for example to feminist Marxists that feminist new materialism implies (Lykke 2010: 107). She discusses sexual difference theories of Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous; corporeal feminism of Elisabeth Grosz (1994) and Moira Gatens (1996); Rosi Braidotti’s (1994, 2002, 2006) nomadic subject; feminist theorists in natural sciences (Haraway 1991; Barad 1996); and finally also places Judith Butler between deconstruction and postconstructionist feminist materialism as representatives of postdeconstruction (Lykke 2010: 108). Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, in contrast, suggest that fundamental changes have taken place in contemporary world that make the postdeconstructionist analytical perspective on ‘matter’ and the ‘real’ particularly relevant and timely. For them, ‘matter is on the move’ in politics. They insist on the label ‘new’ materialism to indicate that unprecedented things are being done ‘with and to matter’ as a result of new technologies relating to nature, life, reproduction and production

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(Coole and Frost 2010: 6). They suggest that a wide range of issues such as climate change, global capital and population flows, biotechnological engineering of genetically modified organisms, the saturation of our intimate and physical lives by digital, wireless and virtual technologies, make the dominant constructivist orientation to social analysis inadequate for thinking about matter, materiality and politics in ways that do justice to the contemporary context of the biopolitical and global political economy (Coole and Frost 2010: 8). In the feminist new materialist debates, matter is no longer regarded as simply passive, as it was previously in political thought. Instead, ‘matter becomes’ rather than ‘matter is’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 10). In political analysis, this places emphasis on economic and political processes and their materiality and impact on bodies. What is also new is accepting social constructionist arguments while insisting that the material realm is irreducible to culture or discourse and that cultural artefacts are not arbitrary vis-à-vis nature (Coole and Frost 2010: 27). Epistemologically, society is simultaneously materially real and socially constructed and our material lives are always culturally mediated but they are not only cultural (Coole and Frost 2010: 27). The epistemology of new materialism is thus a mix of material realism and cultural materialism. Affects and emotions shape individual and collective bodies, cement sexed and raced relations of domination and provide the local investments necessary to counter those relations (e.g. Hill Collins 1991; Spivak 1993; Bhabha 1994a and 1994b; Hemmings 2005). The key question is not what affects are but rather what do they do (Ahmed 2004b). Affective performances materialize and fix the ‘nature’ of subjects and objects and the boundaries between them. An emotion like hate, love or fear organizes its object as fearsome, hateful or loveable. Signs increase in affective value as an effect of the movement between signs: the more signs circulate, the more affective they become (Ahmed 2004b: 45). Affect not only influences how and where bodies can move but it also materializes on bodies as they move through space. It accumulates and takes shape over time: affects of confidence and fear produce very different bodily presences, of entitlement or insecurity, in social spaces (Skeggs and Wood 2012: 136). Importantly for political analysis, affects are seen to be not about individuals, then: they are regarded as deeply social and political formations (Hemmings 2005: 565). In other words, affects are seen to be not outside social meaning and they are considered as not autonomous. Ahmed shows how affect often accumulates around a sign or figure

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(such as the ‘asylum seeker’ or ‘chav’). Such figures become ‘sticky surfaces’ where affects nestle and densely cluster. Ahmed’s (2004a) notion of affective economies captures how feelings are distributed, but not in a disparate way: they are organized socially. For example, ideas about disgust are learned and repeated over time and have been shown to shape class relations. In affective economies, affects align individuals with communities through the very intensity of their attachments (Skeggs and Wood 2012: 159). Shame is an often-studied affect. In international politics, empathy, knowledge and understanding of ‘the other’ have gained feminist attention (Pedwell 2014). While such affects could potentially lead to more ethical political action, feminist scholars argue that there is a need to address the power relations behind empathy (Ahmed 2004b, 2010a; Hemmings 2011).  Carolyn Pedwell asks how emotion and affect emerge and circulate within (rather than outside of) transnational structures of feeling – an imperative that compels us to attend to the importance of social and geo-political positionality and translation in practices of empathy (Pedwell 2014). To target ‘other’ cultures is often to fix them, spatially, temporally and affectively. Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) writes about the neutralizing politics of cultural recognition, whereby to care for ‘the other’ is to identify with ‘their’ culture, while ensuring that neocolonial and neoliberal modes of governmentality remain unimpeded. The neocolonial targeting of ‘other’ cultures for care or empathy, for instance, functions to construct particular cultural groups as backwards and inferior in relation to their ‘Western’ or ‘Northern’ counterparts and puts these cultures into differential geopolitical temporalities (Povinelli 2011: 3). Despite their limited appearance in gender and politics analyses, the new materialist and affect turns can contribute to a political analysis that links theory and praxis. By paying attention to the ‘matter’ in feminist political analysis, new materialism relocates the focus of analyses in the material and not just the cultural roots and consequences of inequality. By theorizing the non-separability of the social and biological, it proposes a monist rather than dualist understanding of human beings through the concept of ‘naturecultures’ (Van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2010). It can contribute to linking the personal and the political by promoting research on the role of emotions in political thinking and behaviour (Neuman et al. 2007) or by placing analyses of everyday life in relationship with analyses of the ordering of the state and international systems (Edwards 2010). The major strengths and achievements of Ahmed’s work, such as the attention she gives to

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affective meaning-making, to the constitution of subjects and objects through performativity and reiteration, and her interest in how affective patterns intensify and sediment over time, are linked to structures of power and privilege (Wetherell 2010: 17–18). The embodied experience of affect can also help to understand how transformative change can occur despite existing social constraints, thanks to the subject’s capacity of autonomous response to such social constraints (Hemmings 2005). New materialism and affect approaches have also been criticized for ‘reinventing the wheel’ or for discrediting former studies (e.g. poststructuralism) by creating a stereotypical image of their features to celebrate the new approach. Concerning the latter, Claire Hemmings (2005) has traced the tendencies to create unnecessary contradictions between approaches to, in this case, mark the ‘newness’ of new materialism and postdeconstruction and to distinguish it from previous approaches. With respect to the former, one could argue that the materialist turn is ‘just’ an updated return to former materialist analyses. The main criticism, from the perspective of feminist political analysis, is that much of the discussion of new materialist approaches seems detached from any consideration of gender and politics. Finally, another critique of the affect literature is that it tends to idealize affect as a subject’s response that is more autonomous and free from social norms than it actually is, whereas examples such as ‘the delights of consumerism, feelings of belonging attending fundamentalism or fascism’ are to be considered ‘affective responses that strengthen rather than challenge a dominant social order’ (Hemmings 2005: 551).

Conclusions We have illustrated in this chapter how one can do gender and political analysis from a variety of perspectives and how it really matters how one defines gender. We introduced the main features of five gender approaches for doing political analysis, which will be explored in detail in this book, and have discussed their contributions and limitations. The women approach places the focus of analysis on women, contributing to make them and their roles and actions visible, and showing limitations in the danger of essentialism and of treating women and men as variables, and in paying insufficient attention to the structures of inequality. The gender approach places the focus on the wider societal structures that construct women and men’s roles, thus contributing

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to show that gender inequality is socially constructed and is the result of a relation between women and men; among its limitations are the dangers of essentialism, the idea of sex as an unchangeable biological given and a binary understanding of gender. The deconstruction of gender approach focuses on the disruption of binaries and hierarchies and on the understanding of gender as discourse, contributing to show that discursive constructions are gendered and that some representations of policy problems/solutions are favoured over others; among its main limitations are the dangers of undermining women’s shared identity, and of forgetting the macro structures of domination. Intersectionality focuses on the intersection of gender with other inequalities, contributing to challenge privileges and marginalizations in theory, antidiscrimination law and policymaking practice; problems of its operationalization and application are among its main limitations. Postdeconstruction of gender includes different debates on new materialism and affect theory that came analytically after debates on the deconstruction of gender, contributing to replace the focus on the material roots of inequality and to promote research on the role of affect in politics; limitations include the discrediting of former studies and its possible lack of originality.

Chapter 3

Power

Power is arguably the key concept for both politics and feminism. For many, politics is defined by its study of power relations. Feminism too is about studying, understanding, transforming, dismantling or reworking gendered power relations. Feminist interest in the transformative aspect of power means that these scholars wish not only to understand the extent to which political processes, institutions, actors and policies (re) produce gender power relations, but also to criticize these power inequalities and to explore how all the former could be changed in order to create more gender-equal society. Amy Allen (1999) suggests that a feminist conception of power needs to account for complex and interrelated forms of masculine domination (power-over); women’s empowerment and resistance to such domination (power-to); and, finally, solidarity as women’s ability to act together to transform inequality structures with collective power (power-with) (Allen 1999: 122). The focus on individual and collective empowerment in the context of domination and the ability to act for progressive change is, according to her, one of the key contributions of feminist theory. While many would intuitively agree with this account, gender and politics scholars, however, differ in their interpretations about how these forms of power are best analysed and approached. Again the ways in which we understand power shapes fundamentally what we study and how we do it. Is power something you can measure? Where is power located and what does it do to actors? Do women use power differently from men? How does power shape us as subjects? How does power define the parameters of our knowledge? How does power work through affects to reproduce domination? The way that the questions about power and gender are formulated very much depends on the analytical approach to power and gender that one adopts. Considering how important power is to gender scholars, there are surprisingly few books about gender and power in politics. Overview accounts about gender and power often map a similar trajectory (see Yeatman 1997; Allen 1999; Squires 1999; Lloyd 2013). First, they

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present the liberal feminist notions of power as something positive (power-to), where women aspire to the power that men have. Second, radical, Marxist and socialist feminists use a notion of power that is more negative (power-over): it is about domination. Third, these overview accounts cover more feminist-inspired notions of power (French feminist philosophers Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray) and point to the impact of Hannah Arendt’s communicative definition of power, ‘to act in concert’. Finally, poststructural and Foucauldian accounts fundamentally challenge the terms in which power is discussed and displace the dichotomy between power-over and power-to (Sawicki 1991). Rather than being repressive, power is productive and produces us as subjects. In this chapter, we approach the complex and contested question of power through our fivefold framework. On the one hand, this allows us to present the feminist debates discussed above. The women approach is very much the liberal feminist approach to power. The gender approach covers the radical, Marxist and socialist feminist approaches but reaches beyond those and studies gendered power relations in current formal and informal political institutions. The deconstruction approach draws upon Foucauldian notions of power as developed and built upon by numerous feminist scholars. We suggest that our framework adds to these traditional studies about power and gender in politics, first, an explicit focus on intersectionality and power, and, second, a discussion on postdeconstruction and power. Intersectional accounts about power bring to the foreground how systems of power, such as sexism, racism or homophobia, intersect, at the same time highlighting the structural and systemic aspects of power relations. Postdeconstruction and power, in turn, shifts our analytical focus to what bodies or affects do in reproducing domination or progressive change.

Women and power In political science, the so-called traditional notions of power draw upon Robert Dahl’s (1957) conception of power where A has power over B to the extent she can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do (‘the first face of power’, see also Weber 1978: 53; cf. Bachrach and Baratz 1962; Lukes 2005: 16). The notion is based on a number of assumptions about power. For example, exercising power is purposeful and active. Power is located in certain places or people and it is a resource that can be shared or owned (see also Allen 2008a; 2008b; Lloyd 2013: 112–114).

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Power can be empirically observed and measured. This notion of power as domination or ‘power-over’ is what Amy Allen defines as ‘the ability of an actor or set of actors to constrain people’s choices in a way that works to the other’s disadvantage’ (Allen 1999: 123). Such a conceptual understanding of power is often implicitly based on the assumption that institutions connected to the modern state – parliaments, governments, courts – are the loci of power. Conceptually, power is considered as concomitant to individuals who wield it in positions of authority within these institutions (Weber 1964: 324–363). Power is (gender)neutral and it is a social good (Lloyd 2013: 113). So, for example, Betty Friedan (1963), a classic liberal feminist, argued that women need political power and access to political institutions (quoted in Lloyd 2013: 113). Analytical approaches that address women and power are underpinned by a traditional – liberal feminist – understanding of gender (as the binary female or male sex), whereby women and men form coherent, unified categories that can be classified. In such political analysis this may lead to an assumption that that the very mechanism of ‘counting heads’ assures an egalitarian outcome; that is, that there are women and men represented in equal numbers in parliaments, company boards, courts or workplaces (Nousiainen et al. 2013: 43). Gendered power thus becomes something that can be measured quantitatively by calculating how many women and men hold positions in the traditional public institutions of politics and economy. Individual merit should be of prime importance in society but women’s equal opportunities are impeded by, for example, legal barriers and restrictions to or differences in resources (Lloyd 2013: 112). Such notions of power and gender (in the form of women and men) have consequences for other key analytical concepts used in feminist political research. Nousiainen et al. explore how such notions of power and women lead to concepts of equality where equality is typically considered on the individual level, legally as individual formal equality before the law, and politically as equality of opportunity (2013: 44). In the legal setting, gender equality is assumed to prevail where women and men have equal formal rights and duties, and legislation is formulated in gender-neutral terms. Creating a ‘level playing field’ for each individual should not involve policies that give privileges to one group or another, which would distort power relations between individuals. Gender equality is measured by comparison between women and with men’s societal activities and behaviour typically upheld as a norm for women to achieve. The notion of gender equality is firmly attached in the first term of the sameness–difference distinction. (Nousiainen et al. 2013: 44).

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As we have suggested in Chapter 2, these ‘women’ approaches make it possible for researchers and gender activists to pinpoint some visible patterns of gender inequality that remain in societies. For example, the lack of women’s economic power evidenced by the vertical gender segregation in businesses has gained heightened attention. Men outnumber women in top executive and board positions. The debate on political party quotas has shifted to company board quotas with some European countries such as Norway having taken the lead (Teigen 2012). The significance of the lack of women in top economic decision making was exposed by the severe economic crisis with the argument that men have mainly used the economic powers that have led to the crisis in the banking sector. Another field that adopts a women approach is the study of women in executive positions, as presidents, prime ministers and in governments, which has become popular as a form of political power. Claire Annesley and Francesca Gains (2010), for instance, study the core executive as a key institution that shapes opportunities and constraints for feminist actors to gender public policies since it controls recruitment, resources and rules. By analysing the feminist actions of two UK ministers, Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, they demonstrate the relationship existing between political executives and the substantive representation of women. Rainbow Murray, on her side, points out that women have succeeded more often in becoming prime ministers than presidents. Where women have become presidents this has been in countries where the president is a ceremonial figurehead and ‘power is concentrated in the hands of the prime minister’. Alternatively, women have been prime ministers in systems where presidents are more powerful. She concludes that women have held less frequently than men the most powerful executive office within a country (Murray 2010: 20). In the field of politics – political power – the study of the domination of men over women has addressed, for example, the power that male party leaders and members exercise over women through formal and informal political practices that marginalize female party members, by excluding them from decision making and assigning them more subordinate roles (Verge and de la Fuente 2014). The advantage of doing political analysis of ‘formal power’, which Verge and de la Fuente (2014) operationalize as holding a party office, is that it can be empirically identified and measured by counting the number of women and men in the party leadership or studying the gender quota politics, if they have one. This possibility of easily identifying and empirically studying formal power is a key contribution of a women approach to analysing

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power. The study of ‘informal power’ or what Verge and de la Fuente (2014) call ‘real power’, which in their study is the capacity for women to have an effective agency in the party, is more difficult to identify and study, especially if we use only one approach (see Chapter 5 for a discussion). The notion of power that often underpins the women approach has been critiqued by scholars who emphasize that power is a ‘relation rather than a thing’ and who seek to ‘de-face power’ by arguing that power impacts also on those who ‘have’ or ‘use’ power, and draws attention to structural power (Young 1990: 31; Hay 1997; Hayward 2000). For example, Clarissa Hayward (2000: 3) defines power ‘not as an instrument some agents use to alter the independent action of others, but rather as a network of boundaries that delimit, for all, the field of what is socially possible’. Iris Marion Young (1980) argues that power is a relation in that men do not possess power independently of women but power consists of a relationship between women and men that gives certain powers to men. Feminist critiques have also pointed out that power in the private sphere falls outside the analytical focus and power is discussed in the context of the public–private distinction. This leads to analyses where power is located in public institutions, rather than private ones, and families, sex and friendships are conceived as outside power relations. (Elshtain 1981; Pateman 1988; Okin 1990). Again, these simplistic accounts of power neglect structural relations of power that shape public relations, policies and institutions. To change these structures, it is not always enough to merely have access to public institutions such as state bureaucracies and parliaments (Yeatman 1997). These institutions may be fundamentally involved in the oppression of women. The women approach to power can indeed easily lead to simplified arguments. One example is the thesis that when women enter institutions, power goes out, or power goes out and women enter institutions. For example, the increased importance of transnational levels of decision making has increased the power of executive vis-ávis parliament and other assemblies where women have made headway in terms of their representation (Dahlerup and Leyenaar 2013: 305). While popular, feminist scholars have critiqued this thesis as simplistic and untestable. Drude Dahlerup and Monique Leyenaar suggest that we should not read a casual link between women’s entry into these institutions and the diminishing power of elected assemblies but rather view them as parallel historical developments (Dahlerup and Leyenaar 2013: 305).

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Gender and power Feminist approaches operating with different notions of gender – as discussed in Chapter 2 – draw on more structural notions of power. The structural aspect of power, in feminist thinking, refers to the fact that power is reproduced through the social structures, practices and mechanisms that create unequal roles between women and men in all social areas, from intimate relations to work or politics. These structural notions of power originate from classic Marxism and were later adopted and developed by socialist feminists and by radical feminist theorizing on patriarchy in the 1970s and 1980s. The key to these analytical approaches is to consider power as structural, systemic and oppressive. Power is conceptualized in negative terms as power-over, coercion or domination (Allen 1999: 12; Lloyd 2013: 116). According to these approaches, power is wielded by some social groups (‘historic blocs’, see Gramsci 1979) in order to ensure their dominant position in economy and/or society over some other, subjugated groups. Power is seen as emanating from a specific basic social conflict, such as capitalist ownership or women’s sexual exploitation by men as a group. The organization and functioning of social structures and institutions, such as the state, the courts, the schools or the media (including those of private relations, such as marriage), are regarded as reflecting this basic social conflict and consequently they are tools of domination utilized by those in power (see Nousiainen et al. 2013: 45). Patriarchal power is systematic and pervasive (e.g. MacKinnon 1987). The solution to resolving this basic social conflict is presented in terms of overthrowing it as well as overturning the power relations emanating from it: the result would be socialism without economic inequality, or a world without women’s sexual exploitation by men (see Nousiainen et al. 2013: 45). Attempts to legitimize power or make the position of those oppressed by power relations better are often seen as ideological tools wielded by those in power (‘bourgeois law’, ‘patriarchal law’). They create a false consciousness among the subjugated through which they accept and even endorse their own oppression (Gramsci 1979; cf. e.g. Wittig 1981; Bordo 1993). For example, gender equality discourses could be conceptualized as a distorting ideology, producing a false consciousness among those subjected to domination – women – by those in power – men (Jaggar 1983; Holli 2002).

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These initial analytical approaches to gender and power have contributed to identify patterns of gender inequality that have systemic rather than individual causes. They have, moreover, given importance to gender and class inequalities as key determinants of women and men’s lives. However, they have faced critiques. For example, they are regarded as universalizing and suffering from essentialism as power oppresses all women in the same way. Too easily all women become powerless or victims of male power, which neglects significant differences within the category of women. At the same time, such approaches fail to recognize the kinds of power, personal and political, that women have (Lloyd 2013: 119). The approaches make it difficult to understand power as something positive, for example in relation to democratic uses of domination, or as power that operates to extend or even constitute the powers of its subjects (Yeatman 1997: 119). Unsurprisingly, there is much more to gender and power than the initial radical, Marxist and socialist accounts would make one think. As a response to the fact that such notions of power rely on the very masculine characteristic of domination, a number of feminists have indeed developed more positive notions of power. They approach power as capacity and ‘power-to’ rather than ‘power-over’ (see Lloyd 2013: 120–124). The accounts have been inspired, for example, by the work of Hannah Arendt (1958, 1970) who defined power as action in concert rather than domination or violence. Some scholars have expanded the dimensions of power-to and power-with to develop an empowerment-based conception of power as a capacity for individual and collective transformation (Wartenberg 1990). It has nevertheless remained important to have analytical tools for understanding structures of gendered power orders. For example, R. W. Connell has developed a notion of gender system that includes four dimensions: power relations, production relations, emotional relations and symbolic relations (2002: 57–68). Power is meant in the sense of one group asserting oppression ‘over’ another, men over women; as ‘power operating through institutions’ as in the example of gender biases in selection and promotion of staff; and in the Foucauldian sense operating ‘intimately and diffusely’, and discursively, where, for example, a discourse of beauty pushes women to practices (diets, beauty surgery) that can provoke ‘much unhappiness, ill health, and even some deaths’ (Connell 2002: 59, see also Chapter 2).

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Neo-Marxist feminists such as Fraser (1993) have conceptualized patriarchal-capitalist power in more comprehensive ways than original Marxist feminists, by unveiling both the socioeconomic structures of redistribution and the cultural practices of recognition of people’s identity that sustain gendered power. Such structural analyses of gender power include theorizing the relative power of different social groups. Fraser (1997: 164) distinguishes hegemonic groups as those who are ‘able to set the terms of debate for many of the rest’ and ‘counterhegemonic publics’ (meaning publics as social groups) as those opposed to hegemonic groups, who experience difficulties in proposing their interpretation of policy problems in the political arena. Social arenas where policy problems are debated, argues Fraser, present unequal conditions of power that favour the interests of hegemonic groups and disadvantage counterhegemonic groups. Since women are often members of non-hegemonic groups, to become more powerful for Fraser they would need greater control over both economic resources and political decision making. Gendered power is also central in the debates about feminist new institutionalism that we discuss in more detail in Chapter 5. In relation to power, feminist new institutionalism highlights the complexities of gendered power relations and how these are ‘constructed, shaped, and maintained through institutional process, practices and rules’ (Krook and Mackay 2011: 4). Such approaches immediately historicize and contextualize gendered power relations in contrast to universalism and essentialism. In a study of women’s political careers in Argentina, Susan Franceschet and Jennifer Piscopo (2014) show how pathways to elected office and the power networks within them contain gendered hierarchies. The hierarchies endure despite institutional changes stemming from the adoption of gender quotas and the corresponding increase in the number of elected women. This illustrates how political institutions can accommodate newcomers while ‘powerful gendered legacies’ nonetheless persist (Franceschet and Piscopo 2014: 89). Gendered hierarchies in public office in Argentina are shaped by the powerful logics of clientelism and federalism in particular (Franceschet and Piscopo 2014: 106). A key issue for research in gender and politics is to look at the relative power configuration of the institutions where women have finally obtained a substantial presence. Drude Dahlerup and Monique Leyenaar develop such a model for identifying the scope and degree of ‘male dominance’ in politics (Dahlerup and Leyenaar 2013: 8–11). The scope of male dominance consists of six dimensions: representation

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(numbers of women and men in elected assemblies), politics as a workplace (male-coded norms and practices), vertical sex segregation (men in top positions in political hierarchies), horizontal sex segregation (women’s and men’s portfolios and committee positions), discourses and framing (gendered perceptions) and public policy (biased in favour of men). The degree of male dominance ranges from male monopoly, through small and large minorities of women (both under 40 per cent), to gender balance.

Deconstruction and power The impact of Michel Foucault has been fundamental to deconstructing some earlier notions of gender and power. With Foucault, power – and with it resistance – become more complex and his theorizing challenged previous gender analyses about power. Some of the key aspects of his notion of power include that power cannot be possessed but is relational; there is never an outside of power relations; and also the seemingly powerless participate in relations of power (Foucault 1978). Thus power does not flow top down, but it is capillary. Rather than being negative and repressive, power for Foucault is a positive force that forms subjectivities. It is here that power is at its most effective, namely when it invites us to certain subject positions, to follow certain norms or practices. In a Foucauldian understanding of power, the relationship between power and knowledge is of prime importance: how knowledge is situated, produced and legitimated and how the power relations produced in these systems of knowledge govern us. Foucault’s conception of power is by no means confined to judicial and authoritarian power. He is more interested in the omnipresence of power: how it governs us in everyday interactions and situations through mundane and expert discourses and how hierarchies and power relations are internalized by the subjects themselves (Foucault 1978). Johanna Oksala (2015) distinguishes between four key features of power in Foucault’s thought: disciplinary power, biopower, governmentality and resistance. Together they illustrate how the exercise of power takes historically varied forms. Disciplinary power works through regulating the way that space, time and people’s behaviour are organized. Disciplinary power is enforced by different systems of surveillance. Feminist scholars explore the complex webs of norms that regulate women’s subjectivities and the punishments that those

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who don’t fit into these norms face (Bartky 1988; Bordo 1993; Butler 1990). A famous essay by Iris Marion Young (1980) is titled ‘Throwing like a girl’ which captures the way that disciplinary power functions on gendered bodies. Biopower and governmentality widen the scope of power from the micro-level of subject formation or the specific institutional contexts of disciplinary power to the domain of the state and the broader rationalities underlying practices of governing (Oksala 2015: 479). Biopower is a concept that can be used to analyse how a certain kind of force charged with regulating life operates to govern bodies and populations (Repo 2015: 11). It is a power that is ‘taking charge of life’ that sometimes, too, uses the tactics of disciplinary power (Foucault 2002/1978). Biopolitics refers to a set of strategies, techniques, knowledges and regulatory discourses deployed to regulate life (Repo 2015: 11). It is a technology for managing populations: births, deaths, reproduction and illnesses of a population. Governmentality, in turn, analyses the rationality techniques and procedures of power that are needed to govern in modernity. For Foucault, the notion of governmentality illustrates the development of a specific type of political rationality and a power technology that were fundamental to the exercise of modern state power. His genealogy of the modern state culminates in an analysis of neoliberal governmentality (Oksala 2015: 481; see also Wöhl 2008: 67). Using these concepts Jemima Repo argues that ‘gender’ is a biopolitical concept: it is ‘a biopolitical apparatus whose deployment precedes its use in feminist theory’ (Repo 2015: 4). As such gender is ‘not the brainchild of feminism’ but as a biopolitical apparatus its genealogy can be mapped back to 1950s psychology (Repo 2015: 4). These entanglements between ‘gender’ and biopower raise serious questions for today’s feminist struggles. Repo suggests that gender equality policy and gender mainstreaming emerged as biopolitical tools of neoliberal governmentality to enable women to work and reproduce, to produce capital and workforce, thus filling a labour shortage gap and easing the pressure on welfare systems (Repo 2015: 3). This means that ‘gender’ cannot be disentangled or rescued from this and a feminist challenge that makes use of the language of gender will always remain a limited one. Finally, Foucault (2002/1982: 329) suggests that in order to understand what power relations are about one should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to change these relations (Oksala 2016). Resistance, like power, is less a thing than an effect of a relation of power. Johansson and Lilja (2013: 269) define resistance as

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‘a response to power from “below”; a subaltern practice that can challenge, negotiate, and undermine power’. They argue that different forms of power create different forms of resistance. Disciplinary power could be resisted by negotiating or challenging norms and hierarchies, or by refusing to participate in self-disciplinary practices that are often very gendered (Johansson and Lilja 2013: 269). Biopower, in turn, could be resisted by refusing to be ‘controlled, monitored, optimized and/or organized’ (Johansson and Lilja 2013: 269). Butler (1990, 1993, 1997a), employing Foucault’s framework, argues that power constrains feminist subjects within a web of heterosexist cultural norms and practices. However, she continues, power can also be subverted from within, when subjects manage to introduce changes in their daily, repetitive, performative practices. In Foucauldian terms, then, it is not possible to step outside of the power relations that constitute both what is being resisted and the resistance. As a result, resistance also involves ‘the reification and reproduction of that which is being resisted’ (Thomas and Davies 2005b: 700; Johansson and Lilja 2013: 271). As the critic and her critique are embedded in relations of power and subjection, we are never in a position to tell whether a given instance of resistance is genuinely subversive of subordination or not (Heyes 2007: 116; Allen 2008a, 2008b). This does not make resistance futile; rather it means that resistance to such power relations must come from ‘within’; that resistance is to be viewed as ‘open to ongoing, never-ending, open-ended contestation’; and ‘our judgments about what constitutes change for the better will have to remain permanently open to contestation’ (Allen 2010: 11). In his late work, Foucault distinguished between power and domination: ‘whereas power relations are always fluid and can be reversed, states of domination are static power relations that have been ossified through institutions. While we can never eradicate all power relations, we can, and we should, eradicate domination’ (Foucault 1997: 299). The Foucauldian notion of power has enabled a deconstruction of the hegemonic discourses on gender equality in different countries, the ideas and issues silenced by this discourse, and the types of political subjects that they produce (see e.g. Holli 2003; Kantola 2006; Lombardo, Meier and Verloo 2009). When seeking to understand the contradictory position of gender equality in Finnish discourse and policies, Nousiainen et al. (2013) deconstruct the binary between the dichotomous pair ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’. They show how gender equality is actively – in different fields such as equal pay or domestic violence – pushed into the grey zone of unlegitimacy. Its position cannot

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be understood with the dominant dichotomy between legitimacy (written in the law) or illegitimacy as its opposite. Rather the position of gender equality can be understood with the Foucauldian working of power that constructs it as unlegitimate and hinders its implementation (Nousiainen et al. 2013; Saari 2015). A Foucauldian focus on the normalizing function of power sheds light on the ways in which Nordic welfare state ideology is now combined with new forms of governance based on neoliberalism (Rönnblom 2009; Eräranta and Kantola 2016). This has promoted the use of regulation typical of what Foucault conceives as characteristic of power in modern societies. Normality in terms of assessment, comparison and ‘evidence-based policy making’ are common in this form of power and have become everyday practices in gender equality work in different European countries. Notions of equality now increasingly rely on indicators and its achievement becomes an issue of technical measurement (Verloo and van der Vleuten 2009). Kristiina Brunila (2009) has scrutinized ­‘projectified’ equality promotion in her analysis of gender equality projects. Projectified equality work means a shift towards a project society where work for gender equality is carried out by externally funded, short-term projects. She shows how the framework of projectified equality work carries a series of contradictory and paradoxical tendencies both for the attainment of the goal (gender equality) and the subjectivities of those trying to perform it, resulting, for example, in a ­self-management of the ‘too feminist’ minds of the equality professionals involved. In the Foucauldian sense, this is a prime example of how discourses not only construe the objects they speak of (here, gender equality) but the speaking subjects themselves (see Nousiainen et al. 2013). Since power and conflict are typical features of politics, silencing or unquestioning them in political discourse shows that power is operating to cover dissent and normalize existing hierarchical relations and norms (Lukes 2005; Lombardo and Meier 2009; Rönnblom 2009). Rönnblom (2009) alerts researchers that when political discourses construct specific issues, such as economic growth, as an unquestioned good, the researchers should scrutinize how power is being used to exclude other issues from the agenda, for instance gender equality, and eliminate contestation and criticism from public debates. Normalization of gender power is also detected in a study of how policy documents frame the concept of power as a potential barrier to women in political decision making (Lombardo and Meier 2009). The study found that Dutch and Spanish policy documents on women’s political representation do not explicitly talk about power. Rather, they implicitly reproduce existing

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power relations in politics, by not questioning, not even mentioning, the male hegemonic position in political institutions as the most significant obstacle to women’s political decision making. We have discussed in the previous chapter the kinds of critiques that have been directed to the deconstruction of gender approach. They are pertinent in relation to Foucauldian-inspired debates on power as well. For example, a frequent critique has been the way in which construing subjects as effects of power means that they are denied agency, unable to change and challenge the conditions of their subordination (see Lloyd 2013: 127). Drawing on Foucault’s late work, the practices of the self as the work that subjects perform on themselves, and developing its meaning for feminist interventions, can be read as one response to these critiques (Oksala 2015: 483). ‘Politics of our selves’ aims at a creative transformation of ourselves by resisting gender normalization (Allen 2008a; 2008b). As Johanna Oksala argues: ‘If we accept the theoretical implications of Foucault’s idea of productive power for gendered forms of the subject, then we have to also recognize the need to engage in transformative practices of the self that target the constitutive effects of power’ (2015: 485).

Intersectionality and power Intersectionality approaches are concerned with the power of actors, institutions or policies to shape and affect people who are differently positioned in relation to class, race and ethnicity, gender, age, disability or sexuality, and their intersections. We suggest that intersectionality makes the analytical debates about power more complex as it requires a study of how patriarchy intersects with other systems of domination such as racism, ableism, heterosexism or homophobia, and age-based discrimination. Intersectionality usefully makes us ask what it means for systems of power to be interactive (Cooper 2015: 386). What kind of marginalization does the interaction of sexism, racism and classism reproduce? When answering these questions, intersectionality can at best expose power, consider the ways in which power intersects, and dismantle systems of power rather than reify them (Cooper 2015: 395–396). While power is a key to understanding intersectionality, there is no one way of defining it within intersectionality theories, which is unsurprising given the debates that surround intersectionality itself (like gender and power). Crenshaw’s (1991) concept of intersectionality made an analytical distinction between the structural and political forms of

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intersectionality (see Chapter 2). Structural intersectionality captures the intersections that are directly relevant to people’s experiences in the society and political intersectionality points to the ways in which political strategies reproduce marginalizations and privileges (see also Verloo 2006: 213; Kantola and Nousiainen 2009: 462–463). Analysing structural and political intersectionalities may require applying different notions of power. Studying structural inequalities directs the analytical gaze to the power of knowledge in the form of feminist standpoint theory and situated knowledge. When exploring this in a study of transgender people’s experiences of race, Kylan Mattias de Vries (2015) draws upon the work of Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks to argue that marginalized groups, who are often more aware of social positions in relation to power, serve as ‘situated knowers’ (Hill Collins 1991). To better understand knowledge production and life experiences within the context of power, bell hooks suggests that we should begin from the margins and theorize to the centre (hooks 1984, 2000). Structural intersectionality also means studying the complexity of social positions in relation to institutional and structural power (de Vries 2015). Pertinent social structures may be composed of various institutions that range from political, economic and military ones to those of kinship, religion and education. Power is the key dimension of each of these in both formal and informal ways (de Vries 2015). Questions about political intersectionality, in turn, are underpinned by such analytical questions about power as who has power to define intersectional issues. Emily Grabham suggests that: ‘Intersectionality teases out what is at stake in decision-making processes, how these processes construct norms across multiple sites of power and identity, and the distributive consequences of complicated norms’ (Grabham et  al. 2009: 10). More constructive or deconstructive notions of power lead scholars to ask how law and state construct inequality categories and how these are underpinned by the workings of power. A focus on power is indeed fundamental to understanding what intersectionality is about. In an important discussion, Brittney Cooper (2015) answers some of the critiques of the concept of intersectionality and argues that intersectionality is often confused with identity politics but that it is fundamentally about power. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s account about intersectionality is based on an understanding of structural power relationships (see Chapter 2). Brittney Cooper argues that in Crenshaw’s original formulation she demonstrated that Black women’s experiences, while intersectional,

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were not reducible to intersectional treatments of race and sex: ‘Intersectionality was a first, formative step that allowed for recognition of the black female subject within juridical structures of power, where she had heretofore remained invisible and illegible and thus unable to obtain any kind of justice’ (Cooper 2015: 390). In other words, if there was no understanding of intersectional systems of power there would always be insufficient attention to Black women’s experiences of subordination. In an important point, Cooper highlights that Crenshaw did not argue for the converse: that intersectionality would fully account for the range or depth of Black women’s experiences. Hence Crenshaw’s work does not indicate that intersectionality would be a tool for accounting for identities at any level beyond the structural (Cooper 2015: 390). It is not about identity politics on a personal level. Cooper argues: Intersectionality’s most powerful argument is not that the articulation of new identities in and of itself disrupts power arrangements. Rather, the argument is that institutional power arrangements, rooted as they are in relations of domination and subordination, confound and constrict the life possibilities of those who already live at the intersection of certain identity categories, even as they elevate the possibilities of those living at more legible (and privileged) points of intersection. (Cooper 2015: 392) To lose sight of intersectionality and power structures is problematic because it creates space for neoliberal forms for governmentality that reduce the spaces for feminist, anti-racist, and other equality politics (Crenshaw 2012: 1452; Cooper 2015: 395; cf. Puar 2007: 215). The priority given to one particular inequality over others, for historical, political, or institutional reasons, can create situations of power unbalance between inequalities. The European Union (EU) a­ nti-discrimination policy, for example, has been criticized for creating a hierarchy of inequalities that, according to different scholars, has tended to prioritize gender (Bell 2002), or ethnicity (Kantola and Nousiainen 2012), or all other inequalities except for gender (Stratigaki 2008). This imbalance of power has consequences for inequality. Ferree (2009) has shown how the hegemonic role of race in US institutional arrangements and class in German ones has influenced the institutionalization of gender inequalities. As Ferree states:

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The meaning of gender inequality is not simply different across countries and contexts but is anchored in a history in which the boundaries and entitlements of racialized nationhood, the power of organized class interests to use the state and the intersection of both with the definition of women as reproducers has been part of politics all along. (Ferree 2009: 100) But inequalities are different and they should therefore be understood and treated in their own right, rather than all be put under the same umbrella, identifying the power mechanisms they share but also how they diverge (Verloo 2006). Feminist scholars and activists, as we suggested in Chapter 1, have developed conceptualizations of power that aim at transforming the reality of inequality through collective action. Allen called ‘power as solidarity’ or ‘power-with’ the power that takes inspiration from Arendt’s ‘action in concert’ (Allen 1999: 122–123). This collective power of solidarity has to do with the building of coalitions between feminist and other social movements, such as the anti-racist or LGBT movements. Scholars adopting intersectional approaches speak of framing feminist alliances with other social movements to bring about political transformation (Ferree 2009), and propose to build contextual coalitions around specific projects that might temporarily unite different social movements concerned with a variety of equality causes (Walby 2009). Empirical analyses of intersectional alliances have found that in some cases social movements do develop intersectional frames to mobilize supporters around their cause, as occurred in the assemblies of the Spanish Indignados movement in Madrid and Barcelona (Cruells and Ruiz 2014). At an institutional level, analysts adopting intersectional lenses have found that Portugal offers potential for the implementation of an intersectional approach, due to its emphasis on the coordination of different equality machinery and on the routinized consultation of civil society (Alonso 2012). Research on institutionalizing intersectionality in Europe (see Chapter 5) has found that civil society groups have built cross-cutting equality coalitions in countries such as Portugal, for the 2007 campaign on the abortion referendum in which the women’s movement allied with trade unions, LGBT and migrants (Alonso 2012), Spain, in support of same-sex marriage in 2005 (Lombardo and Bustelo 2012) or Italy, where the protest against the right-wing government for the 2009 Gay Pride promoted an alliance of the homosexual movement with the anti-racist movement under the slogan of ‘anti-racist pride’ (Lombardo

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and Del Giorgio 2012). Encounters between international actors and civil society have also triggered intersectional politics, as in the case of Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) reporting in Central and Eastern European countries such as Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Poland. In the context of these CEDAW reporting, feminist and other social movements mobilized to discuss problems of elderly and young, poor, rural Roma women, addressing rural/urban gender inequalities and their intersecting with age, class and ethnicity (Krizsan and Zentai 2012).

Postdeconstruction and power Despite the huge diversity within the feminist new materialist approaches, and feminist analyses of body politics or affects, what they share in common in relation to analytical questions about power is their challenge of the power awarded to discourses. For example, feminist new materialists suggest that investigating bodily and natural matter are necessary ‘not to find originating causes but to explore the biological and ecological sites where relations of power take shape and agency is forged’ (Wingrove 2015: 455). Sara Ahmed’s concept of affective economy (see Chapter 2) shows how power works through affects. Affective value or emotional capital comes to be assigned to some figures and emotional displays rather than others. Affect powers and intertwines with cultural circuits of value as some get marked out as disgusting and others as exemplifying modern virtue (Ahmed 2004a, 2004b; see Wetherell 2012: 16). The political significance of affect can indeed be found in the powerful social and political climates of, for instance, the fear and ontological insecurity that it generates (Skeggs and Wood 2012: 135): To ignore affect in these times of greed, avarice, cruelty and insecurity is to miss out the key aspects of the political air we breathe. These feelings are not only part of the realm of the senses but are materialized; most obviously the affects of greed and competition that produced the current economic crisis are now producing fear and insecurity in the majority of the population. Ahmed sees affects containing the seeds of resistance too. In her discussion of happiness, she argues that melancholy can be read as a form of resistance towards the affective norm of being happy (Ahmed 2010b).

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Others disagree; for example, for Lauren Berlant there is no empowering potential in affective structures (Berlant 2011; for a discussion see Mannevuo 2015: 19). Affects not only influence how and where bodies can move, but they also materialize on bodies as they move through space. For example, the repetition of affects over time, such as shame and humiliation, influences the spaces women are willing to occupy and those that they avoid (Skeggs and Wood 2012: 136). Affects of confidence and fear produce very different bodily presences of entitlement or insecurity in social spaces (Skeggs and Wood 2012: 136). Being in politics could be conceptualized as one particular space as illustrated by the effects of gendered hate speech towards women politicians and its impact on acting in politics. Some political topics, including multiculturalism and speaking out against racism or as a feminist, may be particularly affective to speak out about in public. At the same time, Skeggs and Wood show in relation to reality TV that the mobilization of affect can work against what might be presumed to be a more ‘dominant’ representation of meaning in the text (Skeggs and Wood 2012: 149). They discerned, for instance, care for others that replaced the invited and expected moral judgement. Deborah Gould explores the way that power is exercised through and reproduced in our feelings in her study of the destructive work of the affect of despair in the AIDS activism in the 1980s and 1990s US (Gould 2009, 2012). Hope is often deemed necessary for political activism. She shows how despair ultimately opened new political horizons and alternative visions of what was to be done and how. In the case of AIDS activism, it spurred lesbian and gay support for confrontational tactics that had been abandoned in the mainstream and establishment-oriented gay movement (Gould 2012: 107). In this way, there is no a priori way to establish the power of affects and what they do, for example, to movement activism. Laura Suski (2012) studies humanitarianism and how empathy moves us as subjects of humanitarianism. For her, humanitarianism is a form of social discipline that can be understood through the power of emotions (Suski 2012: 129). She maps a shift from sympathy (‘I recognize your pain’) to empathy (‘I feel your pain’). Empathy becomes a socially powerful emotion in its acceptability to undo some of the problematic power structures associated with ‘pity politics’. At the same time, it is enmeshed with power relations related to the histories of colonialism, racism and gender inequality (Suski 2012: 132, see also Pedwell 2014).

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Suski uses Ahmed’s notions of emotions and affects to show how they are not individual but social, how they come from both inside and outside of subjects, and are thus deeply political and enmeshed with existing power relations in a very Foucauldian sense. Emotions both attach us to things and put us in motion. An emotion such as empathy moves between the individual and the social, and the private and the public (Suski 2012: 133): Emotions, it seems, are far less the fuel for the political that we may have imagined them to be, and much more like the political itself. They are a critical part of the project of uncovering injustice precisely because injustice inserts itself to the space of emotion whether we can feel it or not. (Suski 2012: 134–135) Similarly, Sara Ahmed suggests that the emotional struggles against injustice are not about finding good or bad feelings, and then expressing them. Rather, they are about ‘how we are moved by feelings into a different relation to the norms that we wish to contest, or the wounds we wish to heal’ (Ahmed 2004b: 201). Analytical questions in relation to affects and power then include: which emotions become political because they trigger political action and which become apolitical because they do not? How do we associate certain emotions with certain phenomena? Why does anger fit badly as a motivation for humanitarian action (Suski 2012) and why does it fit so well with feminist action in the form of feminist killjoys? (Ahmed 2010b and 2012)

Conclusions The analysis of power from five different feminist approaches has shed new interpretative lights on this key political concept. Women approaches allow analysts to point at visible patterns of gender inequality such as the lack of women’s economic power and male domination in political power. Gender approaches draw on more structural notions of power, linking gender inequality to capitalist and patriarchal power whose causes are systemic rather than individual. Approaches that support the deconstruction of gender tend to draw on Foucault’s understanding of power, by gendering concepts such as biopower and governmentality and deconstructing hegemonic discourses on gender equality and the political subjects they produce. Intersectional

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approaches to power expose the web of hierarchies, privileges and subordination that is produced in the interaction between different inequalities, and the consequences this intersection generates at the individual and political levels. Postdeconstruction perspectives challenge the power awarded to discourse and put their fingers on the power of affects on the economic, political, and social spheres, analysing the effects of emotions mobilized against particular subjects, and their impacts on them. Overall, power, when analysed from this fivefold framework, reveals a multiplicity of faces that make it even more fascinating as a political phenomenon to study, understand or transform.

Chapter 4

Agency

Agency is another key concept in political analysis that, when looked from feminist perspectives, makes visible aspects of social and political reality that are commonly neglected in political analyses. It is defined as the capacity or ability of an actor to act (Hay 2002; Hinterberger 2013), and in this way ‘to have some kind of transforming effect or impact on the world’ (McNay 2016: 39). Agency is commonly associated with autonomy, free will and choice. As with all concepts in political analysis, it is a contested one. It is, moreover, related to other key concepts such as power and structure. It is related to power in the sense that individual and collective capacity to act is both constrained and enabled in different contextual circumstances. In this respect ‘agency can be seen as the ability of the subject to resist, negotiate and transform certain forms of power that work on the subject both internally and externally’ (Hinterberger 2013: 7). Concerning the relation of agency with structure, it is helpful ‘to explore both theoretically and empirically how people think and act within the social conditions in which they find themselves’ (Hinterberger 2013: 7). The agency–structure debate has long been present in sociology and political science in the search for explanations for social and political phenomena. Structure refers to contextual factors (e.g. social practices, political institutions) that show some regularity over time and escape the immediate control of actors. Gender studies of structural factors operating, for instance, in university contexts, explore how gender biases have an impact on the selection and promotion of female professors. Agency, as suggested above, refers to the ‘ability or capacity of an actor to act consciously’, and in this respect it shows a certain degree of deliberate choice and autonomy (Hay 2002: 94). Explanations of social and political phenomena that pay special attention to agency study how the conduct of actors affects the outcomes observed, for example by attributing the introduction of gender equality rules in universities to the deliberate action of feminist academics. While agency and structure have often been discussed as opposed, social constructivists have

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defended ‘the mutual constitutiveness of (social) structures and agents’ (Risse 2004: 161, emphasis in the original). Agents and structures mutually shape each other, because ‘agents are bound by structures, but they are also capable through action of altering the structural environment in which they operate’ (Rosamond 2000: 172). Giddens’ (1984) theory of the constitution of society shows how rules and routines internalized in people’s practical consciousness structure the conditions of social interaction and are reproduced in actors’ daily practices. However, precisely through this interaction, actors can also change their interests, identities and existing social practices. There is thus some margin for people to change within the social structures in which they live. The agency–structure question has been much debated in feminist analyses. Gender structures affect women’s and men’s agency. If agency is capacity to act, feminists have struggled to make women recognized as equally capable to act as men, responsible for their action, and active rather than passive subjects (Madhok, Phillips and Wilson 2013). For example, in 18th- and 19th-century Europe (and in some countries 20th-century too), married women were denied any capacity for independent action from their husbands. Women’s ability to act has been shaped by ‘dominant norms and relations of power’, and in particular ‘patriarchy has construed women as being largely incapable of autonomous action’ (McNay 2016: 41). Feminist analyses on agency, especially by Western scholars, have thus reflected a key concern for feminists, which is to promote women’s independence ‘understood both as freedom from patriarchal oppression and freedom to realise one’s own capacities and goals’ (Madhok, Phillips and Wilson 2013: 7). Feminist political analyses of agency have dealt with a variety of issues. First, women approaches to the study of agency have uncovered and revalorized invisible forms of women’s agency, such as childcare and other care activities, challenging notions of male autonomous actors that fail to account for social interdependence and gendered division of labour (McNay 2016). Second, gender approaches have exposed the structural factors that constrain women’s individual agency in their own daily lives, for example in relation to gendered bodily practices: ‘Practices such as cosmetic surgery, sex work, diet and exercise, wearing high heels, veiling and female genital cutting are often discussed in feminist theorizations of agency’ (Hinterberger 2013: 8). Dilemmas raised in this debate concern the weight given to patriarchal structures as constraints to women’s agency. Do social and cultural structures become over deterministic to the extent that they

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minimize/neutralize women’s capacity to act in patriarchal contexts? Or, do gender scholars wishing to promote a more progressive image of women as empowered and autonomous agents risk not paying enough attention to structures? Third, ‘deconstructing gender’ approaches have conceptualized agency as resistance to patriarchal norms and practices, showing that women can subvert dominant structures, practices and discourses from within. These perspectives have criticized essentialized unitary categories of women that some gender approaches consider necessary for women’s action, due to the exclusions it perpetrates, and have used group identities only as a strategy to achieve common goals. Fourth, intersectional approaches have raised important questions about which women’s agency are we talking about. For example, feminist anthropologists were the first to note that agency as resistance is a Western concept that undervalues how women in non-secular contexts ‘create meaningful identities for themselves within, not against the dominant cultural norms’ (McNay 2016: 40; Mahmood 2004). Finally, postdeconstruction approaches have challenged the very notion of agency by considering the existence of both human and nonhuman agents, and by exploring the consequences of these new forms of agents for feminist agency that wants to increase its potential beyond the binary definition of agency as resistance to domination.

Women and agency Analysing women and agency involves paying attention to women’s ability and capacity to act individually and/or collectively. Good examples of analyses of individual agency that adopt a women’s approach are studies of the substantive representation of women in politics. Substantive representation refers to representatives ‘acting for’ the represented in a manner responsive to them (Pitkin 1967). Works on substantive representation have analysed the role that individual political actors play in promoting women’s interests, however these are defined, and the type of acts that representatives performed in support of women. While a great part of the literature on substantive representation of women has focused on the study of particular acts interpreted as substantively representing women, such as those supporting childcare, equal pay or abortion policies, more recent research has centred upon ‘critical actors’ (Celis 2006, 2009; Celis et  al. 2008). Critical actors are individual women or men that are active within institutions

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or in civil society in the promotion of women’s policy concerns. It is not their number that counts for achieving policy outcomes in favour of women, as theories of a critical mass have defended (Kanter 1977; Dahlerup 1988; Childs and Krook 2008), but their ability to act. Celis’s empirical analyses of women’s substantive representation (2009: 105) found that individual ‘women MPs who were overactive in representing women in proportion to their number’ in the Belgian parliament were more important in making substantive changes for women than the 30 per cent critical mass of women’s representatives that had been formerly theorized in the literature. Women in development (WID) is another scholarly strand that has placed the attention of political analysis on women by criticizing the absence of women in development planning and by calling attention to the roles that women perform in their respective communities (Moser 1993). These studies have made visible the role women play in economic development, through their work as food producers and suppliers for their families; as industrial workers in exploitative conditions (Boserup 1970, 2007); or in the informal economy (Benería and Roldán 1987). The political analysis these gender scholars conducted contributed to questioning the invisibility of women in development planning, which ended up perpetuating gender inequalities in the redistribution and control of the production means, and brought women back on the agenda of development as key actors due to their productive as well as reproductive roles (Lombardo, Meier and Verloo 2013). The novelty introduced by these studies was to place the focus of analysis on women’s agency, as the ability of a subject to act, resist and transform social contexts, practices, and structures of power and inequality that operate on the subject internally and externally (Hinterberger 2013: 7). The focus on women’s individual and collective agency and role, especially emerging in development studies, has also led scholars to reflect on the concept of empowerment, investigating who has the resources that facilitate the ability of making choices and take decisions about their life and that of their community, and whose concerns and interests are taken into account in politics (Kabeer 1999). Empowerment, according to Ferree and Gamson (2003), has two dimensions, autonomy and authority, that together give content and substance to what gender equality may mean. Autonomy means, in their view, individual freedom to make life choices, and authority means collective participation in political authority, in making decisions about the group. Women’s agency is deemed empowered to the extent that women enjoy self-determination vis-à-vis the control of the

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state (autonomy), and to the extent that they have access to decision making (collective authority). Research on women’s agency has also explored what the possibilities of feminist agency are in spite of constraining social and political structures. Feminist research has uncovered ‘marginalized experiences of women’ that prove ‘the capacity for autonomous action in the face of often overwhelming cultural sanctions and structural inequalities’ (McNay 2000: 10). Feminist epistemological perspectives such as feminist standpoint theory have criticized the fact that socially accepted knowledge in Western societies has not been based on women’s perspectives, but rather on the lives of men belonging to dominant social class, ethnicity and culture (Harding 1991). On this premise, feminist standpoint theory has made visible and valorized the role, agency and perspective of women in many different areas of reality – economy, politics, culture, science, history and literature – which female subjects had traditionally been excluded from. By introducing women’s perspectives into dominant knowledge and reality, feminist standpoint theorists intend to offer a more plural and inclusive, and less distorted image of natural and social reality than the one that the official story has told us to date (Harding 1991). This research has contributed to make women’s agency visible in a multiplicity of areas, showing that women can and indeed have acted within existing gendered structures. Feminist standpoint theory has been criticized for sometimes attributing to women a privileged perspective on social reality as if women’s marginalized position in society would somehow make them more ‘authentic’ (McNay 2000). Moreover, the desire to make visible and valorize submerged experiences and agency of women and other marginal groups has sometimes led to ‘uncritical’ celebrations of female agency that understate the role of material structures hindering women’s possibilities of action (Fraser 1997). Women have also organized their agency collectively to pursue specific goals according to their interests. In different world and historical contexts women’s agency has manifested in social movements – sometimes specifically feminist, other times conservative, environmentalist or other – to achieve political change, for women and/or other collectives (Weldon 2002; Celis and Childs 2012; Ewig and Ferree 2013). In particular, comparative studies of women’s movements have revealed the existence of a ‘common core of interests around which women’s movements have organized, consistently and persistently, across time and space’ (Beckwith 2013: 7). These include policy issues such as violence against women, childcare, reproductive rights, civil

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rights, gender equality at work and women’s political representation (Beckwith 1987, 2013; Engeli 2012). In this respect women’s interests have been the basis for women’s collective action and representation organized around particular ideas in politics (Phillips  1995), which might be as specific as the aforementioned policy issues or more generally focused on policies that increase women’s autonomy (Wangnerud 2000). Some scholars have also challenged the idea of a common set of interests around which women would organize their agency, exposing the problems of essentializing women’s interests and not paying attention to their intersectional dimension (Celis 2006; Tripp et al. 2009; Celis et al. 2014). Along these lines, Htun and Weldon (2010: 207) do not ask whether there are common interests around which women’s collective agency is organized, but how we can explain ‘the global variation in gender-equality policies’ taking into account women’s movements action. Women’s interests in these debates are still deemed important organizers of collective political action but the nature of these interests and claims is to be empirically and contextually defined (Celis et al. 2008). Beckwith’s (2013: 411) overview of studies of women’s movements relates that the main questions in these studies of women’s collective agency include ‘women’s movements’ strategic preferences, their alliances with political parties and others, their relationship to democracy and democratization, their policy goals and initiatives, and their success in achieving their ends’. The relations between women’s movements and the state, and the role, evolution, structure and success of women’s policy agencies in promoting women’s claims and increased women’s representation have been important objects in the political analysis of women’s collective agency (McBride Stetson and Mazur 1995; Haussman and Sauer 2007; Outshoorn and Kantola 2007; McBride and Mazur 2010, 2013). McBride and Mazur (2013: 655) distinguish between the study of women’s policy agencies – defined as ‘state-based structures at all levels and across all formal government arenas assigned to promote the rights, status, and condition of women’ (McBride and Mazur 2013: 655) – and the study of state feminism – or ‘the study of the extent to which these structures successfully promote women’s claims and gender equality’ (McBride and Mazur 2013: 654). While the first women’s policy agencies were adopted in the first half of the 20th century in the UN and a few countries, the spreading of these agencies in Western democracies after the 1970s was the result of UN and women’s movements’ pressures on states to establish governmental structures to promote women’s rights (Rai 2003; McBride

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and Mazur 2013). A shift from a women’s to a gender equality approach, and the adoption of the gender mainstreaming strategy characterized this ‘second wave’ of women’s policy agencies in the 1990s (McBride and Mazur 2013: 655). In the 2000s, following developments at the EU level, women’s policy agencies have evolved into structures that also deal with other inequalities than gender, or have seen the creation of separate governmental equality structures dealing (especially but not only) with race and ethnicity discriminations (Kantola and Nousiainen 2009; Krizsan, Skjeie and Squires 2012; for a discussion see Chapter 5 in this volume). The RNGS (Research Network on Gender and the State) network, in its comparative study of women’s policy agencies in Western democracies, analysed the role, activities, structure and impact of these agencies on gendering governmental debates in different issues, from job training to prostitution and political representation (Mazur 2002; Outshoorn 2004; Lovenduski 2005a; McBride and Mazur 2010, 2013). Its aim was to assess the extent to which women’s policy agencies ‘effectively promoted women’s interests within the state, through advancing women’s movements actors’ ideas and claims in policy debates and content and helping the actors that forwarded those claims to gain access to state governing arenas’ (McBride and Mazur 2013: 657). The RNGS study shows that women’s policy agencies matter to the success of the women’s movement, since the more active the agencies are the more likely the state responses reflect the women’s movement goals (McBride and Mazur 2010). Although women’s policy agencies are not a necessary and sufficient condition for the women’s movement to achieve their goals, this machinery can be an ally for the women’s movement, especially when contextual conditions are less favourable. McBride and Mazur have indeed found that women’s policy agencies can and do form alliances with women’s movement actors and this joint agency results in access to the state for women and policy change in favour of the women’s movement goals, with different results and modalities depending on the policy issue at stake (McBride and Mazur 2010: 258–260). They also found that the key factors that helped to explain the cases of women’s policy agencies’ success in the achievement of women’s movement’s goals were ‘agency activities and characteristics of movement, policy environments, agencies, and Left support’ (McBride and Mazur 2013: 667). More specifically these factors included the activities, organization and mobilization strategies of the women’s movement and its interest in the debated issue, the structure of the state and other contextual political opportunities, the type

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of women’s policy agency, and the potentially closer ideological relation of women’s movements to leftist political parties in government. Studies of women’s agency show the active role that women have had in the promotion of their interests and those of the communities they felt responsible for, and how they have been capable of acting both individually – as in the example of critical actors in political representation – and collectively in social movements. The study of women’s policy agencies is an interesting field of political analysis to study women’s collective agency because it combines the analysis of different forms of collective agency – movement and governmental – and their possible interactions. It shows how women’s collective agency organizes and mobilizes in specific contexts and how important it is for women’s advocates to make alliances between state and movement actors so as to promote women’s claims. It is also centrally concerned with constraining political structures (policy environment) and thereby is a good example of the way in which the women approach can be combined with and use the insights of the gender approaches discussed below.

Gender and agency Gender approaches to agency bring to our attention the fact that women’s capacity to act needs to be situated in specific social, cultural, political and organizational contexts and relations that structure women’s action, constraining and enabling it in a multiplicity of ways. The agency–structure debate discussed in the introduction to this chapter therefore forms the background of gender approaches, as does the awareness that all structures are gendered in the sense that they endorse particular gender norms that can hinder or promote women’s action and gender equality. A central acquisition of gender studies is that agency is constrained by the structures in which it takes place. For this reason, Madhok, Phillips and Wilson (2013: 7) have suggested theorizing agency in relationship with coercion, in reference to the fact that ‘agency is always exercised within constraints, that inequality is an ever-present component, and that the constraints relate to social, not just personal, power relations’. The association of agency with coercion is meant to refer to ‘the wider power regimes within which we operate’ – cultural norms, social practices, legal and political rules and practices. This focus does ‘enable us to think both of the social structures that frame

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the possibilities for agency and the social (that is collective) activities through which we exercise it’ (Madhok, Phillips and Wilson 2013: 7). The issue at stake is what the limits and possibilities of women’s agency are within existing gendered structures. Women and men’s agency is differently affected in societies where the sexual division of labour, of intimate relations, and of citizenship construct norms, practices and behaviours that assign them differentiated roles that tend to disadvantage women, as is the case with women’s primary responsibility of care or male dominance in the political arena. Socialization processes have constructed unequal gender norms and roles that have historically treated women as subordinated subjects. When opponents of feminism criticize women’s willingness to comply with traditional feminine roles, feminist scholars have blamed traditional heterosexual gender role models reproduced in family, media and society for constraining women’s action (Meyers 2014). The concept of constrained agency is connected to the idea that agency is a situated, embodied and relational phenomenon (McNay 2016). Agency is situated – according to McNay (2016: 41–42) – because ‘while it is a universal potential, the substantive content and form of action is unthinkable outside specific cultural and social contexts’. It is embodied – McNay (2016: 42) continues – because it is not necessarily ‘reasoned intentionality’ as it includes emotional and affective dimensions, and because ‘dynamics of social control are internalized as bodily norms’ (think, for instance, of cosmetic surgery, diets or virginity rules) and ‘hierarchical structures of class, gender, and race are often naturalized and secured in an “invisible” fashion’. Agency is furthermore relational because it ‘is not a solipsistic assertion of individual will but is inextricably bound up in the web of the interpersonal relations constitutive of social being’. In short, agency is constituted ‘through intersubjective relations and structural hierarchies of power’ (McNay 2016: 42). McNay (2016: 43) challenges the views of scholars that consider women’s agency an individual choice framed in terms of a ­‘losers/choosers’ paradigm, and that do not pay sufficient attention to ‘the underlying power structures that create the possibilities for gendered agency’. Materialist feminists such as Fraser (1997) have argued that access to and redistribution of economic resources are key to women’s agency, as inequality in the gender division of labour, unequal pay, gender discriminations at work and the feminization of poverty significantly shape women and girls’ possibilities for action. The valorization of women’s agency, warns Fraser, cannot imply the neglect of the material circumstances of economic dis/advantage that influence such agency.

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Structural constraints and opportunities are not only of an economic nature, though, they are also institutional and cultural. Bureaucracies and organizations, for instance, oppose resistances to policy initiatives to promote gender equality in policymaking, such as gender mainstreaming (Benschop and Verloo 2011; Mergaert and Lombardo 2014). Benschop and Verloo (2006) report that their actions as gender experts to address the gender biases of the Belgian ministry in which they were hired to apply gender mainstreaming were met with resistance on the part of high-ranking civil servants who preferred a gender-neutral framing of mainstreaming initiatives that seemed less threatening to the gendered status quo. The issue at stake is what gender advocates can actually do in organizations to promote gender equality when they are bound by the norms and practices of the organization. Individuals are bound by patriarchal institutions where they learn the rules of ­‘appropriate’ behaviour. This can mean interiorizing norms about unequal gender roles, which can lead an organization to pay only lipservice to gender equality because egalitarian norms that strategies such as gender mainstreaming promote actually contradict the ‘deep structure’ of the organization (Rao and Kelleher 2005). Individuals within organizations will then perceive the extent to which the institution’s commitment to gender equality and gender mainstreaming is window-dressing and consequently react by supporting or resisting the gender initiative (Díaz González 2001; Rao and Kelleher 2005). Institutional structures can also create opportunities for individual feminist agency to promote gender mainstreaming so that gender advocates can change the norms and the institutional structures in which they operate (Kantola 2006; Eyben 2010: 60). Indeed, institutions and organizations not only constrain feminist agency – according to Eyben (2010) – but also offer discursive and material opportunities that feminist bureaucrats and activists can exploit to promote gender mainstreaming. Not only there are institutions that promote women’s agency (as the example of women’s policy agencies shows), but feminists can also act within unequal institutions to create more womenfriendly places where power relations are more equal. Placing the focus on what the agents can do to apply gender equality within organizations can mean, as Hafner-Burton and Pollack (2000) do in their study, explaining cases of successful implementation of gender mainstreaming by analysing political opportunities opened by institutions, networks of gender advocates and the ways in which these advocates strategically frame gender policy initiatives to make them fit with the dominant frame of a particular institution to avoid potential

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resistance from policymakers that are not familiar with gender equality issues. Ann-Charlott Callerstig (2014: 140–141) illustrates how implementing gender mainstreaming in Swedish local politics required adopting ‘tempered radicalism’ and ‘small wins strategies’. Tempered radicals recognize the existing gender inequalities and want to change them but at the same time are loyal to the values and objectives of the organization in question. They adopt small wins strategies: build alliances and change the organization from within (Callerstig 2014: 140). A key resource in equality struggles for the diffusion of gender norms is that of feminist transnational mobilization, as Van der Vleuten, van Eerdewijk and Roggeband (2014) show in their study of gender-based violence and gender mainstreaming in the EU, South America and South Africa. Varying dynamics of actors’ constellations produce different gender norms in such contexts, challenging institutional discourses and practices when they are considered unequal and exploiting the opportunities arising from the articulation of feminist agency and alliances. While gender approaches have contributed to exposing the influence of gendered social structures on women’s agency, one of the problems in some gender approaches to agency is that they might consider structures as only constraining, and in this way risk denying women their agential capacity by treating them as victims of insurmountable patriarchal structures. This is, for instance, the case in MacKinnon’s (1987) accounts of the patriarchal state depicted as only oppressor and women as only victims of state and male domination. When the weight of structures becomes too heavy in gender interpretations of social reality, the agency–structure relation might prove to be too tight a jacket for understanding women’s action and impact on social reality.

Deconstruction and agency Poststructuralist feminists conceptualize agency as resistance to domination: norms that shape gender identity are mediated through individual practices that when performed allow for variation and innovation and can be ‘acts of resistance to the disciplinary control of individuals’ (McNay 2016: 44). Butler’s idea of constrained agency conceives of agency as embedded in discourses that exist in specific contexts. It contends that there are always possibilities for resisting within the constraints of discursive and material contexts where individuals live.

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The concept of ‘performativity’ has important implications for the agency of women. Butler has argued that the iterability of performativity is a theory of agency, one that cannot disavow power as the condition of its own possibility (Butler 1993). To claim that the subject is constituted is not to claim that it is determined. In contrast, for Butler the constituted character of the subject is the very precondition of its agency (Butler 1995: 46). The subject is constituted and produced in discourses and practices time and again. And the reiteration of norms in different cultures allows for subversion of these norms from within (Butler 1990, 1993). The result, McNay (2016: 45) explains, is that rather than positing oppressive structures on one side and agency on the other, Butler theorizes that ‘empowered agency need not involve an outright rejection of oppressive norms bur rather operates through displacement from within’. In this respect, argues McNay, by expanding Foucault’s remark that the autonomous subject emerges from constraint, Butler has outlined a non-voluntarist conception of agency that breaks out of dualisms of domination and resistance that sometimes hamper feminist thought (McNay 1999, 2000). This perspective contributes to address some of the challenges of the agency–structure debate identified in the discussion of gender approaches, that emerge in MacKinnon’s concept of the state as essentially patriarchal and women as always victims. To  highlight the problems of such accounts, McNay uses the example of lesbian and gay pornography. MacKinnon posits the objects of pornographic representation so unambiguously in the position of victim that it denies the agency of the oppressed. Thus, she fails to recognize that lesbian and gay pornography does not simply replicate structures of victimization, but, in fact, has emancipatory implications for those whose sexuality is denied public expression (McNay 1999, 2000). Poststructural feminism is sometimes criticized on the premise that the deconstruction of the category of women would supposedly paralyse women from action, since they would lack a unitary category to act collectively. The postcolonial writer Spivak (1985, 1990) spoke of ‘strategic essentialism’ to refer to the possibility for a subaltern group of temporarily using a unitary notion of agency to present a public image of the group as if it were more homogenized and united than it actually is. Spivak considers essentialism strategic because it serves the purpose of achieving specific objectives for the group, but she does not praise essentialism as such and does not consider it as real in people’s experience.

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Indeed, from a deconstructionist perspective, the idea of women as a unitary category is in itself a particular discourse and representation of women and of the subject of feminism (Butler 1990). Women, men, feminists and other subjects are all the effects of particular discourses (Grosz 1994) and cannot be posited in absolute terms as oppressors and victims. Therefore, for Butler (1990: 2), feminist critique ought also to understand how the category of ‘women’ is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought. One of the problems with identity politics is that certain subjects are always marginalized and victimized and this risks recreating the meta narratives that have historically excluded voices that do not neatly fit into the unified category of identity (Brookey and Miller 2001: 144). Therefore, the belief that only a unitary category of women can effectively act as a collective subject, from a deconstructionist perspective, may, in fact, assist rather than resist male dominance. A deconstructing gender approach finds possibilities for change and resistance in the fluidity of the category of women that are constructed in a multiplicity of discourses. Butler argues that ‘woman’ itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice it is open to intervention and resignification (Butler 1990: 33). According to McNay (2016) Butler has been criticized for not providing a theory of agency but rather one of structural preconditions for its emergence. For Butler action to resist existing social constraints is not intentional, but rather comes from the reiteration itself. Critics of Butler on this point say that the subversive potential does not come only from reiteration but from the ‘concrete conditions in which action takes place: the nature of the audience, the intention of the performer, and the site of the performance’ so that, for example, in a theatre drag is not subversive (McNay 2016: 45). The assumption that subversion through reiteration is a universal counterhegemonic guarantee has also been challenged on the basis that ‘agency is always historically singular’ and needs to be understood and studied in context (McNay 2016: 46). Postmodern interpretations of individual agency can take the positive assessment of individualism to an extreme, as post-feminist celebrations of girls and women’s freedom in making their own lives exemplify (McRobbie 2009). Madhok, Phillips and Wilson (2013) have warned about the potential misinterpretations in postmodern studies of agency that employ the concept on its own, with no consideration of structural constraints, dominant social norms or dynamics of oppression.

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These studies criticize post-feminist concepts of agency from a gender approach, arguing that the use of agency alone, without considering gender structures ‘can lead to uncritical endorsements of individual efficacy and choice’ (Madhok, Phillips and Wilson 2013: 259). Another set of discursive gender studies has analysed agency through the study of policy, media or other discourses by placing attention on who has ‘voice’ and ‘standing’ in the framing of issues, and what gender roles are constructed (Ferree et al. 2002; QUING 2007a; Verloo 2007). Ferree et al. (2002) in their study of abortion discourses in the media have employed the concept of ‘standing’ to refer to an individual or collective actor that has the opportunity to make a substantive comment about issues of concern. As Ferree et al. (2002: 87) claim: ‘Standing refers to a group being treated as an agent, not merely as an object being discussed by others.’ The MAGEEQ and QUING research projects have applied a critical frame analysis methodology that also pays attention to who has a voice in policy documents, and what roles actors have. The coding of policy texts in QUING research analyses voice by scrutinizing not only who is authoring a text, that is who is directly speaking in the policy document, but also by observing who is mentioned, cited or referred to in a policy document, and how this actor is mentioned (QUING 2007a). It explores what role actors are attributed in the discourse, and if active or passive roles, to find out how women and men are constituted in policy discourses and the extent to which gender biases on male activity and female passivity are counteracted or reproduced. These discursive methodologies allow researchers to identify absence and presence of voices (women, men, feminist organizations, etc.) in policy and media discourses and the extent to which women and men are given active or passive roles in the discourse. Discursive approaches to the study of the symbolic representation of women also offer information about the kind of agency that discourses construct for women and men. For example, frame analysis of EU policy documents on employment and reconciliation of work and family life in the period from 1995 to 2008 show that, although the gendered division of labour is contested in the discourse, women still tend to be constructed as symbols of the private (domestic, reproductive) sphere and men as symbols of the public (labour, productive) sphere (Lombardo and Meier 2008). This symbolic construction of gender, rehearsed through discourse, routine and daily practice, can then have an impact on what people expect from gendered subjects. It can train and form habits so that people will symbolically associate women and men – in politics

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and in daily life – with particular meanings and norms rather than others. Symbolic gender norms reproduced in policy discourses shape particular social roles for women and men, thus legitimizing them, or not, as agents (Lombardo and Meier 2014).

Intersectionality and agency Intersectional approaches to agency contribute to the agency–structure debate by on the one hand making the structures more complex than gender approaches alone would do, and on the other hand by highlighting the agency of women that tend to be victimized, thus challenging the concept of agency from non-liberal and non-secular perspectives. Intersectionality shows that social structures that constrain women’s agency are ‘never simply gendered’ but rather that gendered agency ‘is always so in ways that intersect with hierarchies of class, sexuality and race’ (Madhok, Phillips and Wilson 2013: 2). For instance, the agency of migrant women who are granted or not a permit to reside in a country might be enhanced or constrained by how their gender intersects with their migration and citizenship status, because rights to employment or health benefits are connected to such documentation. Mohanty (2003) has criticized Western feminist representations of ‘Third World women’ as if they were a homogeneous category whose agency were that of victims of male domination. Third World women are constructed in these discourses as the Other, passive and oppressed subjects that are supposed to be universally poor, uneducated, ­tradition-bound and victimized without attention to their class, ethnic or racial dimensions. Mohanty shows, for example, that the practice of veiling cannot be assessed in generalized terms for all contexts and all kinds of women as an oppressive practice that demonstrates the subordination of Muslim women, because veiling can have different meanings for different women in different historical and geographical contexts. In Iran, veiling meant different things at different times for certain women: in the 1979 revolution a group of middle-class women veiled to show solidarity with working-class demonstrating women, while after the revolutionary period the Iranian regime imposed veiling by religious law. Mahmood (2004) goes further in the resignification of women’s agency belonging to non-Western and non-secular contexts. Through an anthropological study of the piety mosque movement women in Cairo, Mahmood (2001, 2004) shows that the understanding of

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agency as freedom from norms and resistance to/subversion of dominant norms is a liberal Western concept that does not manage to grasp the agency of these women. From a Western feminist perspective, women’s religious practices that involve veiling and practising modesty and shyness in interaction with people, especially men, are considered markers of women’s subordination and passivity to patriarchal norms. However, in her view, the concept of agency cannot be universally understood as ‘the capacity to realize one’s own interests against the weight of custom, tradition’, and fixed to a particular context and discourse, such as the liberal ideal of autonomy and freedom, but rather needs to be understood in historically and culturally specific contexts (Mahmood 2004: 8). The pious mosque movement women, according to Mahmood, are making conscious efforts to discipline and cultivate their self so that their inward being matches their outward one, for instance by training themselves in Islamic virtues of shyness and modesty through veiling, and this is to be considered as a form of agency. In her words: what may appear to be a case of deplorable passivity and docility from a progressivist point of view, may actually be a form of agency – but one that can be understood only from within the discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions of its enactment. In this sense, agentival capacity is entailed not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms. (Mahmood 2004: 15) An example of an active way of inhabiting norms, in this view, is the practice of veiling as aimed not at challenging Western norms or strategically using the veil to be accepted in the public space as other studies have argued, but at consciously positioning themselves within the dominant discourses of their religious culture. The suggestion for feminist researchers that comes from this concept of agency as inhabiting of norms rather than resisting them is to separate the diagnostic from the prescriptive part of the feminist project so that women’s emancipation is not considered the only goal of their agency. While Mahmood contributes to an intersectional approach to the study of agency that pays attention to how gender intersects with ethnicity and religion, and unveils ethnocentric conceptual hegemonies of Western feminist research, McNay (2016) finds that her study does not consider the intersection with class. This is because, argues McNay (2016: 48), Mahmood fails ‘to situate the pious practices of the mosque

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movement women in a broader social and political context’ in which the middle-high social class of these women might provide them privileges that allow them to achieve ‘their own personal autonomy through devotional practices’, but this might not be the same for all women in different social classes. The intersection of gender and class is key to women’s agency, as materialist gender approaches have highlighted (Fraser 1997). In current neoliberal times this intersection becomes particularly relevant to feminist agency. Fraser (2013 in McNay 2016: 57) argues that there is an ‘urgent need for feminists to reformulate ideas of agency and reconnect them to a critique of neoliberal capitalism’. Neoliberal governance increases social precariousness and women are particularly exposed given their undervalued and unprotected role as primary carers, generating new forms of exploitation and low-paid employment (Karamessini and Rubery 2014; McNay 2016). In this context, agency needs to be rethought by considering the possibilities for political opposition in the context of neoliberal forms of governmentality and social control (Butler and Athanasiou 2013; McNay 2016: 57). Studies of structural and political intersectionality show how the intersection of gender and other inequalities can and does structure possibilities of action for women, individually and collectively, and what factors can promote women’s agency. Crenshaw (1991) analysed cases of structural intersectionality in which the intersection of race, gender and class constrained individuals’ possibilities of action for African American women, and cases of political intersectionality in which the collective action of white feminist and antiracist organizations ended up marginalizing African American women even further. Studies of social movements’ agency and their interaction with the state such as Tremblay, Paternotte and Johnson (2011) have explored the intersection of sexual orientation and gender and the political contestations and resistance that LGBT claims experienced in different national contexts. Cruells and La Barbera (forthcoming) studied the first intersectional sentence of the European Court of Human Rights in 2012, the Beauty Solomon v. Spain case. Ms Beauty Solomon, the plaintiff, is a Nigerian woman legally residing in Spain, who in conducting outdoor sex work was repeatedly abused, both verbally and physically, by the police. Presenting to the Court witness testimony and documentation of medical reports of the health centre where she went after suffering the violence, Beauty Solomon claimed to have been discriminated against on the basis of her race, gender and social status because the police did

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not similarly abuse the outdoor sex workers who showed ‘European phenotype’. The plaintiff ‘argued that the factors that shape her social position cannot be considered separately, but rather should be taken into account in their mutual and constitutive interaction’ (Cruells and La Barbera forthcoming). The authors of the Beauty Solomon study found out that the individual agency of the applicant, who was actively determined to achieve justice after her experience of race, gender and class discrimination, united to the collective agency of feminist and social organizations who supported the claimant in the trial, were successful micro and meso factors that allowed the counteracting of the limitations of Spanish antidiscrimination law. The specific contextual configuration of the intersection of different inequalities and the agency of individual and collective actors appears crucial in affecting women’s life opportunities.

Postdeconstruction and agency Postdeconstruction challenges what agents are in the first place, arguing that they are not necessarily humans. New materialism scholars suggest the possibility of new forms of agency that come from the interaction of human and nonhuman elements (McNay 2016). Karen Barad employs the concept of ‘agential realism’, which means that there is a so-called ‘intra-action’ between human and nonhuman actors and agents (Barad in Lykke 2010: 120). This refers to phenomena that are only momentarily and temporarily distinguished from each other, that affect each other actively and that transform each other in reciprocal ways. According to Barad (2008), subject and object are not to be seen as independent but rather as ‘entangled phenomena’ (McNay 2016: 54–55), and agency is part of the ‘intraactivity’ between the two. This idea of the intra-action between human and nonhuman actors, elaborates McNay (2016: 53–56), challenges the constructivism that predominates feminist theories of agency, that tend to understand ‘the world and its objects’ as ‘inert entities that receive meaning and significance from the symbolic representations we make of them’. For new materialists such as Coole and Frost (2010: 9), if matter has some kind of agency of its own, a force, vitality, and unpredictability that makes it more than sheer matter, there is a need to rethink modern concepts of agency, causality and change. In this view, it is not only humans who possess ‘agentic capacities’ that have in the past led to assumptions

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about the right to control nature; rather, the natural environment has its agentic capacities too, that help to put the human species into perspective (Coole and Frost 2010: 10). Agency, summarizes McNay (2016: 53), is seen as ‘not the exclusive property of humans but rather as an ever-changing set of potentialities immanent within the energetic and uncontainable dynamics of material existence’. This renewed emphasis on the agency of matter and corporeality has political consequences. First, posthuman feminist theories of agency by valuing nonhuman reality can ‘include broader visions of deep environmentalism’ (McNay 2016: 55), that involve a greater respect for the natural environment and animals and the need to articulate political solutions that take into account natural and animal rights and the dynamics of human–nonhuman interactions. Naomi Klein’s 2014 book This Changes Everything, for instance, shows how human agency under global capitalism has changed the climate in dangerous ways for people, animals and the planet, and how environmentalist agency, both individual and collective, has tried to block this natural destruction in different local contexts and to promote a more respectful and healthy human–earth system. Second, bodies are seen to ‘communicate with other bodies through their gestures and conduct to arouse visceral responses and prompt forms of judgment that do not necessarily pass through conscious awareness’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 20). For example, argue Coole and Frost (2010: 20), in models of deliberative democracy (but this can also be extended to any situation of political interaction, such as political meetings) bodies are ‘significant players in games of power whenever face-to-face encounters are involved’. Ahmed’s (2004b) work shows how emotions form subjects and spaces in gendered and racialized ways and thus shape agency. Fears of black bodies in white racist cultures, especially since 11  September  2001, consolidate stereotypes about black people and contribute to creating distances between bodies, distinguishing ‘those who are “under threat” and those who threaten’ (Ahmed 2004b: 72). This global politics of fear is played out by politicians in racist ways to promote feelings of insecurity among white people against people that ‘could be terrorist’, which are often associated with those who ‘look Muslim’ (Ahmed 2004b: 76). Eventually, this racist economy of fear that sticks together the image of the ‘international terrorist’ with black, Arab and Muslim bodies is detrimental to policies concerning asylum seekers, slowing down European political agreements to provide asylum to people escaping from Syrian or African wars.

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In addition to these ‘negative feelings’, Ahmed has studied the effects of positive feelings, namely happiness, on our actions as political subjects. Affective atmospheres shape our actions through the need to be affected in the right way, for example feeling happy in right moments. Ahmed thereby studies happiness as an ‘affective orientation’, a structure that directs us as subjects in specific ways (2010b: 54). The figure of the feminist killjoy emerges as a challenge to the prevailing ideas of happiness. A feminist killjoy goes against the dominant happiness scripts and emerges as a troublemaker – remaining silent when others laugh at sexist or racist jokes, thus carrying the burden of killing others’ joy (Ahmed 2010b: 59). The figure of the angry black woman, in turn, kills the joy of white feminists (Ahmed 2010b: 67). Ahmed’s analysis thus deconstructs any division to positive, good and negative, bad feelings showing the intimate connections between them in the political work that affects do. Overall, analysing affects involves more messiness than some of the other analytical perspectives discussed here allow for. According to Skeggs and Wood, theories of governmentality cannot grasp this messiness of affects but in an overdeterministic way think that all the subjects relate to the discourses in the same way (Skeggs and Wood 2012: 134–135). In sum, this postdeconstructionist openness to take corporeal interactions into account gives researchers further elements through which to understand political processes, though McNay (2016: 55) admits that ‘it is not easy to see how theories of posthuman agency translate into the type of emancipatory and radical political practice that is claimed for them’.

Conclusions Agency is a concept that has been central to feminist political analyses, particularly due to the need to investigate the complex relation with structure – the power of structures being both enabling and ­constraining – and to understand how women can and do act within the constraints of existing patriarchal and other structures. A women approach places the emphasis on women’s capacity to act, individually and collectively, to express certain claims or represent particular interests. Gender approaches focus on structures, exposing the economic, cultural, social and political constraints that women face in patriarchal societies, and exploring the possibilities of feminist agency in spite of constraining structures. While gender studies of agency have

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commonly focused on individual dimensions that emphasize individual choice, capacity or vulnerability to act, in political analysis researchers are interested in both the individual and collective dimensions of agency. Studies about women’s movements (Beckwith 2013; Ewig and Ferree 2013), women’s policy agencies (McBride Stetson and Mazur 1995; McBride and Mazur 2013) and recent gender studies on agency (Madhok, Phillips and Wilson 2013) have also explored the collective aspect of agency. This allows us to understand ‘how subjects so “systematically” constituted within regimes of power can also “collectively defy it”’ (Kathi Weeks quoted in Madhok, Phillips and Wilson 2013: 7). Deconstructing gender conceptualizes agency as resistance to domination, showing how possibilities of action and subversion of dominant structures occur within the constraints of existing patriarchal structures, practices and discourses. These approaches have questioned the essentialism of gender assumptions about the need for a unitary category of women or their interests as the condition for women’s action against male domination, arguing that the unitary category of women that is implied in these discourses has tended to exclude less hegemonic voices from the category. Intersectional approaches to agency show that agency is constrained and enabled by gender structures intersecting with class, race, ethnicity and other inequalities, and have further challenged essentialisms in the concept of agency from non-liberal and non-secular perspectives, highlighting the agency of women that tend to be victimized in gender approaches. Postdeconstruction approaches consider new forms of agency that come from the interaction of human and nonhuman elements, and explore the implications these could have for political processes (of environmentalism and deliberative democracy among others) and for feminist agency wishing to develop its potential out of the binary definition as resistance to domination. Many gender debates around agency have focused on ‘the extent to which people are seen to be thinking or acting independently from the constraints placed on them by social systems’ (Hinterberger 2013: 7). However, researchers of agency that adopt a variety of gender approaches, such as McNay (2000) and Madhok, Phillips and Wilson (2013) propose to go beyond an understanding of agency as resistance to something constraining, because this would offer an excessively limited account of the actor’s capacities to act. According to these authors, agency should not be seen as the antithesis of coercion ‘as if the measure of how much agency we have is how little coercion has been exercised’ (Madhok, Phillips and Wilson 2013: 3). The conceptualization of agency as resistance to

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domination and constraint is limited because ‘it leaves unexplained the capabilities of individuals to respond to difference in a less defensive and even, at times, a more creative fashion’ (McNay 2000: 3). Madhok, Phillips and Wilson (2013: 3) suggest moving away from ‘simpler oppositions of agent and victim, and towards the complex ways in which agency and coercion are entwined, often in a non-antithetical relationship’. A more varied account of agency is needed to explain how individuals have acted in creative and innovative ways to either promote or hinder social change. ‘With regard to issues of gender, a more rounded conception of agency is crucial to explaining both how women have acted autonomously in the past despite constricting social sanctions and also how they may act now in the context of processes of gender restructuring’ (McNay 2000: 5).

Chapter 5

Institutions

What role do certain institutions, such as parliaments, courts, military, hospitals or schools, play in maintaining inequalities? How can new institutions, such as same-sex marriage, bring about positive change in broader societies? How are inequalities institutionalized in, for example, practices of gendered racial profiling? How do institutions resist change? What do institutions do to people? And how are they connected to other key analytical tools such as power?   If it was once possible to understand institutions in a very narrow way, as state institutions such as parliaments or political parties, or the military, the notion of institutions now encompasses norms, practices and even ideas. In today’s political analysis, institutions can be defined broadly as a ‘stable, recurring pattern of behaviour’ and these institutions are a social phenomenon. In addition to formal political structures and organizations, institutions comprise rules, informal structures, norms, beliefs and values, routines and conventions, and ideas about institutions. Unlike formal institutions, informal institutions are not consciously designed nor neatly specified, but are part of habitual action (Goodin 1996; Lowndes 1996: 182; Peters 1999).   Vivien Lowndes and Mark Roberts (2013: 21–22) discuss the theoretical and analytical developments in the study of institutions in political science through three phases. The first phase of exploration and discovery maps out the role played by old institutionalism in political science. Both the ‘historic heart of the discipline’ (Rhodes 1997: 5) and vigorously attacked, old institutionalism ‘covered the rules, procedures and formal organization of government’ (Rhodes 1997: 68). The second phase of divergence and division signals the rapid growth of new institutionalism and variants of rational choice, sociological and historical institutionalism as well as discursive and feminist institutionalism. Each of the approaches takes a critical stance towards institutions and develops its own theoretical and methodological tools to study them. The third and ongoing phase that Lowndes and Roberts discern is that of convergence and consolidation of the different schools around ‘core

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concepts and key dilemmas in political analysis’ and institutions. These include the notions of agency, power, time and space, and core concepts of rules, practices, narratives and change. Most institutionalists have now developed ‘an engaged approach to the study of institutions in terms of power and disadvantage, inequality and continuing conflict’ (Lowndes and Roberts 2013: 43).  In this chapter, we map out and analyse gender and politics scholarship’s debates about and contributions to institutional analysis. Using our fivefold framework, we first explore the kinds of perspectives that a woman approach to institutions might generate. Celeste Montoya suggests that ‘liberal feminist scholars have investigated gender differences within institutions, but have treated institutions themselves as gender neutral’ (Montoya 2015: 367). We point out the engagements that gender and politics scholars have made with rational choice institutionalism (Driscoll and Krook 2012) as examples of the women and institutions approach. Second, the gender and institutions approach is largely where the feminist debate about institutions is located. Radical feminists have challenged claims of gender neutrality of institutions and explored how institutions entrench male power while socialist feminists have been interested in broader structures of constraint that limit choice and action in systemic ways (Montoya 2015: 367). More recently, feminist scholars have developed the contributions of historical and sociological institutionalism to include and incorporate a gender lens into their approaches (Mackay and Meier 2003; Lovenduski 2005b; Mackay and Kenny 2009; Mackay, Kenny and Chappell 2010; Bjarnegård 2013; Weiner and MacRae 2014). Feminist new institutionalism very strongly engages with the third phase of Lowndes and Roberts’ framework and explores in detail formal and informal institutions with questions about change, and power and agency (Chappell 2011; Krook and Mackay 2011; Kenny 2013; Waylen 2014). The study of informal institutions also includes works on the perpetuation of androcentric norms in parliamentary rituals (Rai 2010) and of institutional resistance to the changes promoted by gender equality initiatives (Benschop and Verloo 2006; Mergaert 2012). Third, deconstruction and institutions allows us to analyse feminist engagement with discursive institutions and its possibilities and pitfalls (Kulawik 2009; Freidenvall and Krook 2011; Bacchi and Rönnblom 2014).  Again, intersectionality and postdeconstruction fall outside of traditional discussions of feminism and new institutionalism (see e.g. Mackay, Kenny and Chappell 2010; Krook and Mackay 2011).

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Intersectional feminist scholars emphasize the simultaneity of multiple oppressions reproduced through institutions (Montoya 2015: 368). They also analyse, in the recent strand of ‘institutionalizing intersectionality’, the ways in which state equality institutions have addressed intersectional concerns and the social and institutional dynamics that have emerged in this process (Kantola and Nousiainen 2009; Krizsan, Skjeie and Squires 2012; Verloo and Walby 2012). Postdeconstruction approaches offer new insights into the analysis of institutions on aspects such as the unpredictable role of people’s emotions for governments (Burkitt 2005; Holmes 2012), the reactions that the appearance of bodily materiality generates within institutions (Beasley and Bacchi 2012), and the affective atmospheres that structure subjects’ relations with institutions (Berlant 2011; Mannevuo 2015).  

Women and institutions  The first approach, ‘women and institutions’, is underpinned by a notion of women as stable and coherent subjects. Women form a unified category and have pre-given interests that can be represented in institutions. Institutions are easily identifiable locations of power. Research that draws upon this approach has illustrated that women are excluded from power, have less power or a different kind of power than men in key political institutions.   Celeste Montoya (2015: 371–372) calls this the liberal feminist ‘women in institutions’ approach. Questions about presence and absence of women in institutions, explored in the literature on the descriptive representation of women discussed in the previous chapters of this book, form an important analytical focus, as do appropriate ‘gender roles’ within various institutional sites, such as parliaments, military, workplaces, schools. Montoya suggests that these approaches clearly distinguish between attributes of individuals and aspects of institutions. In other words, the women and men as actors in the institutions have a sex or gender but the institutions do not (Montoya 2015: 372). Institutions are treated as neutral sites to which inequalities are brought from the outside and gender and institutions are distinct. Similarly, equality in the form of equal participation, can be brought in through mechanisms that ensure equal treatment of women and men in politics or girls and boys at schools (for a related discussion on the state see Chapter 6). 

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Rational choice institutionalism has been one variant of new institutionalism. It places its emphasis on strategic rational action of actors. Because of its emphasis on individuals and their rationality it has hardly been applied in feminist analyses which would often treat notions of ‘rationality’ cautiously due to traditional Western men’s association with rationality and women’s with irrationality. One of the few explorations is by Amanda Driscoll and Mona Lena Krook (2012) where they use the case of Argentinian quota law to explore what the two approaches, gender analysis and rational choice theory, could gain from one another. Argentina was the first country to introduce the quota law in 1991 when women’s political representation was 6 per cent in the Senate and 9 per cent in the House of Deputies (Driscoll and Krook 2012: 210). To the great surprise of the proponents of the quota measures, the bill passed with only minor opposition. This was due to strategic calculations of the key actors and institutional dynamics, such as party discipline. Driscoll and Krook suggest that rational choice theory thus adds to gender analysis the importance of studying the micro-level interactions leading up to the decision to adopt quota measures and the ways in which political institutions – both formal and informal – shape the strategies and constraints of different actors (Driscoll and Krook 2012: 213).   Montoya (2015: 372) critiques the ‘women in institutions’ approach for treating institutions as entirely exogenous to societal structures and immune to power hierarchies. The women in institutions approach fails to analyse women’s treatment within institutions, the institutional dynamics that contribute to persistent inequalities. Second, she suggests that the lack of intersectional analysis is a serious shortcoming of the approach. Women are only discussed in relation to men and there is little differentiation within these categories. Third, the approach is underpinned by a problematic notion of ‘women’s choices’ about participating in certain institutions, which is captured by the popular US discourses about women ‘opting out’ from leadership positions or their need to ‘lean in’ (Montoya 2015: 373). Rather than women’s choices and capabilities, institutional structures are to blame for lack of women in top institutional positions.  

Gender and institutions  When moving our focus to gender and institutions – as opposed to women and institutions – we discuss two key issues. First, we focus upon the relationship between gender and institutions where gender is

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not distinct from institutions but rather gender is their organizing principle. We ask what this means analytically. Second, we ask what key concepts have been developed when analysing gender and institutions and discuss informal and formal institutions, and the ways to understand both change and resistance to the change that gender equality interventions result in.  When one shifts the analytical focus from women in institutions to gender and institutions, the focus changes from women’s presence in and exclusion from different institutions to understanding the gendered structures of these institutions and to transforming them. Gender is no longer distinct from institutions, it is their organizing principle (Acker 1992; Montoya 2015: 374). It is not just institutions that construct gender but gender also constitutes these institutions. Gender power and disadvantage are created and maintained in manifold ways through institutional processes, practices, images, ideologies and distributional mechanisms (Hawkesworth 2003: 531).  In an influential and often-cited quotation Sally Kenney suggests that:   To say that an institution is gendered, then, is to recognize that construction of masculinity and femininity are intertwined in the daily culture of the institution rather than existing out in society or fixed within individuals which they then bring whole to the institutions. (Kenney 1996: 456)    Analytically, the focus shifts to understanding the extent to which the overall institutional structure is formed through gender and the consequences this has for gender equality (Acker 1992). For example, the exclusion of women from political parties has made parties ‘institutionally sexist’ organizations that work on the basis of masculine practices where women are expected to conform to the rules of the game (Lovenduski 2005b: 48). This calls for a focus on the complex relations between gender and institutions and on the processes that continue to reproduce gender hierarchies in institutions.   To explore the significance and implications of these definitions, Celeste Montoya (2015) differentiates analytically between structure, institutions and organizations. We find her distinctions helpful as they say a great deal about what institutions might and might not be in gender and political analysis. For structural analysis, for example Marxianinspired accounts on Iris Marion Young and R. W. Connell, gender and institutions are part of broader societal structures. Institutions, in turn,

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are embedded in structures which shape larger, broader and deeper patterns of social interaction (Montoya 2015: 369). The relationship between structures and institutions can be complex and cyclical: ‘structures underlie and inform the creation and possibilities of institutions; but as products of human action, structures also result from and are the consequence of institutions’. Within the context of structural analysis, institutions are never ‘neutral’ but reflect and reproduce structural inequalities (Montoya 2015: 369).  When individuals refuse to perform in accordance with gender conventions, they can change institutions (for example, challenging marriage institution by cohabiting). Structure, by contrast, is not so easily changed without more dramatic and widespread societal shifts (e.g. in gendered or racialized meanings and orders) (Montoya 2015: 365). Structures are also harder to observe and ‘gain impressive stability’. Once naturalized, structures become very difficult to change. They must be denaturalized and politicized before change is possible (Montoya 2015: 369). Feminist scholars have theorized gender as both a structure, conceiving it as a fundamental ordering of society, and as an institution, a reiterative and performative process. Gender as an ‘institutionalized’ social process connotes a more dynamic, less ‘sticky’, though still constrained understanding than does gender as structures (Montoya 2015: 370). Institutions are also analytically different from the notion of organizations: institutions establish the rules of the game, while organizations are best understood as the players that operate in accordance with and implement those rules (Montoya 2015: 370). Famously, Joan Acker (1990: 146–147, 1992) developed an early analytical framework to explore the extent to which organizations are gendered. Her understanding of gender as a pervasive ordering of human practices comes close to new institutionalism’s definition of institutions as the rules that structure human interaction, whether political, social or economic (Montoya 2015: 370–371). Acker distinguishes four dimensions of the process by which gender differences and hierarchies are constantly produced and reproduced: (i) gendered division of labour, (ii) gendered interaction, (ii) gendered symbols and (iv) gendered interpretations of one’s position in the organization. Acker’s approach has been critiqued for being too essentialist in that it renders all organizations as ‘inherently gendered’: they are ‘defined, conceptualized, and structured in terms of a distinction between masculinity and femininity, and … will thus inevitably reproduce gendered differences’ (Britton 2000: 419, 421–423). A number of scholars have, however, used the approach for

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empirical analysis where the four dimensions can point to variations in the extent to which and the ways in which different organizations are gendered (see Alvesson and Billing 1997; Kantola 2008).   More recently, gender and politics scholars have engaged in debates about new institutionalism and the possibilities of developing feminist new institutionalism. They have applied and developed historical and sociological variants of institutionalism in particular, and have participated in the third phase of institutional theory as identified by Lowndes and Roberts (2013) in developing and advancing the notions about informal and formal institutions and their relationship to change.   Louise Chappell and Georgina Waylen (2013) suggest that informal institutions have become increasingly important in understanding the difficulty of change in gender relations and norms. While formal institutions can be defined as codified rules, enforcement, and legitimacy, informal institutions signify customary elements, traditions, customs, moral values, religious beliefs, and norms of behaviour (Chappell and Waylen 2013: 604). They are ‘hidden and embedded in the everyday practices that disguised as standard and taken-for-granted’ (Chappell and Waylen 2013: 605). As they are less visible, pass unnoticed and are taken for granted, identifying them is challenging for both a citizen and a researcher (Waylen 2014: 213). Methodologically, studying informal institutions requires, for example, ethnographic methods and participatory observation, for which the availability of time, funding and networks is a relevant resource (Rai 2010; Waylen 2014: 213).   Bringing gender into the study of informal institutions means analysing: (i) rules about gender, (ii) gendered effects of formal and informal institutions and (iii) the gendered actors who work with rules (Chappell and Waylen 2013: 606). Gender and politics scholars suggest that interactions between formal and informal institutions are crucial (Chappell and Waylen 2013: 606). This relationship may be competing or complementary as informal rules may subvert or reinforce formal ones (Waylen 2014: 213). For example, Longwe argues (1995, 1997; see Mergaert and Lombardo 2014) that the implementation of gender mainstreaming, while formally endorsed by law, can create a paradoxical clash within institutional contexts that show informal patriarchal norms: while formal bureaucratic principles demand policy implementation, informal patriarchal principles demand evaporation of gender mainstreaming. This happens, in her view, because bureaucracies are not politically neutral institutions in Weberian terms, but rather battlegrounds in which opposing principles, interests, values, norms and objectives are overtly or covertly articulated. Gender norms may

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outlive formal institutional change. For instance, whereas gender discrimination at work has been outlawed in many countries, women are far from equal in the labour market because of marriage or care regimes and expectations about women’s primary care role.   The study of how informal institutions work, in interaction with formal institutions, and their gender implications requires in-depth context-specific analysis because each political arena operates according to its own gendered ‘logic of appropriateness’ (Chappell and Waylen 2013: 608; Kenny 2013). For example, Elin Bjarnegård (2013: 185) has conducted an in-depth study of parliamentary politics in Thailand, finding that ‘in unstable political contexts, formal institutions are often bypassed or ignored […] in favour of informal arrangements’ that end up promoting male dominance in parliament. Her analysis shows that Thai candidate selection procedures for elections are structured on the basis of informal clientelist procedures that favour men over women. Clientelist arrangements favour men due to male advantage in ‘maximising homosocial capital’ (that is ‘social capital that can be used as a currency to achieve electoral success, but that is also reserved for men’) in the enjoyment of networks that are necessary in Thailand to be recruited as candidates (Bjarnegård 2013: 186).   Tània Verge and María de la Fuente study Spanish political parties’ institutional configurations and the daily enactments of informal institutions that they define as the ‘non-codified but still important rules and norms that discourage women from being more active in terms of access, presences and agency’ (2014: 68). They identify five sets of informal gendered practices in party politics that slow down change towards more equal ways of doing politics (Verge and de la Fuente 2014: 72–74). First, men perform gendered rituals in party meetings that include ‘participating regardless of not having substantive or nonrepetitive points to make, and referencing previous contributions of male participants as a means to add legitimacy to one’s point’. This makes men dominate the conversations even in gender-balanced bodies and extends the meetings. Second, women are subjected to ‘supersurveillance’ and carry the ‘burden of doubt’ about their competencies (see also Puwar 2004). Third, women who do not conform to the norm and show political ambition or assertiveness face gendered informal sanctions such as removal from high-ranked offices or a subtle weakening of their competencies. This also increases women’s high turnover (Verge and de la Fuente 2014: 73, see also Kenny 2013). Fourth, political consensus is often sought in informal networks to which women’s access is limited. Bjärnegård (2013: 24) studies the homosocial capital

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that this produces, that is ‘predominantly accessible for other men as well as more valuable when built between men’, which in turn transforms women into illegitimate members. Finally, ‘the full time dedication norm’ sustains men’s power as late-hour meetings and informal networking constitute a challenge for many women due to care responsibilities (Verge and de la Fuente 2014: 73).  Change is a key issue in studying gender and institutions. Progressive change indeed motivates feminist activism and the difficulty of change intrigues gender and politics scholars. Gender norms have proved to be very sticky. As Louise Chappell and Georgina Waylen argue:  Challengers to existing gender logics of appropriateness have often been treated as ‘deviants’ and punished through acts of censure, ridicule, or harassment. With the weight of history on their side, defenders of the gender status quo – those advantaged by existing power arrangements – have often defeated attempts to subvert the existing regime. (Chappell and Waylen 2013: 603)   The recent debates on new institutionalism distinguish between four types of institutional change and gender scholars have built on and developed these (see Mahoney and Thelen 2010; Waylen 2014). First, in the process of displacement, new institutions are created to replace old rules in a process of norm competition as such that could occur if a gender egalitarian ideology of men and women as equal carers were to displace a dominant conservative ideology about women as primary carers (example inspired by Rubery 2014). Gender scholars suggest that this is in fact not a common gender change strategy (Waylen 2014: 218). Even if such a process of change happens it may suffer from ‘nested newness’ where old formal and informal institutions and their legacies still act to shape the new institutions (Chappell 2011).   Second, in layering, new rules are introduced on top of existing ones, and not in competition with them. This is a more common strategy in relation to gender equality. It relies on the fact that actors often have some power to create new institutions (for example legislating on same-sex partnerships) but not enough to displace old ones (such as marriage as an institution that offers more rights to individuals than the institution of partnership) (Waylen 2014: 219).   Third, in drift, the impact of existing rules changes because of shifts in the environment so that institutions have new meaning, as could be the case with increases of women in political parties’ candidate lists promoted by ‘contagion’ with other parties (see Matland and

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Studlar 1996). This may not be an effective strategy for advancing gender equality as it is slow and may remain informal. Nevertheless, such change can be gendered in that societal norms about gender may become more progressive so that some laws or practices are not strongly enforced, for example bans around women’s activities in certain contexts (Waylen 2014: 219).   Finally, in conversion, actors work with the system and utilize any ambiguity within existing rules to get institutions to behave differently in a strategy that is again likely to bring about effective change also in relation to gender equality (Waylen 2014: 220), for instance by using companies’ imperatives of economic productivity to make the ‘business case for gender equality’ and achieve a greater presence of women in companies’ boards.  Institutional and organizational resistances to changes that gender equality interventions promote have become a research subject for gender and politics scholars interested in exposing the informal norms and practices that perpetuate the genderedness of institutions (Benschop and Verloo 2006; Mergaert 2012; Mergaert and Lombardo 2014). Researchers have used participant observation, in-depth interviews, document analysis and focus groups to study resistances opposed during processes of gender mainstreaming and/or gender training within political and educational institutions (Benschop and Verloo 2006; Mergaert 2012; Lombardo and Mergaert 2013; Mergaert and Lombardo 2014; Verge, Ferrer-Fons and González 2017; Cavaghan 2017). Studying ‘causes, dynamics, and consequences of resistances against feminist interventions in organisations’ is useful not only to identify blockages or limited change in the implementation of gender mainstreaming and plan more effective gender policy strategies  (Mergaert and Lombardo 2014), but also to improve political science theories concerning both the study of organizations and that of gender (Benschop and Verloo 2015). 

Deconstruction and institutions  Feminist discursive institutionalism has generated a debate on its possibilities and pitfalls (Schmidt and Radaelli 2004; Kulawik 2009; Freidenvall and Krook 2011; Bacchi and Rönnblom 2014). In attempts to develop ‘discursive institutionalism’, some authors (Schmidt and Radaelli 2004; Kulawik 2009) define discourses as language, ideas or communicative action in a Habermasian sense and give them a

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causal role in relation to institutions. Vivien Schmidt (2008, 2011), for example, argues that ideas and discourse can be independent variables and that it is important to be able to empirically assess when discourses matter or not. Discourses, in her view, need to be taken seriously in political analysis because they are endogenous causes for policy change. For Schmidt (2008), discourse is the interactive process of conveying ideas that comes in two forms: the coordinative discourse among policy actors and the communicative discourse between political actors and the public. In other words, discourses are about communicating one’s views in political processes. To establish the causal impact of such discourse one needs to use methods such as process tracing or comparative case studies (Bacchi and Rönnblom 2014: 173; see also Panizza and Miorelli 2013: 305).   ‘Feminist discursive institutionalism’ has tended, in general, to give discourse a rather limited role and thin meaning. For example, Teresa Kulawik suggests that institutions can be understood as sedimented discourses: ‘What distinguishes them from discourses is that there are relatively fixed functional units that serve certain purposes, such as making binding decisions or distributing social benefits.’ (Kulawik 2009: 268) However, Kulawik finds it important to distinguish between discourses and institutions to make it possible to distinguish between different ‘explanatory factors and their impact for national variation’ (Kulawik 2009: 266–267). In other words, these accounts endorse the need to retain fixed categories for analytic purposes. In line with more traditional political analysis that retain the need to ‘control for variables’, Kulawik suggests that ‘comparative political analysis only makes sense if one can distinguish between categories and their independent formative effects’ (for a discussion see Bacchi and Rönnblom 2014: 180).  Such definitions of feminist discursive institutionalism are very different from more Foucauldian-inspired approaches to discourses and institutions. Carol Bacchi and Malin Rönnblom maintain a critical distance from the notion ‘discursive institutionalism’ because of this tendency to fix institutions as something given, an antithesis to Foucauldian ways of understanding institutions as fluid and in constant need of reproduction (Bacchi and Rönnblom 2014: 171). They define discourses in a Foucauldian way in terms of knowledge and power. Foucault’s notion of discourse refers to knowledge, that which it is possible to speak of, in contrast to language or communication. Discourses are not things but practices that always matter and necessitate critical scrutiny of governing knowledges (Bacchi and Rönnblom 2014: 174). Discourses always matter in relation to ‘institutions’,

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whether they matter or not is not an empirical question (2014: 174). Heterogeneous relations constitute ‘institutions’ as objects of thought. Any attempt to analytically fix ‘institutions’ obscures the politics and power that underpin and form them, leaving them in place as ‘givens’ (Bacchi and Rönnblom 2014: 178).   From a more Foucauldian point of view, then, the key issue is deconstructing institutions and exposing how their unity is discursively maintained and reproduced with particular effects of power. Heterogeneity is the key here. As Bacchi and Rönnblom (2014: 178) suggest: ‘from a Foucauldian perspective, any fixing of “institutions”, much like the fixing of “ideas”, removes from consideration the politics involved in their formation, leaving them in place as “givens”’. To illustrate this one can consider how in Discipline and Punish Foucault studied the practice of imprisonment in contrast to studying the institution of the prison. In Foucault, therefore, institutions are better understood as conglomerations of practices in process, rather than as givens or ‘things’ (Bacchi and Rönnblom 2014: 178).  One analytical tool in deconstructionist approaches has been to study institutions as performative. This follows the idea of gender not as a noun but a practice and ‘doing gender’, and gives rise to such analytical questions as, what do institutions do and how do they uphold their unity and constitute subjects and interests as they do it. Heterogeneity, in turn, signifies that institutions express disparate and, at times, contradictory interests, values and identities and do not necessarily fit together to form a whole or represent functionally desirable solutions (Cooper 1998). Understanding this requires sensitivity to conflicts between and within institutions. It is through re-enactments that the coherence and continuity of institutions is constituted and sometimes destabilized (Sharma and Gupta 2006: 13). The focus is on the construction of gender within specific institutional discourses and practices (Kantola 2006, 2007).   For example, financial economy could be understood as a performative practice, ‘the reiteration of which in the space of everyday life makes capital possible (de Goede 2006: 9, quoted in Bacchi and Rönnblom 2014: 179). A performative practice creates and enacts what it names. Kate Bedford (2009) explores the complex institutional location of World Bank’s gender policymakers, who frame gender policy as producing ‘complementary sharing between men and women’. This results in specific subject positions for women and men in target countries (Ecuador in her case), and particular constructions of femininity and masculinity. The institutional pressure to define gender policy through a complementary

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focus on couples led poor men to become hyper-visible as irresponsible partners, and as the crux of the gender policy problem (Bedford 2009). In turn, World Bank gender policy was focused on efforts to change them, by encouraging their loving attachment to family and willingness to do domestic labour (Bedford 2009). Her analysis thus illustrates the reproduction of gender through institutions and institutional discourses.  Analysing change, a topic that was identified as crucial in the discussion above in relation to gender and institutions, is here done in terms of studying feminist resistance. When reality is understood as enacted or practised and political phenomena as not natural but dependent on being done, spaces are opened up for practices of resistance against institutional arrangements that are perceived as unequal (Ferree 2009). Resistance can then be about subversion, doing differently, which in turn produces room for manoeuvre and for critical interventions (Bacchi and Rönnblom 2014: 179, see Chapter 3 for more on power and resistance).  

Intersectionality and institutions  From its very beginnings intersectionality has highlighted the pivotal role played by institutions in creating and preserving inequalities (Montoya 2015: 380). For example, Patricia Hill Collins emphasizes the importance of intersectional institutional analysis to understand relations of domination and subordination and argues that ‘racism, sexism, and elitism all have concrete institutional locations’ (Hill Collins 1993: 29–30). Much in line with the gender and institutions approach discussed above, institutional analysis and intersectionality emphasize the need (i) to understand the operations of power within institutions and (ii) to assess strategies that are appropriate to change them. However, in addition to gender, intersectionality again explores the intersecting categories that sustain and create these inequalities. Intersectionality and institutions approaches deploy notions of both structural and political intersectionality as defined in Chapter 2 and developed in Chapter 3.  In relation to structural intersectionality, Hawkesworth coins the term racing-gendering to analyse the ways in which the US Congress as an institution works. She defines the process as involving the production of difference, political asymmetries and social hierarchies that simultaneously create the dominant and the subordinate (Hawkesworth 2003: 531). These are active processes with palpable effects. Raced-gendered institutions, in turn, mean that race-specific constructions of masculinity and femininity are intertwined in the daily culture of the institution:  

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Rather than pre-existing the institution and being imported into it, raced-gendered identities are negotiated within the operating practices and professional roles of the organization. To accomplish their legislative goals, Congresswomen of color must attend to the cues they receive from their white colleagues and make decisions about how best to work within the institution. (Hawkesworth 2003: 537)   For example, while lobbying is a normal practice among representatives, the tactics of bargaining, negotiating and conciliating may be race-gender specific: Within systems of racial and gender power, when subordinates ‘tell the facts’, they must do so in a way that assuages the egos of their superiors. Within such hierarchical frame, it will not do for women and people of color to inform a white male that he is mistaken; they must also acknowledge and appeal to his noble nature, in accordance with which he would have done the right thing if only he had been in command of full information. (Hawkesworth 2003: 538) Hawkesworth analyses the ways in which presumably gender- and raceneutral institutional norms shift in ways that make political actions of African American Congresswomen difficult. For example, at the committee level these women were silenced, bypassed and marginalized in stark contradiction to the presumably neutral ways in which the committee was supposed to operate and foster politics (Hawkesworth 2003: 536).  Political intersectionality can be very much interpreted to be about different institutions. It calls us to analyse how intersectionality is institutionalized – as certain practices – in, for example, social movements or equality institutions. Laurel Weldon (2011) makes a strong case for social movements as a key to the representation of the concerns of marginalized groups. She argues: ‘Mobilization of socially and economically disadvantaged groups is more easily undertaken in the informal, fluid world of social movements, because formal institutions tend to disempower and exclude these groups’ (Weldon 2011: 2). Social movements, however, tend to be unitary, namely they focus on single grounds of inequality (race or gender, for instance) as opposed to being intersectional (as in minority women’s organizations). Dara Strolovitch (2007: 7) evaluates the representation of marginalized groups in the US. To evaluate intersectional representation empirically she asks how civil society organizations act on questions that affect their marginalized subgroups. To what extent and how do, for example, majority

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women’s movement organizations include and represent the concerns of minority women and their organizations? One of her key findings is that issues affecting advantaged subgroups (e.g. violence against majority women) are given disproportionality high levels of attention, whereas issues affecting disadvantaged subgroups (e.g. welfare reform) are given disproportionately low levels (Strolovitch 2007: 8). Activism is also conducted in different ways so that the tactics used on advantaged subgroup issues are far more effective and resource and time consuming and involve more intensive coalition-building efforts.   Another strand of research on intersectionality and institutions, called ‘institutionalizing intersectionality’ explores the ways in which traditional state-based equality bodies, such as women’s policy agencies and equality machineries, have integrated intersectional concerns into their ways of operating (see Kantola and Nousiainen 2009; Kriszan, Skjeie and Squires 2012). The research conducted under this heading is interested in the ways in which and the extent to which intersectionality becomes institutionalized in legal, policymaking and political institutions. In European countries, national and European Union (EU) anti-discrimination and equality laws have traditionally focused on single grounds, resulting in gender equality laws and race discrimination acts. For example, in the Nordic countries, gender has been a privileged ground of protection and a target of equality policies (Borchorst et al. 2012). This unitary model has come under challenge and the EU has emerged as a key actor in pushing for legal and political developments in the field of ‘multiple discrimination’ in Europe (Kantola and Nousiainen 2009, 2012; Lombardo and Verloo 2009b; Kantola 2010).   Feminist research about these developments is currently booming. It ranges from analysing the EU’s approach to equality, intersectionality and multiple discrimination (Kantola and Nousiainen 2009, 2012, Lombardo and Verloo 2009b) to evaluating its impact on ‘equality architectures’ in member states (Kriszan, Skjeie and Squires 2012; Verloo and Walby 2012), and to developing new analytical tools in relation to intersectionality and equality policy debates to assess these changes (Krizsan 2012; Strid, Walby and Armstrong 2012).  While the EU policy emanates from many institutional sources that can sometimes contradict one another – for example the European Parliament’s (EP), the European Commission’s (EC) or the Court of Justice of the European Union’s (CJEU) policies and rulings – feminist research has outlined the contours of EU policy on intersectionality and multiple discrimination. This generates a number of interesting insights on intersectionality and institutions: the current ways in which intersectionality is appropriated to existing policies and legal frameworks

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in Europe. In terms of institutional analysis, one can study both the EU model on institutionalizing intersectionality, its innovations and shortcomings, and the national solutions to the policies and laws emanating from the EU. This is one example of the institutional variation that EU policy can result in within the member states. Europeanization is a very uneven institutional process in which national institutional solutions prevail and inform the implementation of EU equality policy (as in layered change, as defined above) (see e.g. Kantola 2010, 2015; Lombardo and Forest 2012).   Therefore it comes as no surprise that there is no overall European institutional pattern in terms of the direction in which countries are moving. Equality institutions in the member states are characterized by a continued complexity ranging from separate to unitary equality bodies and laws, with many refusing to fit this categorization (Krizsan, Skjeie and Squires 2012: 224; Verloo and Walby 2012). It is equally important to differentiate at the national level between the varying institutions in the equality architecture that range from law-enforcing and policymaking bodies to consultative bodies. These may all move in different directions in terms of institutionalizing intersectionality, which complicates the picture further.   To capture some of this complexity Andrea Krizsan, Hege Skjeie and Judith Squires characterize different equality architectures and their attempts to deal with different inequalities as ‘layered’, ‘hierarchical’, ‘dual’, ‘integrated’ and ‘anti-equality’ (Krizsan, Skjeie and Squires 2012: 221–225). Importantly, the national solutions reflect different institutional legacies, discursive and political opportunity structures and past hierarchies between different inequalities in the member states (Krizsan, Skjeie and Squires 2012: 210). Krizsan (2012) shows how hierarchical configurations, where other inequalities are added to existing gender institutions in an asymmetric way, seem to be the most dangerous in that they can fuel competition and conflict. Mieke Verloo and Sylvia Walby (2012: 434) stress the importance of this finding because of its counter-intuitiveness: ‘keeping gender to some extent privileged in a multiple setting with other inequalities endangers gender because it adds conflicting dynamics’. 

Postdeconstruction and institutions  We have seen above that formal and informal institutions are about norms, rules and practices. Some of these are more established or entrenched than others, and change takes different forms and degrees.

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In general, however, there is an analytical interest in identifying certain patterns and disruptions to these. Deconstruction approaches have already challenged the unity of institutions. A focus on affects and emotions adds even more unpredictability and ambivalence into the study of institutions. Ambivalence here means the simultaneous experiencing of contradictory emotions such as pride and shame, and unpredictability refers to the uncertain impact of emotions (Holmes 2012: 118). Institutional crisis and institutional change bring multiple emotions to the surface.  Governments may, for example, try to control people’s emotions but results are always unpredictable, as Ian Burkitt demonstrates in relation to the London peace march in 2003 and the Madrid train station bombings in 2004 (Burkitt 2005). Emotions are ambivalent and unstable and government’s attempts at ‘inciting, inducing and seducing a people to gain support for its own agenda may fail and be counterproductive provoking resistance’ (Burkitt 2005: 693). For example, in London, anger was directed at the then prime minister Tony Blair for not listening, rather than at Saddam Hussein. In Madrid too, fury was directed at the government for taking the country into war against Iraq. Emotions then play a complex part in political protests and processes. As Burkitt argues: ‘powerful emotions are not only involved in the reproduction of the social order, they also threaten its very existence, especially when they are acted out in collective ritualistic performances’ (Burkitt 2005: 693).  Approaches to political analysis that take affects, materiality and embodiment into account suggest that the materiality of bodies tends to provoke people’s emotional response. This is because, as Ducey (2007: 201) argues, a body has the capacity to affect others and to be affected. When this materiality of bodies (physically) enters political institutions, it triggers debates and emotional reactions (Puwar 2004). Beasley and Bacchi (2012: 110) give the example of different situations in which breastfeeding mothers and children were expulsed from the Australian Parliament for reasoning that went from the prohibition for ‘strangers’ to enter the institution to the ‘disruption’ that an infant might cause to parliamentary work. Similar debates have emerged in countries such as Spain, where the presence of a female MP from the Podemos party entering the Parliament with her baby became politically controversial. Politicians’ reactions to these embodied experiences show that bodies matter in politics and are capable of generating a variety of emotions and interpretations. Some actors see acts such as breastfeeding in parliament as inappropriate. Feminist commentators interpret these acts as helpful to rethink the relation between the public and the private

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spheres, and effective in showing with immediacy how the personal is political (Beasley and Bacchi 2012: 108; Martínez-Bascuñán 2016), while they also criticize them for perpetuating a traditional image that associates women with nurturing. Be it an intentional act of protest or of simply mothering, the presence of babies and breastfeeding mothers in parliaments puts bodies and caring issues unequivocally on the agenda.   Beasley and Bacchi (2012: 107, 103) call ‘social flesh’ this ‘fleshly materiality’ of bodies. These acts of ‘social flesh’ described above are political because, according to the authors, they break the boundaries of what is considered as legitimate or normative within the public sphere of parliamentary institutions. As Beasley and Bacchi (2012: 111) argue, the expulsion of babies from parliaments is an expulsion and denial of the ‘fleshly materiality’ of human bodies: ‘Indeed there is nothing like a crying, excreting infant to remind us of where and how we all started.’ They interestingly ask how ‘the presence of children, with all their unruly fleshliness’ could reorient the political priorities of a parliament (Beasley and Bacchi 2012: 112).  Rather than talking about institutions, affect theories and studies more often focus on structures. Lauren Berlant’s (2011) notion of affect highlights the relationship of the subjects to structures such as capitalism that creates the gendered, racialized and classed spaces for action. The subjects’ attachments to these structures create an understanding of what it is like to be in this world despite the way in which these attachments feel (Berlant 2011). Following this, Mona Mannevuo asks why people attach themselves affectively to dreams and modes of action in working life that are problematic as such and do not increase well-being (Mannevuo 2015: 18). For her, discourses and ideologies about work life form an ‘affect factory’ where the production of the category of an ideal worker relies on certain affects in a process that is gendering and racializing.  A key concept that this brings to institutional analysis is that of affective atmospheres. Affective atmospheres is a concept developed by Berlant (2011: 14–15) and means that there are historically moulded structures in relation to which the subject evaluates the possibilities of her actions. Examples of this are the different attachments to the precariousness of working life (see Jokinen, Venäläinen and Vähämäki 2015; Mannevuo 2015). Affect is a structure that informs institutions. In many fields of politics, subjects are defined affectively and according to this structure (e.g. knowledge about what a worker is today). But it does not follow that the subject is the same as this definition, merely

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that she is organized in terms of the structure (Mannevuo 2015: 19). Another example of powerful affective atmospheres could be nationalism that invites people to its happy atmosphere (as, for example, during the Olympic Games in London, see Stephens 2015) but at the same time makes criticism difficult. The affective atmosphere becomes a deeply political structure.   Beverly Skeggs’ (1997) research about class and gender is a good example (see Mannevuo 2015: 20). Although she does not use the notion ‘affective atmospheres’ she analyses how the actions of ­working-class girls – where they can go, how they must behave, or dress – are strongly defined by the affective atmosphere of middle-class morals and values. Skeggs herself calls this symbolic violence, under which the girls can read from others’ gestures, choices of words and expressions how they themselves are perceived. Later in her work Skeggs takes her distance from the Foucauldian inspired theories of governmentality through the notion of affect (see Skeggs and Wood 2012). She suggests that governmentality is overdeterministic and affect, in contrast, brings out the contradictions and illogical breaks. Affects, then, are ambivalent in their effects (Mannevuo 2015: 21). 

Conclusions  Gender and politics scholarship has made important contributions to institutional analysis. Women approaches to institutions have studied women’s presence or exclusion from institutions and have applied micro-level analyses characteristic of rational choice institutionalism to explain opportunities and constraints individual actors face within institutions. They have been criticized for treating institutions as if they were immune to unequal gender power relations that are typical of social structures. By contrast, treating gender as an organizing principle of institutions and unveiling power hierarchies and biases that shape all institutions is at the core of gender analyses. Scholars in this approach have developed feminist institutionalism theories to grasp the dynamics of gender power operating within formal and informal institutions and the resistances to changes that gender equality interventions seek to promote within institutions.   Deconstruction approaches put discourses centre stage in the analysis of institutions, doing it differently depending on the strand that is chosen: discursive institutionalism studies discourses as independent variables or communicative resources that help to explain policy

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change within institutions; and Foucauldian approaches aim at deconstructing constantly changing institutions to expose how the latter are discursively constructed, what power effects this discursive construction has on subjects, and what the possibilities for subverting institutions are.   Intersectionality approaches study the ways and extent to which institutions address intersections between inequalities, with the twofold aim of making the power dynamics that create inequalities visible and changing them. Research about ‘institutionalizing intersectionality’ studies how existing gender and other equality institutions have changed to take into account intersectional concerns, and what power dynamics are triggered between more and less privileged inequalities in the process of applying intersectionality within institutions.   Postdeconstruction approaches, while not directly talking about institutions, offer new lenses for reorienting the analysis of institutions on issues less explored in former approaches. These include the ambivalence and unpredictability of people’s emotions towards governments, the impact of bodily materiality on institutions, and the affective atmospheres that filter individuals’ relations with institutions. When looked at from any of these approaches, institutions appear as fluid battlegrounds of formal and informal norms, of practices, discourses and emotions that can block or promote change towards gender equality in society.  

Chapter 6

Polity

Polities are not gender-neutral entities. Democracies, autocracies, states and nations are gendered constructions that have important gender implications for people and societies. Feminist analyses of polities ask the question: does polity matter for gender equality? And if so, how? (see Tripp 2013). From different approaches they have shown that the ways in which democracies and autocracies treat women and men defines the kind of polity they are, and the individual rights and opportunities that they open or close off. For example, the quality of a democratic polity is related to the extent to which women are included in polities as peers with men, can exercise popular control over a polity equally with others, and are authoritatively recognized in their claims (Galligan 2015). Autocratic polities can also be differentiated in relation to the degree of women’s autonomy that they afford (Tripp 2001, 2013). States and nations have long been at the core of political analysis. For past decades the existence and relevance of the state as a central Western form of organizing the polity has been called into question. The state has been argued to have lost its powers as a result of globalization and to have been transformed by neoliberalization and transnational governance. At the same time, though, it has constantly been brought back to political analyses (Skocpol 1979) and has been argued to have never lost its relevance but rather suffered from ideological battles and hegemonic discourses about its ‘withering away’ (Hay, Lister and Marsh 2005). The states are indeed placed in changing contexts, most recently in relation to the economic and financial crisis, that influence their policies, structures and discourses. On the one hand, we have seen supranational actors – namely the troika of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank – dictating policies on crisis countries such as Greece. At the same time, we are witnessing a revitalizing and resistance in these countries, as well as the increased powers of some member states of the supranational European Union (EU) such as Germany.

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In this chapter, we ask what different feminist analyses have to contribute to debates on polity. While we discuss democratic and autocratic polities, we specifically focus on the state and nation as central facets of the polity. It is still common to see political scientists and gender scholars use the term ‘nation-state’ (e.g. Hawkesworth 2012). In this chapter, we consciously keep the two separate, as they are in practice (as in the case of stateless nations or multination states) but also in gender analyses of polity as evidenced by the two distinct literatures on ‘feminist theories about the state’ and ‘gender and nation’ (see Kantola 2016). The analytical questions we ask about polities are the following: what does it mean analytically to adopt a feminist perspective in the study of democracy, autocracy, the state and the nation? How have women engaged with the state and nationalism? How should we analyse democratic and autocratic polities, the state and nation through feminist lenses? More specifically: how are the state and nation gendered, racialized, classed and sexualized? What roles do states play in advancing equalities/perpetuating inequalities? The analytical answers we provide to these questions differ depending on the five approaches discussed in this book. Doing women and political analysis in relation to polity gives visibility to the active role of women in democratic and autocratic states and nations. The state is analysed as potentially women-friendly; the approach uncovers the traditional roles women have been assigned in nationalist processes – as mothers of the nation – and shows how women have used these maternal roles to resist autocratic polities. Gender approaches bring the focus of analysis onto the social and economic structures that shape polities, and their gendered dimensions. This broader focus allows radical feminists to criticize the social structures of the state for being essentially patriarchal. It also allows Marxist feminists to challenge the economic structures of the state for being essentially capitalist, and, more recently, feminist new institutionalists to study the variety of formal and informal gendered institutions that constitute the state, and the room for changing them. Deconstructing the internal unity of the state and theorizing the differentiated state as a diverse set of institutions has been at the centre of approaches that work on gender deconstruction. These approaches seek to overcome essentialist interpretations of the polity by showing that the state is in fact a multiplicity of different discourses, that women’s experience of the state is differentiated, and that the state can be a positive as well as a negative resource for feminists. Doing intersectionality and political analysis calls for challenging essentialist notions about women and men, democratic and autocratic

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polities, the state and nation. First, it has made clear that concepts about the state and nation are highly context specific rather than universal (e.g. the notion of the state has different meaning in n ­ on-Western countries). Second, intersectionality has shown that states and nations are gendered, racialized and sexualized in the norms they use to reproduce the state and nation (e.g. the terms ‘homonationalism’ and ‘homoprotectionism’ show how the states and nations draw new boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’). Postdeconstruction and political analysis illustrates that polities and their effects on people cannot be studied only in terms of discourses because they are embedded in material phenomena and processes, such as neoliberalism, that need to be examined. Hence, feminist scholars have observed the ways in which neoliberalism is often combined with other ideologies such as conservatism, radical right populism or homonationalism, and the gendered outcomes of this. The approaches draw attention to the role of emotions in nationalist projects and the gendered, racialized and sexualized effects these have on people.

Women and polity Polities can be analysed through a focus on women and men as unified categories. The criterion of inclusion is key to capturing the quality of democratic polities (Galligan 2015). Women approaches to the study of democracies address the extent to which women are included in the decision-making processes, in both their descriptive and substantive dimensions (Phillips  1995; Young 2000). This implies studying the number of women represented in parliaments and other formal political institutions and the extent to which women’s interests are included in political deliberations (Galligan 2015). Women approaches to the analysis of democracy can argue in favour of a differentiated citizenship for women, as does Pateman (1992: 29) when she defends the importance of including women ‘as women’ to recognize their different but equal contribution to the polity. Women analyses rely on a liberal notion of the state where the latter represents a neutral institution that can be targeted and lobbied to achieve progressive equality legislation. In this perspective the state is a source of potentially women-friendly legislation and policies. For example, in the liberal feminist classic The Feminine Mystique (Friedan 1963), equality of opportunity for women is to be achieved through changing legislation on equal pay and working hours, and outlawing

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discrimination in workplaces. Women’s access to the state in terms of political institutions (parliaments, governments, bureaucracy) becomes an important political question and goal (see Kantola 2006, 2016). Ann Towns (2009) has analysed how constitutional theory was based on the exclusion of women from the state – women were defined in opposition to the core values of the constitutional state: In the 19th century ‘woman’ consolidated as being with characteristics and capacities for action that were in direct opposition to those of the constitutional state itself: as the state became one of reason and force, woman became entrenched with emotion and weakness; as the state became one of science, woman became infused with faith and religion; as the state became modern, woman became understood as traditional; as the state turned self-interested, woman was cast as selfless. (Towns 2009: 700) Here, the very ways in which ‘the woman’ was defined ensured her exclusion from the state. While liberal feminists recognize that state institutions are dominated by men and that policies reflect masculine interests, they argue that the state is to be ‘captured back’ from the interest group of men. In other words, the state is a reflection of the interest groups that control its institutions, a notion that resembles pluralist state theories in political science (Dahl 1961). The notion of the state put forward by liberal feminists is symptomatic of liberal feminist appropriation of key concepts in general: they take the existing ideas and apply them to the case of women (cf. about power Lloyd 2013: 113). More women in the state would entail more women’s policy, a presumption that has since been challenged in the debate about women’s substantive representation (Celis et al. 2008, 2014). A focus on women represents in some ways a classical perspective on feminist debates about the state. Yet analyses about the positions of women, their roles and policies around them, do retain analytical purchase in feminist debates. For example, the arguments about the benign liberal state and women surface in recent debates about feminism and multiculturalism. Susan Moller Okin (1999) argues that the liberal state should set boundaries to multicultural group rights when these rights harm women (see Kantola 2006, 2015). Comparative state feminist literature, in turn, has studied the ways in which women’s movements engage with one branch of the state – women’s policy agencies – and evaluated the factors that affect the successes and failures of

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these engagements for overall gender policy in the state (see Stetson McBride and Mazur 1995; McBride and Mazur 2010). The reference to ‘women’ in the title of these policy agencies (e.g. women’s institute, women’s unit, etc.) indicates what their main focus is. In practice, of course, these state departments do not exclusively make a women’s policy but rather a gender policy, which means addressing women’s relations with men, and/or also targeting men rather than only women, and being in charge of gender and/or diversity mainstreaming (see Chapter 4). Feminists often quote Virginia Woolf as saying: ‘As a woman I have no country, as a woman I want no country’, which reflects the suspicions towards the state as a patriarchal institution that co-opts women’s movement demands, and towards nationalism as a patriarchal ideology that often fails the equality claims of women who have joined nationalist struggles. At the same time, feminist scholars have been quick to point out women’s active roles in these institutions and ideologies, as well as women’s resistance to their traditional roles and appropriations of them (see Kantola 2016). These can also be read as ways in which to do women and political analysis in relation to the polity. ‘The woman’ has been an important figure in the constructions of nations and very distinct from men: women are seen to act as the mothers and biological reproducers of the nation, men as the soldiers, leaders and protectors of the nation (Yuval-Davis 1997: 22). The public–­ private distinction relegates women to the private sphere and reserves the public for property-owning men (Norocel 2013: 64–66). Such roles take different manifestations in different contexts (see Kantola 2016). For example, in Serbia, from the 1980s onwards with the growth of nationalism, the ‘reproductive potential of women’ was stressed and women were to reproduce not just new citizens but also soldiers for the nation. A woman’s heroism then was determined through her willingness to sacrifice her children for the nation (Bracewell 1996: 29). The heightened role of Serbian women as biological reproducers of the nation can be compared to that of women in India where the nationalist movement privileged the symbolic category of women as mothers of the nation whose role was to maintain a specific national identity (Thapar-Björkert 2013: 814). In Indonesia, in contrast, during the anti-colonial struggle, women had combined the roles of actors in the political arena and ‘good’ mothers and wives but were disappointed after the national liberation was won and their roles were reduced to the domestic sphere (Wieringa 2002: 97–99).

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Feminist scholars have also studied how women have used this maternal role for political activism against autocratic polities, as in the case of Argentina’s Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo who claimed justice from the repressive government and demanded the return of their disappeared children. In this process, women politicized their roles as mothers and reclaimed public spaces through demonstrations (Alvarez 1990). Women’s active support for nationalist struggles was a key contribution of feminist scholarship outside the West (Jayawardena 1986). Women were shown to take up arms, to refuse the role of the protected in violent conflicts in national struggles. Yet the role of the mother still haunts the descriptions of women’s roles in violent conflicts and ‘the mother narrative’ is used as a key explanation for women resorting to violence and arms (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007). Regime type matters for women. Statistical data on democracy such as those from Freedom House and the World Economic Forum, states Tripp (2013), all indicate a correlation between democracy and the status of women with respect to health, education, economic participation and political empowerment. Attitude studies on democracies and autocracies have also drawn on women approaches. For example, Inglehart and Norris (2003) and Inglehart, Norris and Welzel (2002) found that democracies create citizens that have more egalitarian attitudes towards women, and have more women in parliaments than undemocratic polities. These studies contribute evidence on the importance that the diffusion and maintenance of democratic polities have for the promotion of gender equality. As Cynthia Enloe (1989) suggested, a focus on women can be revolutionary when studying polities: it can give voice and visibility to a group, their perspectives and experiences, previously ignored in political analyses. At the same time, as discussed in the previous chapters, as an analytical approach to the study of polity it runs the risk of homogenizing all women’s experiences about the state and the nation. It not only treats the categories of women and men, but also the state and nation, as unified. Other analytical perspectives give us tools to challenge this unity in relation to different aspects of the polity. Mary Hawkesworth (2012: 151) argues that: one of the most pervasive political myths of contemporary life associates the modern nation-state with the liberation of women. Informed by a notion of progress, this myth suggests that modernity freed women from the domestic sphere as the nation-state granted women formal equality.

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Gender, deconstruction, intersectionality and postdeconstruction all call into question this myth and provide space for more nuanced analysis of gendered engagements with the state.

Gender and polity In relation to the polity, employing a gender analysis means focusing on the gendered structures in the wider society that impact on democracies, autocracies, state and nations; and taking the role of men and masculinities more seriously in the maintenance of particular structures. It also signifies that a more complex notion of state power and institutions is needed. Gender studies of democracies have discussed the concept of ‘gender democracy’ to ‘captur[e] the notion that democratic decision making is imprinted by often unconscious gendered assumptions that in turn influence processes and practices in any given political environment’ (Galligan 2015: 2). This concept is helpful, Galligan argues, ‘to reveal the gendered nature of these political processes and practices in the specific institutional contexts in which they occur’ at different levels of democratic decision making, thus allowing analysts to apply a comparative perspective to the study of democratic polities. Galligan (2015) proposes three criteria to assess the quality of ‘gender democracy’ in specific empirical contexts: inclusion, accountability and recognition. While inclusion is more often analysed through women approaches, accountability and recognition are particularly addressed from gender approaches. Democratic accountability means making public representatives accountable to the people for the decisions they make. The possibility of exercising such popular control requires, therefore, transparency of democratic decision-making processes. When analysed through gender lenses, this means, for example, asking questions such as: ‘How far do political parties articulate their proposals on gender justice and gender equality?’ or ‘How extensive is the range of mechanisms aimed at rendering decision-makers accountable for upholding gender equality commitments?’ (Galligan 2015: 9). Doing gender and political analysis makes explicit how state institutions are embedded in unequal societal structures. One consequence of this analytical strategy has been that there has been and continues to be a strong tendency to view the state rather negatively among feminist scholars (see Kantola 2006, 2016). The state is analysed as patriarchal, abusive or capitalist from a gender perspective. The state is analysed as working together with ideologies or modes of governance such as

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neoliberalism or capitalism to appropriate feminist movement goals, for example in relation to sexual violence (Bumiller 2008). A long-lasting and famous contribution that developed this analytical strategy comes from radical feminist scholarship. Radical feminists stress the patriarchal nature of the state, which requires analysing its role in perpetuating gender inequalities. The state is not an isolated, neutral and narrow institution – as when doing women and political analysis – but rather it is embedded in broader gendered societal structures that in turn shape women’s engagements with the state and the policies that emanate from it (Eisenstein 1986: 181). With Kate Millett, the concept of patriarchy acquired a new meaning (1970). Until her Sexual Politics, patriarchy had signified the rule of the father or the rule of the head of the household. Millett argues that what patriarchy actually is about is the rule of men – male supremacy – the most fundamental form of oppression. The concept of patriarchy captures the insight that the oppression of women is not haphazard or piecemeal but, rather, that the diverse forms of oppression are interconnected and mutually sustained (see Kantola 2006). The radical nature of this feminist analysis stems from the claim that the state is not only contingently patriarchal, but essentially so. Furthermore, patriarchy is global and universal. The particular forms that states take matter less than the fact that all are patriarchal states (Kantola 2006, 2016). For Carole Pateman (1988), the origins of patriarchy lie in the social-sexual contract that gives men the political right over women and access to their bodies. An exclusive focus on integrating women into state institutions produces a situation that perpetuates dominant patriarchal discourses and norms rather than challenging them. Important questions are not asked, critical arguments are not formulated and alternatives are not envisioned (Ferguson 1984: 29, 193). Doing gender and political analysis from this perspective again extends the focus to the wider structures of the state and society. Radical feminist work shows the patriarchal nature of the formal and informal practices of politics and connects this to the ‘personal’ – families, sexuality, intimate relations, violence – which significantly expands the scope of what is studied as politics and the political (see Chapters 5 and 7). The concept of patriarchy informs feminist strategies and political goals: the whole structure of male domination must be dismantled if women’s liberation is to be achieved (Acker 1989: 235). Civil society, rather than the state, is the sphere in which women should concentrate their energies in order to challenge patriarchy. Via consciousness-raising it becomes possible to rediscover what is truly

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feminine and to struggle to speak with women’s own voice and to understand that oppression is not individual but structural – gendered – and concerns women as a group (Kantola 2006, 2016). Whereas for radical feminists the state is patriarchal, for Marxist feminists the state is essentially capitalist (McIntosh 1978: 259). The state is not just an institution but also a form of social relations. Women’s subordination plays a role in sustaining capitalism through the reproduction of the labour force within the family. Women are oppressed in work and in exclusion from it and Marxist feminists argue that the familial ideology is to blame. When criticizing welfare states, Marxist feminists argue that the state helps to reproduce and maintain the familial ideology primarily through welfare state policies. In contrast to radical feminism, Marxist feminists argue that women are important in the struggle against capitalism as workers, not as women (McIntosh 1978) and the category of women is employed in reproductive terms (Sargent 1981: xxi; Kantola 2006, 2016). Socialist feminists attempt to combine the insights of both Marxist and radical feminism. From radical feminists, socialist feminists derive the understanding of the system of oppression called patriarchy, and from Marxist feminists the importance of the class oppression defining the situation of all workers. The two approaches are combined in analyses of this ‘dual system’ of capitalism and patriarchy. For Zillah Eisenstein, the notion of capitalist patriarchy captures the ‘mutually reinforcing dialectical relationship between capitalist class structure and hierarchal sexual structuring’ (1979: 17). Michele Barrett, in turn, identifies a number of ways in which the state promotes women’s oppression: women are excluded from certain sorts of work by protective legislation, the state exercises control over the ways sexuality is represented through pornography laws, and the state’s housing policy is resistant to the needs of non-nuclear families (1980: 231–237). The socialist feminist debates revolve around the relative autonomy of the two systems. Some theorists argue that patriarchy has causal priority over capitalism (Harding 1981; Hartmann 1981) and others that capitalism is more autonomous (Young 1981). For Eisenstein (1984), the capitalist class does not rule the state or government directly but instead exercises hegemony. A large part of the mystificatory role of the state is in this seeming identification of male interests and bourgeois interests. Gender analysis is central to debates about the nation too, but again by raising a distinct set of analytical questions. Here gender relates to the cultural and symbolic reproduction of nations. The cultural

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production of the nation signifies the ‘cultural codes of style of dress and behavior as well as more elaborate bodies of customs, religion, literary and artistic modes of production, and, of course, language’ (Yuval-Davis 1997: 23). Here nations and nationalism are based on gender symbols, and constructions of femininity and masculinity and women act as ‘symbolic border guards of the nation and as embodiments of the collectivity’ (Yuval-Davis 1997: 23). This entails strict norms about how women behave or dress (Chatterjee 1990). It also entails forms of normative masculinity based on fatherhood, honour, patriotism, bravery, duty and heterosexism (Nagel 2000: 252; Norocel 2013: 70–71). While classical gender approaches such as radical or Marxist feminism had the tendency to understand the state as a monolithic entity, more recent gender studies have studied the state as a variety of separate institutions that include both formal and informal institutions such as norms and rules (Chappell 2002; 2013: 607; see also Krook and Mackay 2011). Indeed, new institutionalist theories of the state suggest that ‘institutional norms and rules establish the criteria of intelligibility of political action; they frame the most basic understandings about what is rational, permissible, and possible within political life’ (Hawkesworth 2012: 156). This makes states context specific, distinctive and different from one another but also path dependent and somewhat predictable in their actions (Hawkesworth 2012: 156). Feminist new institutionalists, whose work has been discussed in Chapter  5, draw attention to the importance of these institutional legacies, path dependencies and possibilities for change (Chappell 2013: 608). Similarly, Lee Ann Banaszak (2010) conceptualizes the state in terms of its organization and bureaucracy and explores the favourable locations for gender activists and the impact of changes in these for feminist struggles. Recent gender approaches, thus, not only intend to grasp the complexity of polity structures and their gendered dimensions, but also to identify opportunities for promoting gender equality within the state, ‘engaging the state’. This engagement with the state has been a key characteristic of Nordic feminist activism. The notion ‘women-friendly welfare states’ continues to have analytical purchase in the Nordic context, especially as a critical tool that enables analyses of the impact of neoliberalism on women-friendly welfare states. Helga Maria Hernes (1987) defined Nordic states as potentially women-friendly societies, which signified that women’s political and social empowerment happens through the

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state and with the support of state social policy. Studies of the Nordic women-friendly welfare states argued that women become empowered as political subjects through the institutionalization of gender equality. This drew attention to women’s contributions and roles in both maintaining and changing gender relations (Siim 1988). At the same time, gender scholars have argued that women-friendly welfare states have transformed the private dependency of women on individual men to public dependency on the state (Dahlerup 1987). The expansion of the public sector, even if it benefits women, is planned and executed by a male-dominated establishment. The parameters for distribution and redistribution policies are still determined within the framework of the corporate system, where women have an even more marginal role to play than in the parliamentary system. Thus, women are the objects of policies. The tendency is exacerbated by the observation that women’s lives are more dependent on and determined by state policies than men’s (Hernes 1988: 77) and the Nordic welfare states are based on a gendered system of power and hierarchies. Gender analyses of polities have also explored the degree of democracy in different contexts. Walby’s (2009) study of polity conceptualizes the ‘depth of democracy’, considering that a ‘broad democracy’ includes, among other dimensions, a high number of women in representative positions, and ‘no powers of governance held by an additional non-democratic policy (e.g. organized religion)’ (Walby, 2009: 179). Studies such as Montoya (2005), Paternotte, Van der Wal and Verloo (2009), Htun and Weldon (2010) and Van Der Dussen and Piette (2016) also place considerable attention to the weight of organized religious institutions – such as the Vatican and Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy – in hindering change towards greater gender and sexuality equality in specific contexts. Recent analyses of European democracies after the 2008 financial crisis, austerity politics and the rise of right-wing populist parties have criticized the emergence of processes of ‘de-democratization’ in European polities and their gender implications (Verloo 2015; Wöhl 2017). The comparison of democratic and autocratic polities from gender approaches has shed light on the extent to which the type of political regime matters for gender equality. Comparing democratic and autocratic polities to explain global variation in gender equality policies, Htun and Weldon (2010) argue that democratic polities allow more freedom to the organization of civil societies, which in turn increases the influence of women’s organizations on the state. Autocratic polities,

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by suppressing civil liberties, allow less political influence to women’s organizations. The main factors that have made democracies more likely to promote gender equality than autocracies are, according to Tripp (2013): higher levels of economic development, greater equality attitudes, more political space for women’s movements to influence the state, the existence of women’s policy agencies, more state funds dedicated to gender equality policies, less corrupted courts, and international and regional (e.g. EU) pressure for gender equality. Despite these important differences between democracies and autocracies, when looking more closely into democratic and authoritarian regimes, gender scholars capture differences between democracies, for instance between post-industrial democracies and emerging economies like India or Chile (Tripp 2013), or between neoliberal and ­social-democratic democracies like, respectively, the UK and Sweden, or between ‘public’ and ‘domestic’ gender regimes (Walby 2009; see Chapter 2). They also spot differences between autocracies, for example between socialist polities, that have adopted policies similar to those of welfare states in relation to maternity and employment rights, and bureaucratic authoritarian regimes such as those in Latin America that have restricted divorce and reproductive rights, particularly abortion, or post-colonial African autocracies that restricted women’s rights and controlled women’s autonomous mobilization (Tripp 2013). Doing gender and political analysis has also greatly inspired an emerging subdiscipline of feminist EU studies. Gender and the EU studies rely strongly on gender analysis and, usefully for the concept of polity, take studying the institutions, policies and feminist engagements with the polity beyond the boundaries of the ‘nation-state’. Scholars have undertaken the task of gendering EU integration theory (Kronsell 2012; Abels and MacRae 2016), analysing a wide range of gender policies and attempts to gender mainstream other EU policies (Kantola 2010; MacRae and Weiner 2014; Jacquot 2015) and studying the EU as a polity that consists of gendered institutions potentially informed by their own transnational logics (Rolandsen Agustín 2015; Ahrens 2017; Kantola and Rolandsen Agustín 2016). To what extent is the EU essentially ‘neoliberal’ and about free markets? To what extent would this be compatible with expansive notions of gender equality informed by equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunities? Europeanization is an analytical concept that makes it possible to study the multidirectional impact and effects of the European institutions, discourses and policies on gender politics in member state polities and beyond (Kantola 2010; Lombardo and Forest 2012).

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Deconstruction and polity Poststructural analyses of polities have questioned different forms of essentialisms and, from their perspective, rigid classifications in feminist studies of democracies, states and nations. Postmodern approaches to democracies such as that of Mouffe (1993), for instance, have criticized the essentialism embedded in the idea of including women ‘as women’ in liberal democracies, articulated in Pateman’s (1992) concept of sexually differentiated citizenship. This would in fact assume the existence of one single women’s essence to be included in a specific democratic society, which would end up excluding many other subject experiences, rather than including the variety of different women and men in the polity. Poststructural gender analyses have deconstructed the internal unity of the state and theorized the differentiated state as a diverse set of institutions. For example, Rosemary Pringle and Sophie Watson challenge the unity of the state and argue that the state consists of a set of arenas that lack coherence (1990, 1992) and Elisabeth Prügl defines the postmodern state as ‘a decentered state in which authority is shared by multiple levels of government’ (2010: 448). In deconstruction analyses then, the state is a differentiated set of institutions, practices, agencies and discourses. The state is depicted as a discursive process, and politics and the state are conceptualized in broad terms. The state unity is reproduced discursively (see e.g. Kantola 2007; Kantola, Norocel and Repo 2011). The state is not inherently patriarchal but was historically constructed as patriarchal in a political process whose outcome is open. The patriarchal state can be seen, then, not as the manifestation of patriarchal essence, but as the centre of a reverberating set of power relations and political processes in which patriarchy is both constructed and contested (Connell 1987, 1994). Particular discourses and histories construct state boundaries, identities and agency (Kantola 2006, 2007). Masculinity is central for understanding ‘the multiple modes of power circulating through the domain called the state’ (Brown 1995: 177). The state emerges from this work as a set of legal rules that reinforce social practices of masculine domination (Prügl 2010). Wendy Brown’s poststructuralist approach attends to the constitutive character of the state’s gender orders, to the contradictions inherent in them and to the ways in which state processes occur across very different sites (Brown 1995: 167). Elisabeth Prügl (2010), although inspired by her work, critiques Brown for giving insufficient attention to feminist struggles and to the ways in which these have been

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institutionalized in state-based laws and policies. A number of other poststructural feminists have asked what the most effective strategies are for empowering women in their engagements with the state (Randall 1998: 200). In other words, deconstruction of gender analyses aim to make sense not only of the state’s impact on gender, but also of the ways in which the state can be made use of and changed through feminist struggles (Kantola 2006). The analyses allow the complex, multidimensional and differentiated relations between the state and gender to be taken into account. They recognize that the state can be a positive as well as a negative resource for feminists, thus deconstructing the dichotomy between ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the state. Within a framework of diverse discourses and power relations, gender diversity and differences in women’s experiences come to the fore (Kantola and Dahl 2005). Deconstruction approaches, as other chapters show, are much indebted to Butler’s thinking. Yet her analysis of the state appears at times contradictory with a deconstructive perspective that sees the state as both a positive and a negative resource for feminists. In her 1997 work, Judith Butler evidences a strong anti-state account that is a critical deflection of political battles into the courts and is based on the belief that democratization works best through civil society. In Excitable Speech, Butler is critical of feminists who want to criminalize hate speech by law and argues instead that other forms of politics are more effective: ‘nonjuridical forms of opposition, ways of restaging and resignifying speech in contexts that exceed those determined by the courts’ (Butler 1997b: 23). Butler is suspicious about the arbitrary nature of the state power and, for her, the regulation of hate speech is an example of a means by which the state can extend its power (Lloyd 2007: 127). As Moya Lloyd explains in her interpretation of Butler, constructs such as hate speech become legal mechanisms for the state to ‘extend its own racial and sexualized discourses’, which in turn result in inclusions and exclusions (Lloyd 2007: 129). These forms of state regulation curtail the opportunities of resignification in civil society. In sum, Butler’s position stresses the productivity of state discourse and calls for understanding the ways in which laws can be misappropriated and used in anti-progressive ways (Lloyd 2007: 129). Critical commentators have suggested that Butler assumes that legal protection is necessarily reactionary and hence dismisses the ways in which states may promote progressive equality politics (Jenkins 2001; Passavant and Dean 2001; Mills 2003; Lloyd 2007). Butler’s notion of the state is also contradictory, signifying at times a very narrow judicial

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institution and, at other times, a broader set of conflicting institutions, practices and discourses. In her later work, Butler offers a qualified definition of the state and suggests that the state ‘is not reducible to law’ and that it comprises plural institutions whose interests do not always coincide, and where there are, consequently, multiple sites for political resistance (Butler 2002: 27; see Lloyd 2007: 131). However, Moya Lloyd suggests that Butler’s scepticism towards the state remains. Lloyd argues that there is indeed a fundamental paradox in Butler’s account of the state: she implies that ‘hate-speech and pornography can be radically recited but denies this possibility to state speech, or rather she allows that it can be recited but only in anti-progressive directions’ (Lloyd 2007: 132). Neoliberal logics of governance have resulted in changes in state powers that have been described as state power evaporating upwards, downwards, sideways and laterally to international organizations, substate organizations, non-elected state bodies, private enterprises, public– private partnerships and civil societies, with manifold consequences for feminist politics and engagements with the state (Banaszak, Beckwith and Rucht 2003: 4–7; Kantola and Outshoorn 2007: 8–14). The EU is an example of a suprastate actor whose powers result in fundamental changes in member states through processes of Europeanization, challenging conventional notions of state sovereignty (Kantola 2010; Lombardo and Forest 2012). For Elisabeth Prügl, the EU ‘epitomizes the decentered postmodern state and the loss of nation-state autonomy in the context of globalisation’, which engages actors beyond and below the nation-state (Prügl 2010: 448). Neoliberalism has also been conceptualized as a new relationship between government and knowledge through which governing activities are recast as nonpolitical and non-ideological problems that need technical solutions (Ong 2007: 3). These changes in states are also transforming state-based feminist strategies and practices from previous ‘state feminism’ to ‘market feminism’ (Kantola and Squires 2012) or governance feminism (Prügl 2011, 2015; Wöhl 2008), where feminist knowledge is appropriated and transformed to the service of neoliberal states. Gendered constructions of the state have been closely intertwined with race, ethnicity and class. Lately, feminist scholarship has paid increasing attention to masculinities (Norocel 2013) and sexualities (Peterson 1999; Nagel 2000; Puar 2007) in the constructions of states and nations. Yuval-Davis now speaks of ‘the politics of belonging’ to analyse the specific political projects aimed at ‘constructing belonging to particular collectivity/ies which are themselves being

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constructed in these projects in very specific ways and in very specific boundaries’ (Yuval-Davis 2011: 10). Importantly, the politics of belonging involve both a hegemonic project of the maintenance and reproduction of the boundaries of the community of belonging and also ‘their contestation, challenge and resistance by other political agents’ (Yuval-Davis 2011: 20). Constructing and upholding nations requires of the nation constant doing: nations constitute their subjects, and their existence requires the subjects’ repetitive acts and performances where different parts of their identities play a central role. For example, Athena Athanasiou (2005) analyses the Women in Black, which started in 1989 in Israel and 1991 in Serbia and has become an international movement of women which holds vigils to protest against war and gender violence. Standing silently in black, these women resist the constructions of ‘Others’ that cannot be mourned: ‘performing an alternative feminist politics which involves being radically disloyal, instead of unconditionally supportive, to “their” men in time of war’ and a ‘non-exclusionary notion of who counts as a “woman”: people of all genders and sexualities are welcomed to participate as women in their actions of ritual mourning’ (Athanasiou 2005: 41). Radical right populism draws on these gender hierarchies and binaries in contemporary Europe in its discursive construction of the nation. A central feature of these ideologies is to equate nations with families based on very traditional heterosexual gender roles for women and men (Norocel 2013). Exploring the cases of Romania and Sweden, Norocel shows how radical right populist parties construct their respective national families as vulnerable, in the hands of a remote and detached elite, and where the constructed people represents the most vulnerable classed part of the society, at the mercy of globalization. Men are constructed as idealized working class breadwinners, and the constructions of women draw on normative motherhood or are ‘reduced to merely decorative positions of sexual objects for the masculine heterosexual competition and reward for the people’s men and their (male) Others’ (Norocel 2013: 173). Unsurprisingly, radical right populist parties in these countries have had problems with women’s political participation, which is interesting considering Sweden’s long history as a women-friendly welfare state and high numbers of women in politics. Norocel argues that being a woman and a politician went against the radical right populist ideology, indicating that its constructions of nation as a family rely on constructing women’s emancipation as a threat to the dominance of men in the public sphere, and women’s

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motherly instincts, in turn, as setting the very survival of the people under threat (Norocel 2013: 174).

Intersectionality and polity Intersectionality work on the polity stresses, first, that the contexts where polities are theorized significantly matter for the conceptualizations of the state that are put forward, and second, that nations and nationalist projects are based on gender, race/ethnicity, class and sexuality norms (for a discussion of studies on the institutionalization of intersectionality see Chapter 5). In relation to the former, development scholars point to the fundamentally different meaning of the state in non-Western countries (Alvarez 1990; Afshar 1996; Rai and Lievesley 1996; Visvanathan et al. 1997; Dore and Molyneux 2000). Like Western debates, these literatures are concerned to examine the processes of state institutions in exercises of power in various areas of the public and private lives of women and women’s resistance to these intrusions (Rai and Lievesley 1996: 1). However, there are important differences in this research. Postcolonialism, nationalism, economic modernization and state capacity emerge as key issues in the Third World literature, whereas Western feminists often take these issues for granted, focusing instead on how best to engage with the state (Chappell 2000: 246). For example, in Indonesia, the colonial state introduced the emphasis on motherhood and the domesticity of women that was characteristic of Victorian European societies (Wieringa 2002: 47). During the process of decolonization, women were first urged to join the battle against the colonizers but later their rights were forgotten or put aside, leading to an even more conservative construction of women’s roles in the state (Wieringa 2002: 47). When exploring women’s activism in Africa, the ways in which patriarchy is combined with the (neo)patrimonialism in the polity becomes central (Tripp 2001; Njagi 2013). In neopatrimonial states, ‘claims to authority are based on personal relations of loyalty and dependence that stand above the law’ (Tripp 2001: 106). When combined with patriarchy, they can exacerbate women’s positions and chances in the state (Njagi 2013). Hence, questions of women’s autonomy acquire a different significance from those of Western states. For example, the Ugandan women’s movement has been able to claim a greater degree of autonomy from the state, which has been critical to its success (Tripp 2001: 105). Again, these practices vary greatly between the states and need to be studied contextually.

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Intersectional analyses of polities show that gender and other inequality norms constitute hierarchies between nations, as in the case of colonialism and postcolonialism and the role of oriental women and men in this process (Enloe 1989). ‘Native women’ and their oppression were used as justifications for European civilizing missions. Colonialism, gender and power hierarchies are tied together in a number of ways historically. Colonized nations are feminized, which entails the subordination of whole nations (Thapar-Björkert 2013: 810). Colonized men are feminized too to stress their inferiority to colonial men. In a highly sexualized process, sexuality and nation intersect to produce notions about other nationalities’ sexual character and potential threats related to this (Thapar-Björkert 2013: 811). Women’s bodies have also become very concrete battle grounds through rape as a weapon of war and militarized prostitution and entertainment businesses. Freeing oppressed women is an imaginary still in use, as in the case of US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s. These gendered nationalist hierarchies are highly pertinent within countries too. For example, in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands in Europe, gender inequality is increasingly identified with the culture of the ‘Others’, namely the immigrant populations or other national minorities. Their harmful gendered practices such as female circumcision, forced marriage and honour killings are contrasted with the presumably genderequal majority culture (Roggeband and Verloo 2007; Keskinen et  al. 2009). The political consequences of this process include both homogenized and essentialized notions of gender inequalities in minority cultures and avoiding tackling gender equality problems in the majority culture. Intersectional analyses of the state have explored how LGBT activists have changed state relations and how the state has structured opportunities for lesbian and gay communities all over the world (Tremblay, Paternotte and Johnson 2011; Ayoub and Paternotte 2014). Intersectional approaches have also been applied to the analysis of nationalist projects where sexual orientation and ethnicity interact. Jasbir Puar has studied the ‘reintensification of racialization through queerness’ (2008). The rise of the global gay right wing in Europe divides the world into ‘gay-friendly and not gay-friendly nations’ (Puar 2007: xiv) to draw distinctions between those European countries where the protection of LGBT rights is part of their national reputation as defenders of human rights, and Muslim countries and nations. Puar’s notion of homonationalism is based on Lisa Duggan’s notion of homonormativity, the new neoliberal sexual politics where ‘the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized depoliticized

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gay culture are anchored in domesticity and consumption’ (quoted in Puar 2007: 38). This has signified a transition in the relations of queer subjects and nation states ‘from being figures of death (i.e. the AIDS epidemic) to becoming tied to ideas of life and productivity (i.e. gay marriage and families)’ (Puar 2007: xii). The ways in which homonationalism appropriates homosexuality and queer subjects challenges any dichotomous portrayals of nations as only ‘supportive and productive of heteronormativity and always repressive and disallowing of homosexuality’ (Puar 2007: 39). Homoprotectionist policies can serve to consolidate national identity and legitimate the centralization of state authority. State officials seek to create a more positive image of their government, nation, human rights record, economic policy framework or foreign policy agenda by promoting or speaking about LGBT rights (Lind and Keating 2013: 519). Another study on nationalism and heteronormativity is Munt and O’Donnell’s (2007) analysis of the ‘heterosexualization of nationalism’ in Irish American nationalism. The authors understand the legal exclusion of Irish lesbians and gays from the St Patrick’s Day parade in New York as the result of nationalist ideologies that have been successful in constructing being homosexual as antithetical to being Irish. While in New York the participation of homosexual people in the St. Patrick’s Day parade is presented as a destruction of Irish ethnicity, Munt and O’Donnell (2007) interpret the more inclusive parades in Dublin as a desire to present the Irish Republic as a modern and economically liberated community. Overall, analyses of democratic polities that are aware of intersectionality take the criterion of ‘recognition’ of different and equally valuable claims in democracies as a starting point for assessing the quality of democracies (Fraser 2000; Young 2000; Galligan 2015). To what extent are claims by different non-hegemonic actors in a democratic polity taken seriously? Fraser (2000: 8) argues that the culture of liberal democracies ‘constitutes some categories of social actors as normative and others as deficient or inferior: “straight” is normal, “gay” is perverse; “male-headed households” are proper, “female-headed households” are not; “whites” are law-abiding, “blacks” are dangerous’. The result of this process is the non-recognition of equal ‘epistemological authority’ (Sanders 1997) to some members of a democratic polity. The quality of democratic deliberation would instead be improved if members from marginalized groups were able to articulate their claims to equality, be recognized and respected, and other participants were prepared to change their positions in case these appeared democratically inappropriate (Fraser 2000; Young 2000; Galligan 2015).

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Postdeconstruction and polity Postdeconstruction, as the last two approaches do, conceptualizes the state as differentiated. However, unlike deconstruction perspectives, ‘renewed materialist feminism’ suggests that the state and its effects cannot be understood merely in terms of discourses but are embedded in the material phenomena and processes (Coole and Frost 2010: 2–3). As discussed in the previous chapters of this book, the renewed material feminism accepts social constructionism but conceptualizes the material realm as irreducible to culture and discourse (Ahmed 2008, Davis 2009; Coole and Frost 2010: 27; Irni 2013). In terms of the state, this signifies combining: [the] Weberian insights of critical theory regarding the bureaucratic state, whose tentacles reach increasingly deeply to control ordinary lives through governance and governmentality, and aspects of Foucauldian genealogy that describe how the minutiae of power develop and practically manage embodied subjectivities. (Coole and Frost 2010: 27) When explaining the renewed scholarly interest in materialism, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost single out not only the advances in natural sciences and biopolitical and bioethical issues but also the global political economy and understanding its structural conditions such as neoliberalism (Coole and Frost 2010: 6–7). From the point of the view of analysing the state, what becomes important is the biopolitical interest of the modern state: the state’s role in managing the life, health and death of its populations through management of ‘fertility rates, marriage and funeral rites, epidemics, food hygiene, and the nation’s health’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 23). Seemingly technical questions about biological life processes enter the political order because the state must make decisions about the worthiness of different lives (Coole and Frost 2010: 23). In this way, states exert powers in shaping, constraining and constituting life chances and existential opportunities. The exercises of these powers take place in complex circuits, ‘whereby discursive and material forms are inextricable yet irreducible and material structures are simultaneously overand undermined’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 27). While economic factors and capitalism become central, the capitalist system is not understood in a narrowly economistic way but rather ‘as a detotalized totality that includes a multitude of interconnected phenomena and processes’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 29). This view encourages scholars to take

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seriously Foucauldian analysis of governmentality, biopolitics and the role of discourse in maintaining social order, and to incorporate the state’s role in maintaining the conditions of capital accumulation into the analyses (Coole and Frost 2010: 30). When seeking to understand the complex relations between gender and the nation, the ‘affective turn’ has signified a shift away from text and discourse to understanding emotions, affects and the body. In other words, the emotional politics of contemporary constructions of nation are based on power circulating not just through discourses but also through feelings, emotions, bodies and affects (Ahmed 2004b; Pedwell and Whitehead 2012: 116). As Carolyn Pedwell argues that emotions are conceptualized most productively ‘not as affective lenses on “truth” or “reality”, but rather as one important (embodied) circuit through which power is felt, imagined, mediated, negotiated and/or contested’ (Pedwell 2014: 34). Power works through affect to shape individual and social bodies in a gendered process where subjects learn emotional rules that help to maintain the hierarchies of gender, race and class that exist in nations (Boler 1999). One of Sara Ahmed’s central insights is that ‘emotions can attach us to the very conditions of our subordination’ (Ahmed 2004b: 12). This ‘affective attachment to social norms’ explains the difficulties in achieving change in unequal power relations (Ahmed 2004b: 11–12). Scholars in this approach have explored the role of emotions in nationalist projects and their implications for gender, race and sexuality. The way in which emotions are mobilized in nationalist practices has effects on people, in terms of exclusion from or inclusion in the polity. Ahmed (2004b: 1–4) describes the emotions of hate, fear or rage that radical right-wing parties mobilize against people they define as ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘bogus asylum seekers’. These people are constructed as ‘others’ that are trying to, for example, ‘invade Britain’ and endanger the safety of the British nation and property. The emotional rhetoric clearly tries to steer the rage of ‘the British taxpayer’ as ‘the legitimate subject of the nation’ against ‘these illegitimate others’ that are trying to take what is ours (Ahmed 2004b: 1). This raises questions about how the state is enacted through patterns of desire, attachment, hope and fear in migrant politics (Darling 2014: 485) and how these are constituted by race and gender. From this analytical perspective, what matters is how people inhabit strategies of government and this is shaped by complex discursive and material relations that vary, for example, in relation to asylum seekers’ subjectivities (Darling 2014: 496).

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Conclusions Democratic and autocratic polities, the state and nation continue to play key roles in challenging or reproducing gendered, racialized and sexualized hierarchies in contemporary societies. Feminist analyses in their different approaches theorize them as powerful constructs where gender, race, class and sexuality occupy a central position. Women approaches to the analysis of polity address the ‘where are the women’ question (Enloe 1989). They signal, on the one hand, the public–­private distinction that traditionally had kept women outside the state in the private sphere and in the role of the biological reproducers of the nation and, on the other, women’s active roles in states and nations. Gender approaches required focusing on both femininities and masculinities, on the broader power relationships in societies, on ‘gender democracy’, and on structural and institutionalized hierarchies in states and nations, that gender scholars have understood as patriarchal, capitalist or more broadly as gendered informal and formal institutions. By identifying differences between democratic and autocratic polities, and within democracies and autocracies, these analyses have shown that gender matters for polities, and vice-versa. If some of the former approaches propose essentialist ideas of women or of the state as a monolithic institution, deconstruction approaches propose to deconstruct the internal unity of the state and conceptualize the latter as a diverse set of institutions that offer both opportunities and limitations for gender equality. Gender, the state and nation are theorized in terms of doing rather than being: they need constant repetitive acts by subjects to uphold them, and are discursively produced in many different ways. Intersectionality approaches have contributed to displace ethnocentric scholarly assumptions about the democratic state, arguing that the state is theorized in different ways depending on the geographical context of reference. They have further shown that gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and class play a central role in processes of reproduction of states and nations. Postdeconstruction perspectives, including the new materialist turn in feminist theorizing, suggest that these processes are not just discursive but material and bodily, and that the affects and emotions that are mobilized in nationalist projects have gendered, racialized, and sexualized effects on people that strengthen the ties between discourses and material phenomena and can make change harder.

Chapter 7

Politics

Politics, as discussed in Chapter  3, has to do with power, or more specifically ‘the (uneven) distribution of power, wealth, and resources’ (Hay 2002: 73), whether material or symbolic. For some scholars this power is circumscribed to specific institutional arenas, such as governments, parliaments and so on, while for others power relations are everywhere. Feminist scholars, in particular, have advocated for the need to study power relations in all social spheres, not limiting political analysis to those arenas that are considered public but rather breaking the boundaries between public and private and exploring power relations in all social contexts and times, in formal and informal institutions. This will allow analysts to grasp existing privileges, hierarchies and inequalities, as well as identify the potential for transformation of unequal relations in ‘the political’. Our own understanding of politics defines it very much as a process rather than as an arena. As Colin Hay suggests (2002: 69), ‘Although they can agree on little else, there is at least some unanimity within the discipline that political analysis is concerned essentially with the analysis of the processes and practices of politics’ (emphasis ours). In this chapter, therefore, we focus on what adopting the five different feminist perspectives signifies for studying politics as process. First, women and politics perspectives define politics much more in terms of traditional political institutions. We have already seen in other chapters of the book how the focus on women and politics relies on narrow notions of gender (Chapter  2), power (Chapter  3) and institutions (Chapter  4). In this chapter we explicate the significance of this for the study of politics by focusing on analyses of female styles of political leadership, women’s political behaviour and voting attitudes. Second, a gender and politics perspective is traditionally argued to have illustrated how the personal is political and broken down the divisions between the public and the private sphere. In this chapter, we address its focus on politics as ­‘masculine’, its attention for informal politics, and ask what this means for gender analysis. Third, deconstruction challenges any binary distinctions related

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to politics such as formal/informal politics, and national/international. Instead it seeks to uncover the power relations upholding these distinctions and ask questions about performative and discursive politics. Fourth, intersectionality allows analysts to examine politics’ inclusiveness of different intersecting inequalities, and to criticize the dynamics of power, privilege and marginalization of people at the point of multiple intersecting inequalities. Finally, postdeconstruction approaches teach us that emotions matter in politics, that actors mobilize them in political processes for a variety of purposes, and that they have specific gender, race and other inequality dimensions that have effects on people. Altogether, the feminist framework for analysing politics as process will be applied to the understanding of political processes such as policymaking, constitution making, democratization, European integration, decentralization, regime changes, judicial litigation and economization, and to the study of women’s political behaviour and leadership.

Women and politics How does a focus on women change the notion of politics as arena? Pamela Paxton (2008) challenges ‘universal’ suffrage models in politics in which ‘universal’ has meant the right of men to vote. When the focus is changed to women and to women’s right to vote, theories about a country’s transition to democracy are transformed (Paxton 2008: 52): When women are included in measures of democracy, the notion of waves of democracy is no longer strongly supported, some countries’ transition to full democracy may have come thirty to seventy years after the traditionally accepted date, and the West does not have a hold on early democratization. (Paxton 2008: 68) This is an example of the power of the women’s perspective to challenge traditional political analysis, even when politics is defined narrowly and gender is defined as women. A women and politics approach makes visible the extent to which women are present in political and economic processes and how women behave in politics. Constitution-making processes are important political moments for reframing and renegotiating existing political rules. Asking ‘where are the women in processes of constitutional reform?’ can therefore be a powerful analytical tool. Feminist research in this field has been interested about the extent to which women participate in and shape constitution

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making and define the field of political and democratic decision making. A few studies have explored this question in relation to the European Union (EU) constitution-making process that took place from 2002 to 2004, with the work of the European Constitutional Convention and the preparation for the 2004 Intergovernmental Conference that produced the EU Constitutional Treaty. This research denounced the underrepresentation of women in the Convention that drafted the document, which could become the future European Constitution, pointing out that the proportion of female representatives in the 2003 Convention was only 17 per cent (León, Mateo, and Millns 2003; Millns 2007). None of the female representatives in the Constitutional Convention occupied a leading position as president or vice-president. Only two out of the 12 members of the Presidium were women, and only one of them chaired one of the 11 working groups (Lombardo 2005). These figures, that are nowhere near the 40 per cent of women in EU committees recommended by Commission Decision 2000/407, are useful to make visible that decision-making processes take place in gender-biased institutions (Mackay, Kenny and Chappell 2010). European feminist policymaker Agnès Hubert, at the time on secondment from the Commission as liaison person in the Secretariat of the European Parliament Committee on Women’s Rights, referred to the low number of female members of the Constitutional Convention as one of the reasons for explaining the gender blindness of the ­constitution-making process: only 17 women out of 105 conventioneers is a small number through which to make your voices heard. Although not all women speak for gender equality, she argued, it was difficult for the few female members who did so to raise gender equality issues and to have a receptive audience on these matters, considered that conventioneers had 2–3 minutes to speak on the basis of an agenda that was decided by the all-male Presidium (Lombardo 2005). Adopting the women perspective on the current economic crisis, which started in 2008 in the USA with the collapse of the Lehman Brothers, involves studying the number of women and men in economic decision making, banking and political institutions. Walby (2015) has argued that it has been a men’s crisis in the sense that men have been the dominant actors in the institutions that have inflicted the crisis and attempted to solve it. Men dominate in finance decision-making institutions, both in private companies and in public bodies such as central banks. For example, there were no female presidents in the European Central Bank or in central banks of the 28 EU member states in 2013, and only 18 per cent of women on the boards of EU28 member states’

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central banks. Walby’s question: ‘Would the financial crisis have been different if it had been Lehman Sisters rather than Lehman Brothers?’ makes us consider whether a more diverse composition of corporate boards, with at least 40 per cent of each sex (as the Norwegian corporate board quotas law prescribes), would have moved financial leaders to take less risky decisions (Walby 2015: 57). The women approach is also powerful when mapping the effects of the 2008 economic crisis on women. In the first wave of the crisis, men’s employment in the private sector was worst hit, and in the second wave, the public sector cuts started to erase women’s jobs and the public services and benefits that women relied on (Bettio et al. 2012; Karamessini 2014). An example of the indirect differentiated effect of the financial crisis on women and men is to be found, explains Walby (2015), in the gender composition of people who lost their homes in the US subprime mortgage crisis: women more than men, and minority more than majority ethnicities. Banks considered these groups to have higher levels of risk because of their lower and less stable incomes, and thus applied higher interest rates on loans so that, when the housing bubble exploded, women and minority ethnic groups were not able to pay their mortgages. The focus on women has also enabled analyses about women’s political attitudes and women’s political leadership. Regarding attitudes, Hay (2007) has analysed the reasons ‘Why We Hate Politics’ by providing evidence of the growing decline in electoral participation in advanced liberal democracies and the processes of depoliticization and politicization that are at stake. Hay claims that disenchantment with formal political participation does not mean disinterest for political participation, as informal processes of participation show. For instance, women’s struggles for pushing violence against women out of the private sphere and onto the governmental agenda are a form of politicization that occurs out of formal political participation. Yet when we consider formal politics, surveys that include selfreported interest in politics reveal that women are less interested in formal politics. Campbell and Winters (2008) have explored the question of women’s lower interest in politics than men in depth. Their argument is that women are not necessarily less interested in politics. However, due to gendered processes of socialization, women and men are simply interested in different aspects of politics. That is, women are more interested in social issues, as the study of Norris et al. (2004) also reported, but they do not perceive this interest as ‘political’, because they tend to associate the latter with partisan competitive politics, something that

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they are less interested about. This might explain why women report a lower interest in politics than men and why it may appear that they are the ones that mostly hate politics (paraphrasing Hay 2007). It also profoundly illustrates that it matters how we define politics and what definitions of politics a focus on women might generate. One of the exciting new trends in this research analyses female political leadership in the executive branch and whether it makes a difference for the substantive representation of women (SRW) or for advancing gender equality (Annesley and Gains 2010). The German Chancellor Angela Merkel – the most powerful politician in Europe according to many media accounts – has attracted the interest of those doing gender and political analysis. Joyce Mushaben (2014) suggests in her study of Merkel’s leadership that, although the chancellor does not embrace feminism, she has nonetheless made a difference in German gender equality policies. This is because she has promoted measures such as childcare facilities for children under three years, paternity leave, and a 30 per cent quota to increase women’s presence in corporate boards; and she appointed in 2014 Germany’s first female defence minister, Ursula von der Leyen. Angelika Von Wahl’s (2011) research shows more mixed results on the extent to which being a female leader played a role in Merkel’s representation of women’s interests in her first term in office (2005–2009), by pursuing or avoiding policy reform in areas of concern for women, such as family policy and anti-discrimination. On the one hand, Von Wahl’s study shows that both Angela Merkel and Ursula von der Leyen (CDU), the Minister of ‘Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth’ at the time, supported progressive reforms in family policy. These included parenting benefits, childcare services for parents with smaller children and a two-month non-transferable paternity leave. According to Von Wahl: these female leaders promoted such womenfriendly policy reforms against the strong male breadwinner model prevailing in Germany and despite criticism from more traditional sectors of the CDU party. Their action was not only due to their own ‘strategic political goals’ – that is, attracting new voters from younger couples and women, and pleasing mothers, who are traditional voters of the Christian democratic party in Germany – but also ‘on the grounds of personal and normative convictions in the validity of substantive gender equality, born out of lived experiences and identities’. (Von Wahl 2011: 398)

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In this respect female leadership did matter for the substantive representation of women’s concerns. On the other hand, however, the two German female leaders did not manifest the same courage when they had to challenge traditional gender norms in the area of anti-discrimination in the labour market. Merkel defined the Equal Treatment Act as an ‘absolute job killer’, aligning with the important supporters of CDU such as business interests and the Church who opposed the law. Von Wahl’s (2011) explanation for Merkel’s political behaviour in this case is that she aligned with the German historical class-centred context, in which improving social rights in the family is more culturally accepted, whereas promoting individual liberal rights in employment resonates less in German culture. The reforms listed by Mushaben (2014) that relate to Merkel’s actions in favour of women that is sex quotas and women’s appointments in top positions, are about women rather than about fundamental gender norms in society. They are more about equality as women’s equal opportunities to participate than breaking gendered structures. Gender scholars, of course, are quick to point out how such actions might nevertheless end up changing the politics of institutions as we know them. Von Wahl’s findings, in turn, strongly rely on a gender perspective and gender norms. This may explain the more critical interpretation of Merkel as an advocate of gender equality, since the gender and politics approach foregrounds deep structures of politics that require more fundamental reforms. This is the perspective that we turn to now.

Gender and politics Gender approaches bring a more structural perspective to the analysis of politics. They analyse politics and its concepts not just as male dominated – as in the women and politics approach – but as gendered, for instance as ‘masculine’ politics, meant in a traditional way as based on hierarchical gender relations. Understanding politics as a ubiquitous process is particularly useful here. Gender analysis seeks to uncover the deep structures of political processes that result in uneven gendered outcomes. Janet Elise Johnson (2014) provides an excellent illustration of ­context-specific masculinity politics, where masculinity is understood in a patriarchal way that associates it with traditional male roles. She  studies Russian President’s Vladimir Putin’s ‘masculinity

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politics’ as a context for the emergence and actions of the feminist punk group Pussy Riot in the 2010s (Johnson 2014: 585). Putin’s masculinity politics combined elements of virility, physical strength, aggressiveness, crudeness and sexualization to present Putin as a hero who could restore Russia’s power. Economic growth ensured support for the scheme. This masculinity politics had the effects of making the Orthodox Church’s anti-gender campaign stronger, it contributed to the anti-LGBT laws from 2013, and explained the lack of gender equality legislation in the country (Johnson 2014: 585). Gender analyses have expanded the notion of politics by challenging the public–private distinction and proposing redefinitions of politics that place at its core issues of care and domestic work that are mostly performed by women (see, among others, Waring’s 1988 If Women Counted). With respect to the content of politics, these studies, as discussed elsewhere in this book, criticize the lack of recognition of women’s unpaid care and domestic work in the countries’ gross domestic product (GDP) and political agenda, arguing that this work is necessary to sustain human life and is therefore central to politics. With respect to the arena of politics, gender approaches have proposed an attention not only to formal politics, but also to informal communitybased activism, where women’s political action is particularly vibrant. For example, in the case of the masculine politics of Russia, Johnson suggests that there is very little space for organized feminism: ‘the best hope for feminism may be informal organizations. In the Russian context, what happens in the private and semi-private spheres is particularly relevant’ (Johnson 2014: 587). Along these lines, Faranak Miraftab’s (2006) gender study of antieviction mobilizations in South Africa calls into question assumptions that only formal politics dominated by men are a valid form of political participation and citizenship a longstanding tradition that has been able to ignore the political activities and agency of women. Her analysis shows how the state, media and international organizations tend to legitimize as ‘proper’ the most formalized channels for civil society’s political participation that they can more easily control, while they reject informal politics practised by grassroots marginalized groups that invent their own autonomous spaces and strategies of mobilization (Miraftab 2006: 194). The author finds that the private–public distinction reappears even within these ‘invented’ spaces of informal politics to achieve social justice where women tend to be especially active. Participation practices reproduce unequal gender roles in which ‘it is the ladies that are doing all the work, [while] the men are doing all

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the talking and all the flying’ to represent the demands of the group – as a female campaigner in Miraftab’s study (2006: 204) claimed. This led to women’s struggles within the anti-eviction campaign for ‘more progressive grassroots practices that treat gender justice and social justice as inseparable’ (2006: 195). The study demonstrates how it is the very notion of politics that needs to be rethought in gender terms, in relation to both its content and its practice of political participation. Politics as a dynamic process happens on a number of different levels that are deeply intertwined: national, international, subnational and global. The analytical perspective on gender and politics therefore calls for a focus on key political processes such as federalism, decentralization of state powers, European integration and Europeanization, democratization or regime change. Gender and politics perspectives illustrate the deep gendered structures that can be either reified or challenged in these processes. Gender and politics approaches reveal a number of gendered structures in relation to the political processes of federalism and decentralization. Federal states create both opportunities and limitations for gender relations (Vickers 2010, 2013; Meier 2016). Gender scholars have unveiled, on the one hand, the genderedness of federal structures when they criticize the attribution to the subnational level competencies, such as social policies, that are traditionally associated with women and the allocation to the federal level of those competencies, such as finance, that tend to be associated with men (see Meier 2016). On the other hand, they highlight the opportunities that federalism opens up for placing gender issues on the agenda, because the different levels of government offer multiple entry points for feminist lobbying that are precluded in unitary states (Haussman, Sawer and Vickers 2010). Processes of decentralization can be opportunities for gendering the politics of the new governments. Beveridge, Nott and Stephen (2000) show how government decentralization opened up opportunities for implementing gender mainstreaming and introducing more transformative approaches. They find that the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have integrated the commitment to mainstreaming equality into policymaking more than at the central UK level by requiring gender impact assessment of all policies and applying a more participatory approach to mainstreaming (Kenny and Mackay 2011). Gender scholars have also conceptualized the process of European integration as gendered and have proposed ways to mainstream gender in its analysis (Abels and Mushaben 2012; Abels and MacRae 2016). They argue

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that the European integration process is gendered because it reflects and constructs specific understandings of gendered power relations (Locher and Prügl 2009; Kronsell 2012: 24). These approaches take gender as a fundamental category for analysing social relations and in this way ‘shed[ding] light on the otherwise invisible economic, political and social effects of integration’ (Abels and Mushaben 2012: 9). For example, gender studies of regional governance reveal the hierarchical normative power that the EU exercises in its relationships with South Africa and South America, challenging the EU self-presentation as a gender equality model for other countries (Van der Vleuten, van Eerdewikg and Roggeband 2014). Gender studies of European integration make visible the tension between gender equality and the EU neoliberal economic model by exploring the uneasy coexistence in the European integration project between the goal of equality and that of achieving greater economic integration within a neoliberal framework (Cavaghan, Lombardo and Walby 2015). This coexistence has resulted in both advances and backlashes in EU gender equality (Clavero and Galligan 2009; Kantola 2010; Abels and Mushaben 2012; Woodward and van der Vleuten 2014; Jacquot 2015). It has led to the adoption of a set of gender equality laws and policies that are relatively confined to the sphere of the labour market, but which have pushed states to engage with equality issues in employment, equal treatment, equal pay and reconciliation of work and family life (Hoskyns 1996; Van Der Vleuten 2007; Kantola 2010). Democratization is another field where gender and politics scholars challenge prevailing conceptions of politics and show their genderedness and its implications. Democratization has been described as the process of ‘“making democratic” regimes, practices and discourses of public power’ (Rai 2008: 59). Gender scholars have challenged most of the non-gender literature on democratization for being largely gender blind. Evidence of this gender blindness includes the fact that this literature tends to focus only on actors that intervene in the public sphere, that are predominantly men, to pay little attention to women’s activities in processes of transitions to democracy, and to neglect women’s access to citizenship rights as part of the criteria for a procedural or even a qualitative democracy (Waylen 2007; Rai 2008). In a prime example of the continued need to challenge public–private distinctions in politics, gender analysis of democratization suggests that it is important to analyse the extent to which the private domain is democratized too. To enhance gender equality in these processes there needs to be a ‘parallel democratization of both the public and the private spheres’ (Rai 2008: 61). The analysis of transitions from authoritarian regimes to democracy, for instance, should include in the definition of the

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political not only ‘formal activities within the conventional political arena’ but also ‘informal political activity’ within ‘communities and social movements’, where women tend to be more present (Waylen 2007: 5). Gender approaches to regime type and change have also revealed the effects of different political dynamics on gender relations. Aili Mari Tripp (2013) argues that gender approaches to the study of regime type go beyond women’s approaches’ predominant focus on the number of women in national legislatures. Her point is that women’s formal political representation cannot be taken as the only measure of women’s advancement because non-democratic regimes may have introduced gender quotas (due to international and/or women’s pressures), but not other gender equality policies. Besides, these polities may have adopted equality policies within structures that limit women’s rights in other ways, as the example of former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries that had quotas but in non-democratic regimes shows. By contrast, gender approaches consider a combination of factors over time that produce gender (in)equalities in formal and informal economic, social, cultural and political contexts. These approaches look at factors such as gender policies adopted by governments, attitudes toward gender equality, women’s activism and international pressure, and consider how they differently combine in the various regimes and in processes of regime change to promote gender-equal outcomes (Tripp 2013). Along these lines, Htun and Weldon (2010) explain the variety of gender policy outcomes by considering the type of regime and the degree of democracy together with other factors. They point out that gender policy outcomes vary with different kinds of gender policy issues, as different issues might imply different kinds of dynamics between political actors and context factors such as state capacity, policy legacies, international vulnerability and degree of democracy. Other gender studies that adopt a combination of factors to analyse processes of regime change have found that results vary depending on the different contexts. For example, transitions to democracy in Latin America and Eastern Europe were criticized from gender perspectives due to the regressive economic and social policies that left women in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe without social security and childcare measures and reduced women’s political representation (Tripp 2013). By contrast, gender studies of transition processes in Africa and East Asia found that democratization opened up spaces for women’s mobilization and promoted the advancement of women’s rights and gender equality policies (Lee 2000; Tripp et al. 2009).

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One key issue in relation to gender and politics approaches is that of the interphases between what is considered law, religion, culture or economics. Comparative politics studies of West European countries such as those of Annesley et al. (2014), for example, have examined the relation between economic growth and the likelihood that gender equality policy issues enter the government’s agenda. Annesley et al.’s (2014) study indeed confirms that costly gender equality policies in the areas of women’s access to the labour market, equal treatment at work and care activities are more difficult to advance in hard economic times. In recent years, as a result of the heightened dominance of neoliberalism, economics is often argued to have narrowed down the space of politics. In other words, ‘economy’, instead of politics or politicians, dictates the frame within which, for example, welfare state policies are developed or curtailed. Economic liberalization is one example of such ongoing political processes. It changes both the notion of ‘politics’ and has deep gendered impacts as gender scholars illustrate. Razavi (2009) shows that there is a global agenda of economic liberalization that includes trade and financial liberalization, fiscal restraints, privatization of stateowned companies, labour market liberalization and market principles introduced in public management and public services. This process of economic liberalization has negative gender impacts that are visible, for example in the informalization of labour – and feminization of informal labour – in Africa, India, Latin America and China (Razavi 2009). In the EU, the Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF – with the support of most member states – have adopted austerity politics in response to the 2008 economic crisis. This has negatively affected gender equality policies and gender relations (Bettio et  al. 2012; Karamessini and Rubery 2014). The new economic governance regime is also highly undemocratic – out of reach of ‘politics’ (Klatzer and Schlager 2014). Civil society organizations have been excluded from participating in and influencing the economic reform processes. Gender and politics approaches also promote some solutions to ‘bringing politics back in’ to these undemocratic and seemingly apolitical processes. This could signify regulation of finance through democratic means, for instance by eliminating tax havens, investing in social issues and regularly applying gender budgeting (Walby 2015), the mainstreaming of gender into economic and finance policies (Bettio et al. 2012), and in general to achieve some form of ‘embedded liberalism’ to ‘tame’ or ‘embed’ economic liberalization (Razavi 2009).

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Deconstruction and politics A deconstructive approach to politics signifies challenging the underpinnings of politics, that which is normally considered political and keeps up the appearance of politics. It may mean, for example, exploring whether such notions as formal and informal politics act as binaries and, instead, showing how they are mutual, so that it is impossible to say where one begins and the other ends. Often there are attempts to construct these as binary as in the case of the distinction between national and international politics in the study of International Relations (IR) (Kantola 2008). Deconstruction and politics asks questions about power relations behind these constructions and boundaries: what power keeps up the boundaries. Institutions of power – the state, the media, political parties, international donor organizations – configure these spaces in a binary relation for the purpose of depicting the other as the proper site of politics (Miraftab 2006: 194). Deconstruction of gendered politics shows how performances of gender reproduce politics as we know it and us as the gendered subjects of politics. Politics is thus gendered and gendering, in the sense that it both reproduces gender bias and enacts un/equal practices that constitute us as women and men with specific roles. Performative politics requires constant performances. One way to study performative practices of politics from deconstruction approaches is to treat political and economic processes as discursive gendered constructions that are continuously contested by different actors and that are used for a variety of purposes. This means, for example, that in processes of economic liberalization there is not one but a multiplicity of discourses that construct gender relations in different ways. These discursive constructions not only help us to understand the ‘endogenous reasons’ of processes of political change (Schmidt 2011) but also open our minds to the specific effects that discourses have on women, men, and their relations. Deconstruction studies of Europeanization processes, which analyse how the EU has influenced member states’ politics, have tried to understand policy change in Europe via exploring not only the transposition of EU directives in member states, but also the soft mechanisms of policy learning, norm diffusion through financial incentives, actors’ interactions and the discursive usage of the EU (Liebert 2003; Lombardo and Forest 2012). This broader explanatory potential has enabled scholars in these studies to understand not only phenomena of convergence of national norms with the EU norms, but also the divergence of member

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states’ policy outcomes. Liebert’s (2003) comparative study of the Europeanization of gender equality policies in six member states, for example, addresses as part of its theoretical framework how EU gender equality directives are framed in the process of transposing EU norms into domestic ones. Findings of this comparison of processes of discursive contestation around the transposition of EU gender directives at the domestic levels show diverging patterns in the Europeanization of gender equality policies, because EU gender equality policies are given different meanings in the different member states. In Spain, for example, data indicate that domestic policymakers adopt EU gender norms for opposite reasons, sometimes when the gender equality context is more distant from EU law and other times because it is closer to EU law. The cases of France and Sweden, in turn, show that domestic policymakers resist EU norms because they perceive them as contradicting the more gender-equal domestic provisions (Liebert 2003). Deconstruction studies of Europeanization both help us to understand that processes of EU policy transposition result in diverging rather than converging patterns, and offer analytical lenses for understanding how political change occurs. Lombardo and Forest (2012) adopt a discursive-sociological approach to studying the Europeanization of gender equality policies that draws on discursive framings, actors’ interactions and EU soft policy instruments for understanding processes of political change around equality in Europe. Krizsan and Popa (2012) apply a discursive-sociological approach to study the Europeanization of domestic violence policies in five Central and Eastern European Countries, showing that the EU had an influence on domestic policies even in a ‘soft’ policy area that at the time of the analysis had no legally binding legislation, such as domestic violence. The authors show that Romanian female parliamentarians strategically used the pre-accession climate in favour of all that was European to discursively ‘sell’ in parliamentary debates a law against domestic violence as ‘one of the most European laws debated in our Parliament’, even when there was actually no EU directive on gender-based violence at that time. Yet discursive strategies of gender advocates using the EU to adopt policies against domestic violence promoted processes of political change towards gender equality in Europe. As an approach to analysing processes of economic crisis, such as those that occurred from 2008 onwards in the US and Europe, deconstruction of gender means focusing on the ways in which the crisis is discursively constructed, how some diagnosis of the crisis problem and solutions to the crisis are constructed as hegemonic while others are

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marginalized, and how these constructions are gendered and gendering subjects. For example, there is ample research into the dominance of neoliberal discourses in providing solutions to the crisis, which is a particularly hostile discourse for gender equality (Kantola and Squires 2012; Fraser 2013; Prügl 2015). In Greek national discourse the macroeconomic level is discursively constructed as the most important, which makes the gendered experiences of the crisis disappear (Vaiou 2014) and the feminist, queer and LGBT struggles against homophobia seem unimportant (Athanasiou 2014: 4). Other examples of discursive politics analyses have also shown how contents of gender equality are reproduced in political debates in ways that can take it far from feminist aims, for instance by promoting the goal of economic productivity rather than that of gender equality (Rönnblom 2009). A deconstructionist approach to the process of economic crisis then challenges the very definitions of the crisis and asks on whose terms is it defined, what relations of power underpin these definitions and how could they be undone.

Intersectionality and politics Intersectional approaches allow analysts to scrutinize processes of policymaking, of judicial litigation and of economization, among others, for their ability to be inclusive of different intersecting inequalities, respectful of diversity and defiant of privileges. Intersectional approaches to studying any of these processes contribute to political analysis by unveiling how, for instance, processes of gendering and racializing interact in judicial praxis, the kind of differentiated impacts that policymaking produces on people who are at the point of intersection between multiple inequalities, and the dynamics of power, privilege and marginalization that political processes enact or counteract. When intersectional perspectives are applied to the analysis of processes of policymaking, for example, they show the extent to which the latter are inclusive of people’s different claims. Scholars researching on gender mainstreaming have argued that participatory-democratic processes of policymaking – that involve different groups of civil society in the process – would be more open than ‘expert-bureaucratic’ ones to ‘do the mainstreaming’ of diversity into policymaking (Beveridge, Nott and Stephen 2000; Barnett-Donaghy 2004; Squires 2005). The political contestation that takes place in deliberative processes of policymaking would moreover favour politicization and thus a more open discussion, and

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potential challenging, of power relations and privileges (Mukhopadhyay 2004; Verloo 2005). In the ‘expert-bureaucratic’ model, the mainstreaming work is mostly done by gender experts and bureaucrats in policy machineries, and this, while being the most widespread form of mainstreaming implemented, tends to make mainstreaming appear essentially like a technical process in which policy actors simply need to apply supposedly neutral procedures (Rees 2005). From an intersectional approach, the problem that this technocratic model of gender mainstreaming raises for democracy is the extent to which this elite body of professionals and gender experts can actually reflect wider women’s concerns that are not part of the bureaucrats and experts’ experiences (Squires 2005). Participatory processes have effects for the content of politics, making it more egalitarian and inclusive of marginalized groups’ concerns in the political agenda. Barnett-Donaghy (2004) has studied the ‘­participatory-democratic’ approach to gender mainstreaming in the case of Northern Ireland, which is based on the participation of civic and community groups through a process of consultation and hearings. The mainstreaming model of Northern Ireland includes gender together with eight other social groupings, according to the Northern Ireland Act of 1998, and it requires that in the preparatory stage of legislation the government consults the groups affected by a proposal through specific schemes. An ad hoc set Equality Commission monitors that public authorities are adequately consulting affected groups. According to Barnett-Donaghy, the results of this process are that the political agenda has given greater priority to equality and the needs of the different discriminated groups. Deliberative processes of mainstreaming of equality in policymaking, argues Squires (2005), have a great potential of making the strategy a transformative tool. Gender mainstreaming can progress only when it becomes diversity mainstreaming, that is when diverse groups bring to the public agenda their respective views and experiences and engage in democratic deliberation (Squires 2005). At the local level there have been initiatives to apply a diversity mainstreaming approach to policymaking, as it was the case with the Barcelona municipality in Catalonia. However, applying intersectionality to policymaking has proved challenging, and the result has often been in terms of multiple discrimination rather than intersectionality. In their analysis of Catalan public policies targeted at LGBT groups, Coll and Cruells (2013) show that the Barcelona municipality applied a multiple discrimination rather than an intersectional approach to address inequalities. Different inequalities were treated under the same

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umbrella but each inequality was addressed in a parallel way, rather than in interaction with the others. The result was a process of competition among different inequality groups. However, some advantages emerged for inequalities that were considered more peripheral, such as LGBT issues, because these seemed to gain greater legitimacy when they were addressed together with other inequalities (Coll and Cruells 2013). Similar competitive processes occurred at the EU level, when the European Commission launched the anti-discrimination approach at the end of the 1990s and asked non-governmental organizations (NGOs) representing different inequalities to come together under the same umbrella. This triggered defensive mechanisms on the part of the different organizations that felt they had to compete with other groups for funding and attention on the part of the European institutions (Lombardo and Verloo 2009b; Kantola and Nousiainen 2012). According to Hancock (2007) this ‘Oppression Olympics’ phenomenon occurs when multiple inequalities are treated as separate and parallel axes, rather than being interacted. After some years of practice, EU civil society organizations are becoming more open to intersectionality in their internal politics, for example ILGA-Europe by intersecting gender and sexuality and the European Women’s Lobby by intersecting gender and ethnicity or gender and age. However, intersectionality in EU policymaking is still embryonic, and the European Commission tends to treat inequalities as parallel rather than intersecting (Lombardo and Rolandsen Agustín 2012). Some experiences of intersectionality in EU policymaking can be found especially in more recent policy documents (from the period 2009–2014) elaborated by the European Parliament Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, due to the gender  specialization of the institution and the practice of consulting with gender experts (Lombardo and Rolandsen Agustín 2016). Studies that adopt intersectional approaches are important to reveal processes of culturalization, gendering and degendering that are at play in policymaking. This is the case in Rolandsen Agustín’s (2013) intersectional study of EU gender violence policies. Culturalization, according to Rolandsen Agustín’s study, occurs in EU policies on gender violence when some types of gender violence, for instance female genital mutilation, are considered to be specific to certain ethnic groups due to their culture. When forms of gender violence are categorized as culture-specific (rather than as the result of processes of power that take place in all kinds of gender violence), and attached to a specific ethnic minority group, such as migrant Muslim women, there is a risk

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of stigmatizing these groups. Roggeband and Verloo (2007) make a similar argument about Dutch gender violence policies, which seem to assume that Muslim women are especially subject to gender violence, as if native Dutch women did not suffer from it. This process of culturalization and stigmatization – argue Roggeband and Verloo (2007) – does not contribute to solving the problem of violence against women. The tendency of public policies to associate the problem of gender violence with particular inequalities, while silencing others, shows further limitations of policymaking’s capacity to address intersectional inequalities. In this respect, Rolandsen Agustín (2013) finds that EU policymaking on gender violence, in the period from 1995 to 2008, tends to focus on ethnic minority and migrant women, assuming that the most important problem for ethnic minority women is that of gender violence. However, this concentration on inequalities of gender-and-ethnicity and gender-and-citizenship status on the other hand silences other inequalities that are also important to gender violence policies, such as social class. Ethnic minority women who experience violence, as ethnic majority ones, would benefit from employment policies that promote their economic independence. Intersectionality approaches are also used to assess processes of judicial litigation in which the discrimination that a person denounced was not based on one single characteristic, for example race, but rather on a ‘combination on the grounds of gender, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation’ (European Commission 2007: 9). Scholars note that intersectional approaches are not systematically included in judicial processes, and courts, especially European ones, still prove rather insensitive to intersectionality (Vakulenko 2007; Radacic 2008; Cruells and La Barbera 2016). As a matter of fact, neither the Court of Justice of the European Union nor the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) had applied an intersectional interpretation of discrimination until the Beauty Solomon v. Spain decision in 2012 by the ECHR (Cruells and La Barbera 2016). In  this case, mentioned in Chapter  4, the court recognized the particular vulnerability of the applicant due to her race, gender and employment status, because the plaintiff, a Nigerian woman performing sex work, had been physically and verbally abused by the police in ways that other sex workers with ‘European phenotype’ did not similarly suffer. It was the mutual and constitutive interaction of her gender, race and social status that shaped her experience of discrimination, so that it would not make sense to consider each ground separately.

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A Canadian court has gone further in explicitly recognizing the importance of applying intersectional approaches in judicial cases that involve discrimination that is due to multiple inequality factors. This is because, as made clear in the Baylis-Flannery v. DeWilde case of a Black woman denouncing sexual harassment at work, if only one ground is considered, for instance sex, there is a danger of denying the relevance of the racial discrimination that the plaintiff experienced as a Black woman. As the court concluded, ‘the law must acknowledge that she is not a woman who happens to be Black, or a Black person who happens to be female, but a Black woman’ (Baylis-Flannery v. DeWilde 2003 CarswellOnt 8050 at 145, quoted in Chaudary 2010: 10). Intersectional approaches ask judges to consider the multiple discrimination that a person might experience as a whole. The Canadian court put it clearly when discussing the victim’s sexist and racial discrimination: the ‘whole is more than the sum of the parts: the impact of these highly discriminatory acts on her personhood is serious’ (Baylis-Flannery v. DeWilde 2003 CarswellOnt 8050 at 11, quoted in Chaudary 2010: 10). The adoption of an intersectional approach allows analysts to scrutinize processes of judicial litigation in a more holistic way and allows judges to pay attention to the specific nature of the experience of a person who has lived discrimination that is due to the interaction of multiple inequality grounds. In another case appeared in front of a US court, Lam v. Univ. of Hawaii, 40 F.3d 1551 (9th Cir. 1994), an Asian woman alleged discrimination on grounds of her race and gender. The court adopted an intersectional approach by arguing that: Asian women are subject to a set of stereotypes and assumptions shared neither by Asian men nor by white women … As other courts have recognized, where two bases for discrimination exist, they cannot be neatly reduced to distinct components … The attempt to bisect a person’s identity at the intersection of race and gender often distorts or ignores the particular nature of their experiences. (Lam v. Univ. of Hawaii 40 F.3d 1551, 1562 quoted in Chaudary 2010: 6) Intersectional analysis can train political researchers to become more sensitive to the complex and multifaceted nature of inequality that people experience in judicial processes and offer them analytical tools for recommending to policymakers measures apt to interpret and address social inequalities.

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Processes of economization have also been looked at from intersectional perspectives, by examining how austerity policies adopted in response to the economic crisis in Europe have had differentiated impacts on migrant minoritized women or men (Bettio et al. 2012), female refugees in countries like Greece (Athanasiou 2014), younger unemployed women and older women who see their pensions reduced or cut (Bettio et al. 2012; Karamessini and Rubery 2014). Intersectionality shows how different organizations and movements representing different groups can be pitted against one another in a seeming competition for scarcer resources, or, alternatively, it can point to new alliances and solidarity at times of crisis (Bassel and Emejulu 2014). Populist right parties seeking to protect ‘our people’ can resort to racist or even fascist discourses that challenge the human rights of racialized others in European countries (Norocel 2013). Intersectionality studies have also highlighted how in the last two decades, in a European context of increased migration, the intersection between gender, migration, ethnicity, class and religion has been put at the forefront of European policymaking (Mügge and de Jong 2013; Siim 2014). This intersection reflects processes of racialization of Muslim identities often through the adoption of policies concerning types of gender-based violence that are considered specific to Muslim migrant women, such as female genital mutilation, forced marriages and veiling (Lépinard 2014: 125). In terms of the definition of the crisis, intersectional approaches pinpoint how the crisis is underpinned not only by a gender system or gendered structures but also racism, classism and heterosexism. Looking at politics from intersectional perspectives thus exposes the limitations of traditional concepts of politics for grasping intersecting dynamics of inequality, and promotes analyses that are more inclusive of groups’ diversity and attentive to power dynamics.

Postdeconstruction and politics Postdeconstruction approaches offer novel lenses for looking at the role of emotions, the ‘mattering of the body’ (Athanasiou, Hantzaroula and Yannakopoulos 2008), and their gender and intersectional dynamics, operating in political processes such as nationalism and economization. These perspectives help conceptualize politics as made of processes and practices that mobilize people’s emotions in different directions, including sexism, racism or equality. The politics of emotions has gender and other inequality effects on people, and is thus relevant for redefining the notion of politics.

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Scholars in this approach have shown that processes of nationalism are ‘profoundly dependent on a politics of emotions’ (Athanasiou Hantzaroula and Yannakopoulos 2008: 10). For example, the construction of the nation as a ‘system of kinship’ that is biologically defined in terms of ‘race’ and ‘blood’, argues Banti (2008: 2), is based on ‘deep images’; that is, pictures, allegorical systems and narratives that incorporate a set of nationalist values and beliefs that emerge from old discursive narratives. ‘Deep images’ are made of primary emotions such as love and sacrifice, which bond members in a community around the feeling that it needs to be defended from ‘miscegenation’. The construction of the nation as a community of kinship is reinforced by the gendered terminology of ‘motherland’, ‘fathers of the nation’ and ‘brotherhood’. The role women are given in this ‘system of kinship’ is to preserve the biological purity and continuity of the nation. This role is reproduced through gender-specific discourses about women’s sexual honour and virtue as key to preserve the nation’s genealogical lines (see Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989; and Yuval-Davis 1997). Banti (2008) argues that the emotional power that derives from ‘deep images’ has intensely shaped people’s identities in 19th-century European nationalisms. Symbolic processes related to the construction of the nation suggest particular meanings of gender. Studies on gender and nation such as Yuval-Davis (1997) and Yuval-Davis and Anthias (1989) claim that men have commonly been assigned roles that involve the defence of the country, while women’s roles involve its nurture. The everyday training of people’s symbolic association of women with care of the nation and of men with its defence, through images, statues or discourses, evokes emotions and values that reinforce traditional gender roles (Lombardo and Meier 2014). This can help to explain why the image of the sevenmonths-pregnant Spanish minister of defence in 2008, the first woman appointed for that ministry in Spain, attracted considerable attention in the international press. The image appearing in the front page of many newspapers showed a mother-to-be, a symbol of motherhood, inspecting the troops in a position of command, and the army, symbol of masculinity and defence of the nation, in a state of subordination and obedience towards a woman. The image provoked emotions of surprise in the public opinion, joy on the part of feminists, and rage on the part of conservative political actors and media, because it turned upside down socially ingrained expectations and norms about gender roles (Lombardo and Meier 2014). Scholars employing this approach have also explored the kind of emotions that are mobilized in nationalist projects and their race

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intersections. Ahmed (2004b) has shown how race intersects with nationalism when national identity is mobilized through the politics of ‘love’ and ‘shame’. She argues that the mobilization of love in nationalist projects does not necessarily lead to emancipation. Nazi members felt united in love with what they perceived as the White Nation but this love was based upon hate against non-whites and mobilized racism and segregation, thus it was a politics of emotions that was not emancipatory. Ahmed also analyses how politicians’ official declarations of shame can bring the nation into existence as a felt community. One of the examples she makes is the 1996 Australian governor-general’s official discourse of reconciliation about the need to express shame on the part of the Australian nation towards its indigenous people. In this declaration, the recognition of past injustices committed against Aboriginal people is presented ‘as a form of nation building’ or as ‘the re-covering of the nation’ (Ahmed 2004b: 102, 112). In this narrative, injustices committed by the Australian nation are presented not only as unjust in themselves but also because they have ‘deprived white Australia of its ability to declare its pride in itself to others’ (Ahmed 2004b: 112). The official expression of shame for the wrong done in the past can thus have the function of returning the pride to the nation and sticking people together around the national ideal that failed in the past but can now bond people together again. Processes of economization have been scrutinized in the light of the politics of emotions as well. Ducey (2007) discusses the relation between a capitalist economy and affect in her study of health care workers in the US, a job with a great personal investment in terms of affect, that is described as ‘more than a job’. The author shows that while the training and education of these workers improved their learning and affective capacities of interaction with their patients, the common ends of a training and education, such as a pay rise and a better job, were constantly delayed to the benefit of capitalist production. Other studies analyse the 2008 economic crisis in Europe by placing the emphasis on the material underpinning of the current political economy, its entrenched relations to neoliberalism, states’ biopolitics, emotions and affects and their bodily impacts (Coole and Frost, 2010; Athanasiou, 2014). Anger, shame, guilt and empathy are important emotions to understand socio-political developments around the crisis, as the indignation and rage of Spain’s Indignados movement shows. The analytical perspective on postdeconstruction suggests that these emotions are not individual but social, and involve power relations. For instance, in the south of Europe the neoliberal ‘austerity’ agenda

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has been accompanied by a moralizing discourse ‘that passes on the responsibility to citizens together with a feeling of guilt, making easier for governments to impose public expenditure cuts and to increase social control of the population’ (Addabbo, Rodríguez-Modroño and Gálvez-Muñoz 2013: 5). In the north of Europe women politicians’ expressing empathy towards ‘the other women’ in the south can be read as an affective expression of power that fixes the southern countries’ economic and gender policies as failed (Pedwell 2014; Kantola 2015). Feminist analyses using these approaches show that neoliberalism and violence constitute the vulnerabilities of the bodies affected by the crisis and protesting against it (Athanasiou 2014). Popular left and right parties whose popularity the crisis has increased play with emotions and affects too with tangible results for many, including women from the south of Europe and minority women and men, especially from lower social classes, in different areas of Europe.

Conclusions In this chapter we have analysed politics as process. This has meant studying the dynamics of politics in action and their equality dimensions, differently expressed in the women, gender, deconstruction, intersectional and postdeconstruction approaches adopted in this book. The analysis of politics as process has moved us to review the dynamics that are expressed in political processes such as policymaking, democratization, European integration, constitution making, decentralization, regime changes, judicial litigation and economization, as well as to consider issues of political leadership and political behaviour. Women approaches to politics as process contribute to making visible the extent to which women are present in political and economic processes and the ways in which they behave politically. Gender approaches bring a more structural perspective into the analysis, by unveiling the gender biases of ‘masculine politics’ and formal political processes that perpetuate unequal public and private divisions at all levels of government, and by revaluing informal politics where women are particularly active. Deconstruction approaches, on their side, challenge binary distinctions of public/private spheres and formal/ informal politics and show how politics is based on performative practices and discursive gendered constructions. Intersectional perspectives propose a notion of politics that is inclusive of different intersecting

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inequalities, respectful of diversity and defiant of privileges. Finally, postdeconstruction approaches remind us of the role of emotions and bodily materiality in politics, and suggest that emotions have gender and other inequality dimensions that affect people in different ways. When analysed from this variety of feminist perspectives, politics shows features that would otherwise not be visible, and appears as a concept capable of both reflecting the diversity of women and men’s political experiences and making the power inequalities embedded in existing political processes and practices explicit, and hence more exposed to contestation.

Chapter 8

Policy

Policy is often defined in the literature on policy analysis as the output of processes in which governmental institutions plan, formulate, adopt, implement and evaluate interventions aimed at addressing those problems that political actors have defined as relevant in specific social contexts (Dye 1972; Hogwood and Gunn 1984; Anderson 2006; Lombardo, Meier and Verloo 2013). Gender equality policies, for example, are generally put into place with the aim of making the economy, society and politics more equal. This definition of policies, while helpful in many ways, makes them sound as if policy problems were objectively discovered ‘out there’ and the role of policy solutions were simply to fix them (Allison 1971; Bacchi 1999). Policy scholars, and not only from gender perspectives, have long challenged this premise and proposed constructivist approaches to policy analysis. These suggest that public policies are social constructions that reflect subjects’ ideas, norms and values about what a problem is, and what solutions are offered to the problem (Allison 1971; Elder and Cobb 1984; Bacchi 1999). It is not the same, for instance, when policies talk about the problem of ‘reconciliation of work and family life’ or about the problem of ‘equal sharing of care responsibilities’ (Peterson 2013). Policy itself produces biases and power relations, and the literature on policy analysis is aware of this (Hogwood and Gunn 1984: 119). But to what extent are policy analysts aware of their own gender and intersectional biases when studying policies? What are the main contributions of feminist analyses to the understanding of policy? Jointly, all of the approaches contribute to policy analysis, first, because they challenge dominant narrow definitions of policy as something that only concerns the ‘public’ sphere (Parsons 1995; Lombardo and Meier 2016). The 1960s–1970s feminist movement’s struggles – exemplified in the slogan ‘the personal is political’ – put pressure on institutions to place on the political agenda policy issues formerly considered private such as contraception, abortion, childcare and violence against women. By challenging the division between public and private, gender activists

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and scholars have contributed to redefining and broadening the realm of policy (Pateman 1983; Okin 1991ab; Benhabib 1992; Fraser 1997). Feminist struggles and analyses have broadened the domain of public policy so that issues such as sexual and reproductive rights, violence against women and the equal sharing of care of children and dependent people have increasingly become matters that public authorities in democratic states should address (Mazur 2002). Second, the five feminist approaches contribute to link theory and policy practice by providing analytical tools not only for s­ crutinizing policies due to their gender and intersectional biases, but also for formulating more inclusive policies. Perspectives that point at the exclusion of women from the public arena or that promote the mainstreaming of gender and diversity in policymaking are examples of this potential. Third, while policy analysis has alerted scholars to the ‘biasing effects of their own assumptions or backgrounds’ on the policies they analyse (Hogwood and Gunn 1984: 119), it has not necessarily made them aware of their gender bias. Instead, the different feminist approaches to policy promote self-reflection or awareness in analysts and policymakers about their own gender and intersectional biases when they are analysing, making, implementing or evaluating policies. This increased awareness can help to control the emergence of unconscious gender and other biases in the analysis or making of policies, and as a result can counteract the reproduction of inequalities in both processes. In particular, women and policy approaches contribute to reveal where women and men are in policymaking processes and focus on the impact of a wide range of policies on women and men. Gender and policy approaches criticize policies for perpetuating gender biases and inequalities through norms that are supposedly gender neutral while in fact they reproduce unequal social structures that tend to assign men to the public sphere and women to the private. These approaches not only challenge unequal policies but also propose ways of integrating gender into public policies. Deconstruction and policy approaches explore the discursive underpinnings that frame policies with very real effects on people’s lives. Intersectionality enables an analysis of how to integrate intersectionality into policies and new evaluations about their inclusiveness and fairness. Finally, postdeconstruction perspectives focus on how policies, bodies and affects interact, and we explore how this not only gives rise to new analytical perspectives but also foregrounds new policy issues to be studied in gender and politics.

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Women and policy Women and policy approaches foreground three issues. First, the need to give policy visibility to the role women play in society; second, the impact of public policies on women; and, third, the presence of women in policy processes and their impact on public policies. Development is a key policy field where the women perspective was first formulated and gained political significance for policies (see Lombardo, Meier, and Verloo 2013). As discussed in Chapter 4, women in development (WID) scholarship addressed the key productive and reproductive role that women perform in their communities, which development policies had until then neglected. By mainstreaming women in development, this scholarship contributed to transforming development policies in more gender-equal ways (Boserup 1970). Second, as these studies on women in development planning show, public policies have an impact on women, when they are both decisions to act and not to act on specific issues. Employment, childcare and parental leave policies may constrain or enhance women’s participation in the labour market (Rubery 2005; Blofield and Haas 2013). Care policies may promote a universal male breadwinner model that produces women as dependents, or a universal caregiver model that promotes a more equal sharing of care between women and men (Fraser 1994; Sainsbury 2013). Policies against violence against women have a huge impact on women’s lives. Since violence against women is a strong mechanism of domination that affects women’s health, personal integrity, life and employment, it greatly matters to women if a state adopts and effectively implements policies that address violence against women in its multiple forms, from domestic violence to rape, sexual harassment and assault, and ‘harmful traditional practices’ such as female circumcision (Zippel 2006; Walby 2009). If public policies do not cover the different forms of violence  or do not effectively criminalize violence against women and provide assistance to women who experience violence, victims will lack rights and protection. Third, women and policy analysis documents the underrepresentation of women – and overrepresentation of men – in the elaboration of policy, arguing that what is needed to redress this imbalance is women’s presence in politics (Phillips  1995). Pitkin’s (1967) notion of descriptive political representation put forward the idea

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that democratic institutions should mirror the population. Since the 1990s, analyses on women’s descriptive representation have shown that women are not equally represented in democratic institutions, and that mechanisms such as sex quotas are needed to achieve a more equal quantitative political representation (Lovenduski 2005a; Dahlerup  2006; Franceschet, Krook and Piscopo  2012). Part of this literature has also explored the extent to which women’s presence has an impact on public policies by way of ‘feminizing’ policy, politics and polity (Lovenduski 2005b; McBride and Mazur 2010). Studies on the relation between the descriptive and the substantive representation – the ‘acting for’ women – suggest that the extent to which women’s interests reach the political agenda are matters for empirical research, and bring evidence of the conditions in which women and men’s acts make a difference in policies (Celis 2008, 2009, 2012; Celis et al. 2008; Annesley and Gains 2010; Celis and Childs 2014). Doing political analysis from a women and policy approach allows researchers to identify who are the policymakers (men or women), who has agency and voice, who is present in processes of policymaking and who is left out, and what positions policy actors have. This is important because it informs people about who is empowered in policy processes thanks to resources that allow them the possibility of making choices about their community’s life and their own, about who is taking policy decisions, but also about which concerns, needs and interests – women’s or men’s – are given consideration in policymaking (Kabeer 1999). These approaches show how public policies impact on women’s lives – it matters if one has access to legal abortion and if there are quality and affordable childcare services – and that women’s actions impact on public policies. At the same time, the women and policy approach may suffer from its narrow notion of gender – as represented by the coherent subjects of women and men – that may neglect the diversity within these categories. As intersectional approaches to policy, discussed in more detail below, show, policies have a differentiated impact on different women shaped by their race and ethnicity, or class and religion. Women and policy approaches also take the definition of ‘policy’ at face value. It suffers from a benevolent understanding of what good policies can do and from assumptions that what policies make is always either good or bad. Gender and policy approaches introduce analytical elements that complicate these assumptions.

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Gender and policy Gender and policy analyses do not give so much relevance to which policy actors are represented and how, but to how social structures such as the organization of labour, intimacy and citizenship – and the norms and institutions related to them – construct hierarchical gender relations and female and male roles in ways that particularly disadvantage women (Verloo and Roggeband 1996). Analysing gender as a relation that underpins public policies shows that constructions of femininities and masculinities are interdependent and that it is not possible to understand women’s condition, for example their main role in social reproduction, without placing it in relation with men’s role, in this case their predominance in the labour market (Vogel 1991). Social structures that construct these relations need to be scrutinized in gender policy analyses, to uncover the influence they have on the shaping of policies. What distinguishes gender and policy approaches from women and policy is, firstly, that they put their fingers on gender biases that policy reproduces, questioning a supposed gender neutrality of policymaking (description), and, secondly, that they propose strategies to integrate gender into all public policies (prescription) (Lombardo, Meier and Verloo 2013). In relation to their contribution to policy description, gender analysis of policies illustrates that public policies tend to reproduce the male norm masqueraded as ‘neutral’ and to systematically disadvantage women (Rees 1998; Shaw 2000). Public policies are ‘androcentric’ – argues Hawkesworth (1994: 105) – because they tend to be based upon, and to reinforce male power advantage. For example, welfare policies show their androcentrism when they differentiate the type of benefits for employed and non-employed people, granting pension rights only to the former or penalizing interruptions in the participation in the labour market or part-time schemes, because women tend to be more represented among the workers that are not officially employed (Fraser 1989; Orloff 1996; Sainsbury 1996; Orloff et  al. 1999; Meyers et al. 2001). Or public policies on childcare and parental leave can disadvantage women’s employment opportunities when they do not promote men’s caring roles so that they share them equally with women (Gornick 2007). Gender approaches contribute to policy by also developing a ­prescriptive part of the analysis: one that links the theory of androcentric policies with the practice of incorporating a gender perspective in all

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public policies. The strategy of gender mainstreaming is thus proposed to challenge the existence of androcentric policy norms and structures (Rees 1998; Mazey 2000; Verloo 2001, 2005; Rai 2003; Walby 2005; Squires 2005, 2007; Kantola 2010; Lombardo 2013; Lombardo, Meier and Verloo 2013). The key idea of gender mainstreaming, endorsed by governments and civil society actors participating in the UN Women’s Conference of Beijing in 1995, is to assess before their adoption the potential impact that policy proposals on areas that were formerly not considered as gendered, such as transport, finance or urban planning, could have on women and men. Once gender biases and disadvantages for women or men are identified in policies, these policies should be changed and made more gender equal. As the UN (1997: 1) states: ‘The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality’ in society by formulating, implementing and evaluating all policies ‘so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated’. Gender mainstreaming epitomizes a gender analysis of policy. By definition it is about gender and gender relations, it requires comparing and contrasting and understanding the differentiated impact of policies on women and men as a result of their constructed gender identities. Its aim is to challenge the deep structures of inequalities that previous gender equality policies, namely anti-discrimination law and positive action (see Rees 1998), failed to do. Its contribution to gender and political analysis lies in showing that – to challenge existing gender biases in policy practices, mechanisms and norms – all organizations ought to undergo deep structural change (Benschop and Verloo 2011, 2015). It is not just a matter of applying the strategy to ‘someone else’, it means applying it to the very department or ministry that has issued the policy, changing its working rules, doing gender training of its personnel, and questioning unequal practices and processes (Benschop and Verloo 2006, 2011; Mergaert 2012). In an illustrative way, Teresa Rees calls anti-discrimination law ‘tinkering’, positive action ‘tailoring’ and gender mainstreaming ‘transforming’ gender inequalities in societies. Gender mainstreaming has also resulted in an array of important gender equality policymaking tools that rely on gender analysis. These include ‘gender impact assessment’ of legislation or policies, that is an ex-ante assessment of the potential gender impacts of a given policy before it is adopted (Verloo and Roggeband 1996); gender training of civil servants so that they are capable of applying gender lenses in their daily work (Pauly et al. 2009; Bustelo, Ferguson and Forest 2016); and

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‘gender budgeting’, or the elaboration of budgets from a gender perspective, identifying implications and effects of revenue and expenditure policies on women and girls in relation to men and boys (Elson 1999). The goal in each of these cases is to produce more gender-equal policies or budgets. The potential and the hopes associated with gender mainstreaming in the beginning of the 2000s in Europe, when it became the official policy of the EU, were huge among gender advocates, whether scholars, bureaucrats, politicians or activists (Kantola 2010). As a gender policy, it has failed these hopes in many ways. The key problems relate to its weak or ineffective implementation (Rees 1998, 2005; Mazey 2000; Verloo 2001; Rubery 2005; Bruno, Jacquot and Mandin 2006). Although formal commitments to mainstreaming do exist, they are often not legally binding, economic and human resources devoted to it are insufficient, and capacity building almost non-existent (Mergaert 2012; Weiner and MacRae 2014; Jacquot 2015). Mainstreaming initiatives have to face organizational resistance to change on the part of policymakers at different institutional levels (Benschop and Verloo 2006; Lombardo and Mergaert 2013; Mergaert and Lombardo 2014). The involvement of gender advocates from the feminist movements or academia in gender mainstreaming initiatives has been rather limited (Beveridge, Nott and Stephen 2000; Squires 2005; Verloo 2005). The insufficient means and participation of feminist actors from civil society have tended to turn mainstreaming into a bureaucratic exercise of ticking the ‘yes’ answer in the box if a policy is considered gender friendly – far removed from the intentions of effective gender analysis of policy (Mukhopadhyay 2004). This ‘toolkit approach’ to mainstreaming has been questioned for involving a ‘de-radicalization’ of feminism in terms of losing the power dimension of the gender struggle (Currie 1999), and thus weakening the critical analytical potential of the strategy for challenging unequal gender relations (Lombardo 2013). The practice of mainstreaming through ‘toolkit approaches’, among other factors, has triggered the criticism of complicity of gender mainstreaming with neoliberal forms of governance (Kantola and Squires 2012). In terms of gender analysis of policies, the implementation gap in gender policies has generated interest in questions of policy implementation. Studying implementation from gender approaches contributes to political analysis in that it explores the structural obstacles and opportunities for putting gender policies into practice. The research network Gendering Equality Policy in Practice (GEPP)

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finds that, whereas there is a large amount of research on the adoption of gender equality policies, few works have studied the postadoption stage of policymaking (Mazur 2017). The goal of GEPP, as launched by its convenors – Isabelle Engeli, Joni Lovenduski and Amy Mazur (2015) – is precisely to comparatively study whether gender policies that Western post-industrial democracies have adopted since the 1970s are actually implemented, what are their outcomes and impacts, and to what extent is this implementation successful. Gender scholars who have performed policy implementation studies speak of ‘the implementation problem’ or the way in which transforming political objectives into concrete practices is far from simple (Callerstig 2014: 71). Implementing gender-equal policies has proved to be a huge challenge and has been characterized in many contexts by some common problems: gender equality is not prioritized, there is a lack of support from management, lack of resources and capacity building, and the work is undertaken by dedicated individuals (Mergaert 2012; Callerstig 2014: 72). In addition, any gender analysis illustrates the complexity of gender and gender equality, which adds to the implementation problem: it is not easy to identify simple causes or solutions to complex structural gender equality problems. Further, complexity in policy implementation is introduced by the multiplicity of actors at different levels of government – national, supranational, regional, local – that come into play when gender policies are implemented (Alonso 2016). Policy actors can open opportunities for the implementation of gender initiatives, for example when gender advocates manage to increase the budget dedicated to gender policies or to introduce some gender initiative in institutional areas that are commonly gender blind (Pollack and Hafner-Burton 2000). But policy actors can also create obstacles to implementation by opposing resistance to gender policies through their actions (Mergaert and Lombardo 2014), as when higher-ranked civil servants that are responsible for implementing gender mainstreaming take decisions which support under-staffing, under-budgeting or the insufficient gender training of personnel (Braithwaite 2000). Resistances to gender mainstreaming policies are not necessarily the result of deliberate decisions to go against gender initiatives, but, as gender analysts point out, they often stem from policymakers’ unconscious preservation of the informal patriarchal norms of the institution they have learnt through the years (Longwe 1997; Bergqvist, Bjärnegård and Zetterberg 2013). Gender equality policy advocates, while not immune to gender biases, also act in a deliberate and strategic way to swim against the patriarchal tide and put equality into practice

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(Eyben 2010). Considering the complexity of gender policy implementation, gender equality advocates need to adopt a ‘strategy of small wins’ and to take small steps at a time (Callerstig 2014; Ylöstalo 2016). Overall, gender approaches have contributed to political analysis in several ways. Taking gender as an analytical category enables researchers to link theory and practice by documenting the androcentrism of policies and recommending ways to incorporate gender into policymaking. In relation to the descriptive part, gender approaches are helpful to understand the adverse consequences for gender equality of policies that construct and reproduce male biases and norms, systematically creating disadvantages for women and privileges for men. In relation to the prescriptive part, they also allow exploring the possibilities of re-gendering policies, by mainstreaming gender into all policies, promoting structural change into organizations and challenging resistances to gender initiatives. Policy implementation studies from gender approaches further contribute to revealing the obstacles and opportunities that gendered structures pose to policies that aim at achieving gender equality. Yet in much of gender analysis of policy, gender is employed as a binary concept; it refers to the relation between women and men. The use of binary categories of women and men entails the risk of reifying people into ‘fixed gender categories’. This has a double effect, first, of excluding some issues and people from the agenda, for example, transgender issues tend to be excluded from gender studies and placed into the sexuality research agenda; and, second, of blocking further transformation towards policies that might ‘go beyond the use of categories of women and men’ (Lombardo, Meier and Verloo 2013: 693) and address the concerns of people in all their variety and continuous transformation through the course of their lives. Deconstruction and policy approaches take up this challenge and propose the study of policy discourses as a way to address the limits of binary gender categories.

Deconstruction and policy Deconstruction and policy enables a political analysis that deconstructs gender and deconstructs policy. This means questioning the dominant or hegemonic ways in which policies are framed and studying the effects of these on gendered subjectivities and agency, as well as the possibilities of realizing some form of gender equality. First, we explore here how policies are not only gendered – as illustrated above with

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the gender and policy approach – but also gendering. Second, we present some of the analytical tools developed within the different strands of this approach including Carol Lee Bacchi’s ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach (Bacchi 1999) and discursive policy analysis (Lombardo, Meier and Verloo 2009). Deconstruction then signifies fundamentally questioning and challenging the contours of policy and analysing what policies mean for doing gender. As an approach to policy, deconstruction calls for going beyond gender because a focus on female and male roles can constrain the analysis and limit capacity of more transformative approaches free from binary or any other categories that might fix people in specific roles in policy analysis (Lombardo and Meier 2016). Postmodern feminist theorists such as Haraway (1991) and Braidotti (1994) challenge both the unitary identity of the gender subject and the binary categories of sexual difference, suggesting rather a multiple, nomadic, partial, contradictory, situated and continuously changing subject. As Haraway (1991: 180) states: ‘One is too few, and two is only one possibility’. In this line, LGBTQ and sexuality studies challenge the heteronormativity that pervades existing societies (Butler 1993; Rich 1993; Rubin 1993; Cooper 2004) and policies (Plummer 2001; Lind 2013). The way in which gender, from a deconstructionist perspective, is a discourse, is pertinent to policy analysis too. As noted in previous chapters, according to Judith Butler (1990, 1993) discourses have a performative power to create reality and to delimit the borders of the meanings that sex can take within a given society. Bodies get constructed within different discursive contexts that shape them with particular meanings and norms. What this means for analysing policy is that policies are studied not only as gendered but as ‘gendering’ (Bacchi 1999, 2009, 2017). Policies are analysed as discourses that constitute gendered subjectivities and agency and that enable specific ways of doing gender. Policies, for Bacchi (2017), are to be considered as discursive ‘gendering practices’ and need to be scrutinized for their constitutive effects on subjects, by asking how they are potentially gendering, racializing, heteronorming, classing, disabling and Third-Worldizing them. For instance, policies can be gendering, according to Bacchi, because the lack of good quality state childcare is a policy practice that ‘encourages those marked as women to assume domestic caring responsibilities, thus becoming “women”’ (Bacchi 2017, pages forthcoming). Or policies can be classing because parental leave measures are funded and designed ‘to include only certain groups, those who can afford it, leaving others to cope as best they can, (re)producing class relations’ (Bacchi 2017, pages forthcoming).

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The deconstructionist approach Bacchi proposes for addressing policies is to never treat concepts such as gender, women or men as uncontested categories, but rather to always interrogate policies – and concepts they use – for their constitutive effects on people. Ongoing questioning of policy categories for their gendering, classing, heteronorming, disabling or racializing effects ‘calls attention to the ways in which such policies may reinforce conventional social arrangements that harm specific individuals and groups while benefitting others’ (Bacchi 2017, pages forthcoming). When you leave policy categories open for contestation, the diversity of different premises to address women, men and gender can emerge, and the inequalities that policies produce be more easily redressed. Laura Shepherd (2007) illustrates this in relation to domestic violence policy. With the women approach violence is constructed as violence against women (VAW) that constructs women and men as coherent subjects, victims and perpetrators respectively. Women can be helped and liberated with the help of certain policies. The second approach, in contrast, uses the notion of gender violence (Skinner, Hester and Malos 2005) and focuses on women as victims, perpetrators and actors. It thus results in a wider range of subject positions for women although a notion of gender difference remains. Gender violence has also been placed on the international agenda highlighting the continuum of different forms of gender violence. Finally, deconstruction studies the violent reproduction of gender through discourses, practices and policies. It calls for analyses of violences that are both gendered and gendering (Shepherd 2007). It calls for a focus on bodies that are constituted through this violence (Wilcox 2015). This approach analyses how masculinities and femininities are reproduced through policies, discourses and practices of violence. Paralleling these debates, we see that the notion ‘male violence’ reproduces a vision of violence that is inherently male (Hearn 1998). Men’s violence, in contrast, suggests that men, more often than women, are perpetrators of violence but this is not inherent in violence or men. This allows for a discussion on the role of masculinities in the violent reproduction of gender as in international relations (IR) concerns about masculinity and militarism (Zalewski and Parpart 1998; Higate 2003; Whitworth 2004; Anand 2007). An important analytical tool in deconstructionist policy analysis has been Carol Lee Bacchi’s ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach. The key idea behind the approach is that policy proposals contain implicit or explicit diagnosis of the policy problem – ‘problem

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representations’ in Bacchi’s terms. For example, in relation to the gender pay gap, Bacchi (1999) identifies four problem representations that include ‘equal pay for equal work’, ‘equal pay for work of equal value’, ‘affirmative action’ and ‘wage solidarity’. The problem representation shapes the policy solutions adopted to the policy problem: how the concerns are framed, what the cause of the problem is identified to be, and finally what measures are taken (Saari 2013: 44; see also Verloo 2007). The key discursive idea behind the approach is that social problems requiring policies do not just exist ‘out there’ but rather that the competitive interpretations of the policies are constitutive of the problems (Saari 2013: 43). Milja Saari, for example, analyses shop stewards’ problem representations of equal pay at the level of the workplace. She teases out the competing problem representations and evaluates which of these dominates over others and with what effects on shop stewards’ construction of their role in promoting equal pay and narrowing the gender pay gap (Saari 2013: 42). Her analysis shows that ‘equal pay for similar jobs’ is the dominant problem representation. This has several effects. Institutionally, it does not require comparisons across collective agreement or personnel group lines. Gender equality becomes a subordinate goal in trade union negotiations to other general goals, for example for ‘more transparency’ in pay systems. Saari argues that there would be a need to introduce ‘gender as a legitimate analytical category’ in these processes. This would shift policy attention from the level of individual women and their choices to the level of deep structures and politics (Saari 2013: 53). Similar to and partly inspired by Bacchi’s approach, a wide array of discursive policy studies have explored the different ways in which policies can be framed, the multiple norms underlying them, and their consequences for gender equality (Bacchi 1999; Ferree et al. 2002; Kantola 2006; Verloo 2007; Rolandsen Agustín 2013). These studies show that there can be multiple constructions of policy problems and solutions, and gender, women and men are given a variety of different meanings when actors engage in discursive contestations and fix particular meanings of a concept in policy documents (Lombardo, Meier and Verloo 2009). As Ferree (2009, 2012) argues, policy framing is an interactive process in which actors encounter in texts, such as laws, administrative regulations, constitutions or judicial sentences, opportunities for debating the interpretation of a particular issue in public arenas. Through these discursive contestations, new meanings are constructed, as the United Nations slogan ‘women’s rights are human rights’ exemplifies by changing, in this new framing, the meaning of both human rights and women’s rights.

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This varied construction of meanings is expressed through different policies that reproduce or create norms that have then different consequences on women and men, creating privileged and marginalized subjects, making some actors and some policy issues present and others absent (Lombardo and Meier 2016). Discursive policy analysis is then useful to understand how policies are framed, and what implications the different norms embedded in the framings have for gendered subjects. For instance, frame analysis of Italian policy discourses on marriage between 1995 and 2007 reveals a heteronormative construction of the legitimate family as married heterosexual couple with children, which delegitimizes LGBT couples and unmarried heterosexual couples (Lombardo and Meier 2014). In the area of gender violence policies in Europe, discursive policy studies such as Kantola (2006) and Krizsan et al. (2007) have identified two main frames of the issue: a gender equality frame, in which domestic violence is framed as a problem related to structural gender inequality that reflects unequal power relations between women and men, and a degendered domestic violence frame, in which violence is represented in gender-neutral terms and neither the victim nor the perpetrator seems to have a sex or gender. These framings show different understandings of what the problem of gender violence is, who is responsible for the problem and how it should be solved, with different consequences on the subjects. They have very real policy effects, for example in terms of who is defined as a legitimate victim. The degendered violence policy frame has the tendency to put both women and men forward as equal victims of domestic violence, thereby sidelining the prevalence of domestic violence against women, as well as the lack of services for women, as in the case of Finland (Kantola 2006). The contributions of the deconstruction approach are manifold. First of all, they allow the questioning of rigid gender categories of men and women on the basis of the fact that subjects, whatever their gender, are all constructed through policy discourses that constitute them in specific ways, as women, transgender, men, homosexual or heterosexual subjects. Understanding gender as discourse allows these approaches to analyse policies from a transformative perspective that aims at achieving a world beyond rigid categories, which consequently promotes a particularly critical view of policies that tend to maintain the status quo concerning gender relations. Second, the conceptualization of policy processes as framing processes is helpful for understanding public policies as the result of contestation by different political actors, which allows the attribution of different meanings to policy

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problems and solutions. The study of these different voices enables researchers to map the variety of policy discourses around a particular problem, and to grasp hegemonic and alternative framings of policy problems and solutions. Thirdly, discursive approaches help to bring otherwise submerged norms about gender that are present in policy documents to the surface. For instance, by analysing employment and parental leave policies that legitimize women’s absence from the labour market to care for their families much more than men, while they construct male subjects as more legitimately accepted to be full-time employed, discursive approaches show that policies construct norms about how women and men ought to be and act in their productive and reproductive roles (QUING 2007a). Overall, deconstruction studies contribute to alert analysts and policymakers of their own gender and other biases when analysing or making policies. While studies of policy frames are helpful for understanding policies, they are not necessarily effective in explaining why policies are framed as they are. For explanatory purposes, researchers should complement framing studies with analyses of agency, national and global contexts, and actors’ dynamics of interactions, alliances and oppositions, among other factors. While deconstruction approaches question binary gender categories, they are not necessarily taking into account how gender intersects with other inequalities in policy discourses, which would allow these analyses a deeper look into how public policies challenge or perpetuate power relations of privilege and marginalization.

Intersectionality and policy Intersectional analysis of policy started to develop with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1991) study of how the intersection of inequalities of gender, race and class had consequences on people’s opportunities of life, and of how different political and social movements’ strategies focusing on one inequality are not neutral to other inequalities. The two policy areas of Crenshaw’s study of intersectional race and gender discrimination that we discussed in Chapter  2 are those of employment policy and domestic violence policy. In both cases the policy in place discriminated against African American women, either as workers at General Motors or as victims of domestic violence. In both cases the policy decisions taken revealed a narrow focus that did not address the problems experienced by African American women at the

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point of intersection between race, gender and class. Intersectionality approaches to policy have been fundamental to denounce the privileges and marginalizations that policies reproduce. In this they also contribute to political analysis that links theory and practice, because they suggest political tools to make more inclusive policies (Lombardo and Rolandsen Agustín 2016). Scholarly work has addressed the ways in which intersectionality operates in public policies and institutions (see Chapter 5). Public policies, for example through distribution of funding and institutional procedures, have a responsibility for promoting or discouraging dynamics of competition between groups that are concerned with different inequalities (Hancock 2007; Lombardo and Verloo 2009a). On a similar line but with a focus on discourses, Bacchi (2017, pages forthcoming) argues that attempts to operationalize intersectionality in public policies need to focus not so much on ‘“how social categories of difference intersect” (Hankivsky and Cormier 2011, 221; Hankivsky et al 2011)’ but rather on ‘how a range of social dynamics – gendering, racializing, heteronorming, disabling and so on – interact’ (Dhamoon 2011). A relevant issue when analysing policy from intersectional perspectives is how to integrate intersectionality into public policies, considering that the practice of intersectionality in, for example, European policymaking is still at an initial stage as compared to the high scholarly expectations about its policy adoption and implementation (Kantola and Nousiainen 2009, 2012; Lombardo and Verloo 2009a; Rolandsen Agustín 2013; Bassel and Lépinard 2014). Verloo (2013) argues that intersectionality can be applied in policies in many different ways, namely by: (i) exposing forms of stigmatizing particular people in policymaking (e.g. Muslim women); (ii) adopting pragmatic approaches to intersect policies, for instance by crossing existing legislation (e.g. employment and migration policies to address the problem of migrant carers), or crossing different policy domains; (iii) mainstreaming equality in all policy processes, mechanisms and structures that fix inequalities; and (iv) establishing mechanisms of participatory democracy, which make clear ‘who’ should have a voice and who is actually participating in policy processes. A number of studies have explored the dynamics and challenges of incorporating intersectionality in policy practice. Coll and Cruells (2013) explore some of these challenges in their study of LGBT policies in Catalonia, discussed in Chapter 7, in which they observe the non-implementation of an intersectional approach in policymaking. They argue in favour of integrating intersectionality in public policies,

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due to its potential to address structural inequalities. At the same time, though, they alert us to the need to address the autonomous effects of each intersecting inequality (cf. Weldon 2008). If multiple inequalities are treated separately and in a parallel way in policymaking, this has the advantage of giving greater policy legitimation to inequalities that are considered more marginal among the different inequality axes, as it is the case with sexual orientation (Coll and Cruells 2013). In the policy experience reported by  Coll and Cruells (2013), inequalities on grounds of sexual orientation that are commonly marginalized in the gender equality policy  agenda could gain greater attention than they would have had if all inequalities had been treated together in a ‘one size fits all’ approach (Verloo 2006). Gender equality policies – as comparative studies of European policies have shown – are rarely intersectional and can even reproduce further inequalities by including racist or ethnocentric biases (Lombardo and Verloo 2009b). Studies of intersectionality in EU policies on ­gender-based violence have identified processes of culturalization, gendering and degendering. Rolandsen Agustín (2013) shows that when EU policies on gender violence are framed in cultural ways, because types of violence such as ‘honour crimes’ are treated as specific to Muslim ethnic groups, there is a risk of stigmatizing ethnic minority groups, which does not contribute to solving the problem of gender violence. If gender equality policies can be stigmatizing of some people, EU policies in which other inequalities than gender are discussed tend to silence gender by, for example, talking about ‘the elderly’ or ‘the disabled’ in abstract terms, without assessing the different concerns of elderly and disabled women and men (Lombardo and Rolandsen Agustín 2012). As a result, there is a need to analyse the limitations of policies that address multiple inequalities and scrutinize if, when addressing one inequality, this leads to a diminished policy attention towards other inequalities. In most contexts, as it is the case at the EU level, the policy on intersectionality has strongly favoured ‘multiple discrimination’ as opposed to intersectionality (Kantola and Nousiainen 2009). As a concept, multiple discrimination recognizes that people can be discriminated against on the basis of more than one identity category. However, analytically, in ‘multiple approaches’, categories matter equally in a predetermined relationship to each other whereby, for example, gender and race are treated as parallel phenomena (Hancock 2007: 67). In contrast to multiple approaches, intersectional approaches look to forms of inequality that are ‘routed through one another and which cannot be untangled to

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reveal a single cause’ (Grabham et al. 2009: 1). As a concept, however, multiple discrimination is easier to tackle legally and politically and the kinds of policy and legal solutions that it requires are simpler.   It follows that multiple discrimination prioritizes an ­ antidiscrimination framework for addressing intersecting inequalities. A number of scholars now argue that this is too narrow and policy actors should, in fact, explore other tools, including positive action measures, to tackle intersecting inequalities (Geddes and Guiraudon 2004: 346; Fredman 2008). With positive action measures the initiative lies with policymakers, service providers and employers. Institutional change becomes systematic rather than random or ad hoc because the institutional and structural causes of inequality can be diagnosed and addressed collectively and institutionally. The duty to bring about change lies with those with the power and capacity to do so, not with the ‘victim of discrimination’ (Fredman 2008: 79–80).  Finally, to continue with the EU case, the EU policy on institutionalizing intersectionality relies on soft law measures rather than hard law (Kantola and Nousiainen 2012). The EU gender directives (as an example of hard law) continue to be single ground directives and do not contain provisions on multiple discrimination. The directives that deal with the other bases of inequality contain references to multiple discrimination acknowledging the ways in which gender intersects with race and ethnicity (Nielsen 2008: 33). Similarly, the equality directives do not require that equality laws be unified but the choice of the legislative means used in transposing directives is left to the member states. Furthermore, EU directives require that member states establish equality bodies to monitor only two grounds of discrimination, namely gender and race/ethnic origin (Bell 2008). Again it is up to the member states to choose whether to monitor discrimination through one or several bodies. Soft law leaves a lot of room for national manoeuvre and interpretation.   While current policymaking on intersectionality is still initial or weak in contexts such as the EU, adopting an intersectional approach when analysing public policies allows the grasping of relations of power that policies perpetuate or counteract, privileges of particular social groups and silencing or stigmatizing of other groups in policymaking (Rolandsen Agustín 2013; Verloo 2013). Intersectional analysis makes it possible to analyse the quality of public policies. This can be done in terms of their capacity to be inclusive of different social groups, particularly most excluded and non-hegemonic publics, and defiant of oppressive social norms that privilege some

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groups as a result of interactions of gender with class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or disability (Fraser 1989; Verloo 2006; Lombardo and Verloo 2009b). From a methodological perspective, Hancock, McCall and Ferree all promote studies that would take intersectionality as an ‘open empirical question’ (Hancock 2007) to be explored in specific historical and institutional contexts (McCall 2005; Ferree 2009). Intersectional policy studies would need to consider ‘dimensions of inequality themselves as dynamic, located in changing, mutually constituted relationships with each other from which they cannot be disentangled’ (Ferree 2011: 55). This approach can guide scholars of public policies towards making their analyses more empirical, contextual and attentive to the changing relations of inequality. However, applying an intersectional approach to analysing policies places the researcher in front of a number of methodological challenges. How to study intersectionality in policies? How to operationalize the complexity of intersectionality for policy analysis? For example, McCall (2005) argues that one of the most frequently adopted methodological approaches to studying intersectionality is the ‘intra-categorical’, which tries to grasp the complexity of social inequality within one specific social group, such as African American women in Crenshaw’s analysis. Its limitation is that it only sees intersectionality within people of the same social group. Another problem that intersectional analysis could face is that researchers, in their efforts to grasp the effects of intersectional inequalities on specific groups of people and in policymaking, neglect to consider the autonomous effects that each inequality might have (Weldon 2008). Scholars may also risk overlooking the predominance that one specific inequality could have in each context due to the history and institutionalization of inequalities in which it is anchored, with its related consequences for the framing of public policies (Ferree 2009). A final question concerns the ‘blind spots’ in intersectional studies (Lykke 2010): what are the public policies that have been less studied from an intersectional approach, why does this occur, and what can be done to make these policies more attentive to the different intersections that people and collectives experience?

Postdeconstruction and policy As we have seen in previous chapters a focus on people’s experience of ‘the materiality’ has informed developments in cultural studies and political theory summarized in the idea of ‘new materialism’ (Coole

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and Frost 2010). We explore the implications of this ‘postdeconstruction’ for policy. Scholars that propose the idea of new materialism share an interest in exploring questions concerning ‘the materiality’ and ‘the place of embodied humans within a material world’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 3). The attention to human beings’ experience and impact on the material world, natural environment, economic structures and technologies gives rise to new policy areas that can be explored in gender and politics too. Biopolitics, political economy and phenomenology of daily life that place at the centre an interest in ‘the matter’ from a variety of perspectives are some examples of these (Coole and Frost 2010: 28). Biopolitics, biotechnological, and biomedical developments, such as reproductive technologies that favour fertility and advance life expectancy, have gendered political and ethical implications. Feminist theories on ‘the body’ have accompanied the development of new technologies, such as in vitro fertilization and stem cell research, to reflect on the ‘deconstruction of the boundaries between science, technology and bodies’ (Reed 2013: 17). This is illustrated in the conceptualization Haraway (1991) does of humans as cyborgs, in which the boundaries between body and technology are blurred and socially constructed, opening the door to transformations in bodies and human relationships. Yet biotechnology’s potential to ‘transform bodies by overcoming their limitations – for example enabling previously infertile women to conceive and give birth to healthy babies’ (Reed 2013: 17) has relevant policy implications in terms of gender. This is so because by regulating criteria of access to these services – for instance, whether lesbian couples can access them, how expensive they are – and conditions of the treatments, biotechnology can enable or constrain women’s life opportunities. Lauren Wilcox (2015) studies violence and bodies in IR, a discipline famous for its degendered and bodiless accounts. Through her cases of torture, airport security assemblages and suicide bombers, she uses the work of Barad (2008) and Coole and Frost (2010) to add to Butler’s theory of performativity and to argue that ‘materiality of bodies is not only an effect of political practices but such practices are formed in relation to bodies as well’ (Wilcox 2015: 11). The culture and discourse of politics and the materiality of the body are thus intimately entangled, she continues. Bodies are not only constraining but also enabling in that they possess ‘creative and generative capacities to affect the political field’ (Wilcox 2015: 11). Her analysis of the practices of torture in prisons, such as Guantánamo, illustrate how bodies are both politically

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constituted – by practices of international security – and constituting – through hunger striking – agents in their own right (Wilcox 2015: 14). In the policy field of economy, new materialists see new forms of ‘nondogmatic Marxism’, ‘especially in the turn to critical international political economy’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 28). New materialism in economy situates the understandings of people and ideas ‘within the fields of material forces and power relations that produce and circumscribe their existence’ and is interested in exploring the interconnections between ‘broad political and economic structures’ and ‘everyday experiences’ (28). New materialism’s rejection of the idea of economic determinism places it far from Marxism, while it shares with the latter an interest in the dynamics of domestic and international political economy to get a ‘critical understanding of global capitalism and its multifarious effects’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 30). The attention for the interaction between broad economic structures and individual experience could resonate with feminist proposals to take into account the differentiated gender impact of economic policies on people, and to recognize in the economy the unpaid care and domestic work mostly performed by women. The openness to the ‘intersectionality of social relations while still recognizing the importance of class’ can also promote fruitful exchanges between feminist and new materialist research (Coole and Frost 2010: 30–31). Alliances can also emerge in the analysis of the 2008 financial and economic crisis where new materialism shows an interest in connecting research on a volatile global economy with the material effects it has in terms of poverty, people losing their homes, jobs, pensions, and social services, and increasing inequality. Policy analysis from a gender perspective in this respect would imply gendering the connection that new materialists make between people’s ‘everyday life’ and ‘multiplicity of material practices’ with ‘the ordering of the city, region, state and international system’ (Edwards 2010: 297). New materialists’ interest in people’s daily life experiences starts from the recognition that not everything is discursive, cultural or socially constructed, because there is material life beyond discourse. From this positioning comes a renewed interest in the phenomenology of everyday life (Coole and Frost 2010: 27). Part of this reflection connects with developments in gender, race and cultural studies on ‘the politics of emotions’ (Ahmed 2004b) or what some authors call the ‘affective turn’ (Gorton 2013). The work of Ahmed (2004b; 2010a) on the importance of the ‘doing’, of what we do in our daily

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life, of expanding or constraining our capacities, and the gender, class and race dimensions of this doing is considered by some scholars as part of this new materialist current, although Ahmed (2010a: 234) herself claims her work to be part of feminist reflections that were developed earlier in ‘the cultural turn’. Implications of this new materialist turn for policy analysis are not immediately evident, as they are not explicitly framed in terms of policy and policymaking. Yet Ahmed’s (2004b) analysis of emotions and their role and use in politics makes emotions visible and shows that there is more emotionality in policies than at first we might think, and this emotionality needs to be analysed to understand how policymaking produces boundaries between people. In her words, ‘Feminist and queer scholars have shown us that emotions “matter” for politics; emotions show us how power shapes the very surface of bodies as well worlds’ (Ahmed 2004b: 12). For instance, in xenophobic discourses, according to Ahmed, ‘Emotions provide a script, certainly: you become the “you” if you accept the invitation to align yourself with the nation, and against those others who threaten to take the nation away’ (Ahmed 2004b: 12). In sum, new materialism opens the door to new analytical perspectives that wish to go beyond the analysis of discourses to grasp material reality in its multiple facets, the body and biotechnologies, the effects of economy on people’s daily life, and the political dimension of emotions. All of these areas have gender and intersectional dimensions to explore. Yet among the limits of using new materialist perspectives for gender analyses of policy is the lack of a precise and clear-cut definition of what a new materialist gender analysis of policy would actually be.

Conclusions Feminist analyses of policy have contributed to the understanding and studying of public policies in many ways. First, they have challenged the narrow definition of what was conceptualized as ‘public’ in policies and have broadened it to issues formerly considered ‘private’ such as violence against women, sexual and reproductive rights, or care. These are now considered public matters that political authorities must address in democratic states and policy analysts need to study. Second, the different feminist approaches contribute to link theory and

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policy practice. They do so by providing conceptual tools that allow analysts not only to scrutinize the biases and power relations that policies produce, but also to propose ways of addressing policies that can redress those inequalities and be more inclusive of the different people’s concerns. Third, feminist approaches help to make analysts and policymakers more aware of their own gender and intersectional assumptions when they analyse and make policies. As discussed in this chapter, a variety of approaches, including a focus on women, on gender, on discourses and on intersectionality, and recent developments in new materialism, have contributed, each in its own way, to the analysis of policy. Studies on women and politics have given visibility to women’s role, work and agency – as women in development studies show; they have addressed the impact of public policies on women, and women’s impact on public policies, through the action of women’s representatives gendering the agenda. The need to address the social structures of gender inequality, and the relation between women and men, rather than only focusing on women, is at the centre of studies of gender and policy. These have dedicated their efforts to expose the male biases of policy norms and structures and to regender policies by mainstreaming a gender perspective into policymaking. Deconstruction approaches propose to overcome the conceptualization of gender as a binary construct to avoid constraining the ever-changing diversity of people’s experience. Analysing gender as discourse allows the development of theories and methodologies for studying policies as gendering practices that construct women and men in specific ways, frame problems and solutions according to the norms and meanings that emerge in actors’ discursive contestations, and which have different consequences for women, men and gender equality. In the search for more inclusive practices and analyses, intersectionality studies bring attention to the exclusions and marginalizations of individuals and groups that public policies can produce when they do not consider how gender intersects with other inequalities. They also debate different ways in which intersectionality can be applied in policymaking to improve the quality of policies and make them more inclusive. Intersectional policy analysis is methodologically challenging as much as it is theoretically stimulating for the researcher, and the multiple operationalizations of intersectionality reflect the variety of scholarly approaches to the issue. Finally, recent developments in new materialism have placed attention on the materiality of

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experience, noting that not everything is discursive, cultural or socially constructed. Rather, there are realities that significantly impact on people’s lives, such as biomedical developments on fertility, economic dynamics at international and national levels, and everyday experiences of life – including what we do and what we feel – that need to be adequately analysed. More scholarly work is needed to clarify how to apply the new materialist approaches to policy analysis from gender and intersectionality perspectives.

Chapter 9

Conclusion

Gender and politics has over the past 20 years become a vibrant subfield of political science with its own distinct identity. Political science associations recognize it and organize conferences and panels on the issue, books and journals are published and courses are taught at university. As such, the gender and politics discipline has guided us in this book in exploring questions about doing gender and political analysis. In the introductory chapter, we argued that gender and politics contributes to political analysis by inspiring the rethinking of political questions and concepts from gender lenses, expanding the boundaries of ‘the political’, and strengthening the link between theory and praxis. In this concluding chapter, we explore two broad conclusions that this book generates. First, if feminist political analysis is to make sense of political phenomena, it is in need of a plurality of approaches. It needs to be aware of not succumbing to dominant approaches, to let itself be co-opted to either disciplinary cultures or political preferences that create a monoculture in the discipline. Approaches that come closer to the mainstream of political science, such as those centred on ‘women’ or ‘gender’, might achieve greater legitimacy in the mainstream, but also risk becoming vulnerable to practices of exclusion that downplay discursive and postdeconstruction approaches. Reflexivity is thus needed to stay alert regarding processes of marginalization within the discipline of gender and politics. The exposure to a plurality of approaches can help analysts identify the gaps existing in each approach and the benefits of openness to the multiplicity of approaches in the subfield of gender and politics. Exercising a reflexive and openminded view can lead us to discover approaches that we would otherwise not consider, with great benefits for political analyses that wish to grasp nuances and complexities of existing political phenomena. In our analysis, for example, we found that the postdeconstruction approach has been the least studied in gender and politics research. We thus suggest scholars continue its exploration and incorporate gender and politics considerations in the discussion of new materialist approaches.

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Second, political analysis can improve its understanding of the political as the link between theory and praxis by drawing on feminist approaches for doing political analysis. In this book we have argued that each feminist approach not only contributes to strengthen this link in its own way, but also, taken altogether, the various approaches provide insights for sharpening political analysis in reflexive ways and for transforming the praxis of political analysis and political science towards greater equality. Reconnecting the analysis of politics to social and political realities might make researchers more aware of the dangers of self-referentiality and the disciplinary hegemonies that professionalization could create. After providing in the next section a summary of the book Chapters 3–8, we will assess the five approaches for doing feminist political analysis that have guided our argument in this book (first developed in Chapters 1–2). The assessment will stress the contributions and limitations of each approach, the cautious way in which analysts should handle the framework, and some of the possible combinations of approaches in political analysis. The subsequent section will address the hegemonies and marginalizations that the discipline of ‘gender and politics’ produces and will provide some explanations of the reasons for these processes. The final section will explore how each feminist approach contributes to the understanding of political analysis as the link between theory and praxis and how they jointly contribute to reflexivity and transformation in political analysis and political science.

Summary of the book As a background for an assessment of the analytical framework for doing feminist political analysis that we have introduced in Chapters 1 and 2, and have applied to the analysis of different political concepts and issues, we summarize the main points of the six other chapters that address in Part I the concepts of power, agency and institutions, and in Part II the key substantive issues of polity, politics and policy. The concept of power, when analysed from the five different feminist approaches in Chapter  3, offered new interpretative keys for understanding and transforming existing power hierarchies that are structured around gender and other inequalities. Women approaches render visible women’s underrepresentation and male domination in political and economic power. Gender approaches address the structures of capitalist and patriarchal power that systematically construct and reproduce patterns of inequality. Deconstruction of gender approaches

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develop Foucault’s understanding of power through feminist lenses, gendering the concepts of biopower and governmentality and deconstructing hegemonic discourses on gender equality and the political subjects they produce. Intersectional approaches address intersecting power inequalities and challenge the dynamics of privileges and marginalizations they produce for individuals and groups, and the role politics plays in reproducing or in counteracting them. Postdeconstruction approaches, criticizing what in their view is the overemphasized power of discourse, reorient the analysis onto the power of emotions in politics and society, and their impact on people. Chapter 4 addressed the concept of agency from feminist perspectives, revisiting the agency–structure debate in light of subjects such as women that act within the constraints of existing patriarchal and other inequality structures. Women approaches analyse women’s individual and collective action aimed at representing specific interests. Gender approaches study the capacity of feminist agency, both individually and collectively (e.g. feminist movements and women’s policy agencies), to defy existing structural economic, socio-cultural and political constraints. Deconstruction of gender approaches criticize essentialist assumptions about a unitary category of women as necessary to speak as a strong unified actor, which tends to exclude less privileged women’s voices. They study women’s agency as the interplay between resistance and domination, showing how women can act by subverting dominant structures from within the constraints of existing patriarchal discourses and practices. Intersectional approaches contribute to political analysis of agency, showing how gender structures intersecting with class, race, ethnicity and other inequalities enable and constrain such agency. Postdeconstruction approaches conceptualize new forms of agency that come from the interaction of human and material elements, considering the political consequences for feminist agency beyond what in their view is the reductionist definition of agency as resistance to domination. Chapter 5 discussed feminist perspectives on institutional analysis that shed light on the contested formal and informal norms, practices, discourses and emotions that advance or resist gender equality change. Women approaches address women’s presence in and exclusion from institutions and explain opportunities and constraints individual actors face within institutions. Gender approaches study structural gender power norms and biases in institutions, contributing to political analysis through feminist institutionalist theories that address both formal and informal gendered institutions and the resistances opposed to gender initiatives that try to transform them.  Deconstruction

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approaches study institutions as discursively constructed, the effects of institutional discourses on people and of people on such discourses, in some strands taking discourses as factors that help to explain institutional change. The object of intersectional approaches to institutional analysis is the extent to which institutions apply intersectionality, as the research line of ‘institutionalizing intersectionality’ makes clear. Postdeconstruction approaches do not directly study institutions but offer insights for feminist analyses of institutions on issues such as the unpredictable role of people’s emotions for governments, or the ways in which bodily materiality affects institutions. After our discussion on power, agency and institutions in the first part of the book, we moved to the key issues of polity, politics and policy in the second part. The five feminist approaches provide different analytical perspectives on polity, politics and policy, each deepening our understanding of their gendered and gendering patterns. In relation to polity, Chapter 6 discussed how a focus on ‘women’ has illustrated the association of men with the public sphere of the polity and women with the private, delegating women the role of biologically reproducing the nation and caring for its children. Gender approaches exposed the broader power relationships in societies, and the structural and institutionalized hierarchies in states and nations that underpin these gendered roles. Deconstruction, in turn, has analytically differentiated the polity, conceptualizing it as a diverse set of institutions that offer both opportunities and limitations for gender equality. Polities – much like gender – are analysed in terms of doing rather than being: they need constant repetitive acts by subjects to uphold them, and are discursively produced in many different ways. Intersectionality has contributed to displacing ethnocentric scholarly assumptions about the polity, arguing that the state is theorized in different ways depending on the geographical context of reference. It has further shown that gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and class play a central role in processes of reproduction of states and nations. Postdeconstruction shows that these processes are not just discursive but material and bodily, and that the affects and emotions that are mobilized in nationalist projects have gendered, racialized and sexualized effects on people that strengthen the ties between discourses and material phenomena and can make change harder. In Chapter 7, we explored how the analysis of politics as a process itself changes depending on the feminist perspective one adopts. The strength of the women approaches is to analyse politics as usual and the key processes that constitute the politics as we know it, and to assess how women succeed in the male-dominated political environment. The gender approach analyses ‘masculine politics’, namely the deep gender biases that underpin

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our very understandings of politics, paying particular attention not just to the gendered character of formal politics but to that of informal politics too. Deconstruction coins the term of ‘performative politics’, challenging any binary distinctions between public and private spheres and formal and informal politics and showing how politics is based on performative practices and discursive gender norms. Intersectionality develops a politics that is inclusive of different intersecting inequalities, respectful of diversity and defiant of privileges. Finally, postdeconstruction approaches remind us of the role of emotions and bodily materiality in politics, and suggest that emotions have gender and other inequality dimensions that affect people in different ways. These feminist political analyses shed light on features of politics that would otherwise remain invisible. Together they put forward a concept of politics that reflects the diversity of gendered political experiences and makes the power inequalities embedded in existing political processes and practices explicit, and hence more exposed to contestation. Chapter 8 explored feminist analysis of policy. The women and policy approach discerned the impact of public policies on women, and women’s impact on public policies, through the action of women’s representatives gendering the agenda. Gender and policy approaches exposed the male biases of policy norms and structures and regendered policies by mainstreaming a gender perspective into policymaking. In deconstruction, analysing gender as discourse allows the development of theories and methodologies for studying policies as gendering practices that construct women and men in specific ways, frame problems and solutions according to the norms and meanings that emerge in actors’ discursive contestations, and which have different consequences for women, men and gender equality. Intersectionality highlights the exclusions and marginalizations of individuals and groups that public policies can produce when they do not consider how gender intersects with other inequalities. It also debates different ways in which intersectionality can be applied in policymaking to improve the quality of policies and make them more inclusive. Finally, postdeconstruction shows how material realities, such as biomedical developments in fertility, economic dynamics at international and national levels, and everyday experiences of life, need to be adequately analysed.

Assessing the five approaches for doing feminist political analysis The main rationale behind our proposal of doing feminist political analysis through the five different approaches discussed in this book’s chapters is to show the diversity of the perspectives as well as their

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contributions, shortcomings and dominance in the discipline. Doing political analysis through the lenses of women, gender, deconstruction of gender, intersectionality and postdeconstruction had a number of benefits. First, the five approaches began to illustrate the plurality of analytical strategies in relation to gender in the discipline and pointed to the need of understanding complexity of both theory and practice rather than aiming at parsimony, once so popular in political science. A pluralism of approaches allows researchers to look at political phenomena from different angles, each approach offering an important but partial vision of political reality. The strength of feminist analytical potential comes from the richness of its plural approaches. When concepts such as power, agency or institutions are analysed from the variety of feminist approaches to politics, a multiplicity of aspects are brought to the surface and offered to our understanding. Second, the analytical distinctions between the approaches allowed us to give space for two of them in particular: intersectionality and postdeconstruction. These were indeed the novelties in many chapters. In feminist scholarly accounts of power, institutions, polity and policy, there is often no mention of postdeconstruction. Also, intersectionality tends to be mentioned but not treated as a separate analytical strategy. Presenting the approaches separately carved out yet more space for intersectionality, but, especially, sought to raise questions about materiality, bodies, affects and emotions in doing gender and political analysis, which in the book have been addressed as part of postdeconstruction. Third, the distinction of five approaches has allowed for a thorough discussion about the strengths and shortcomings of each for understanding key political concepts and phenomena (see Table 9.1). To give an example, in the analysis of power, the strength of women approaches, questioning ‘where are women?’ in political or economic domains, is their capacity to make patterns of gender inequality immediately visible, by showing that men currently tend to dominate political and economic power. Their limitations include the dangers of obscuring the different experiences of women in relation to power, and the risk of using the categories of women and men as variables, leaving aside the structures of unequal gender power. The strength of gender approaches, in turn, is to employ more structural notions of power by linking gender inequality to capitalist and patriarchal power whose causes are systemic rather than individual. Its shortcomings are the risk of essentialism: the concept of gender does not necessarily include the intersections of gender with other inequalities. Such inclusion would allow for a more complex understanding of power and reduce the risks

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of assuming that only gender is a social construct while sex is an unalterable biological given. Deconstruction of gender approaches, on their side, have the strength of destabilizing gender and challenging its essentialisms, by showing that gender is constructed in a multiplicity of discourses that have powerful effects on subjects. Among their weaknesses are the priority given to the discursive and the symbolic over the socio-political power, and the undermining of women’s agency and shared identity on which struggles against different forms of oppression may be based. Intersectional approaches to power have the strength of exposing not only the hierarchies, privileges and subordination that the interaction between different inequalities produces, but also the consequences this intersection generates at the individual and political levels. Limitations mostly relate to the methodological challenges and difficulties of operationalization when doing intersectional analyses of power. Finally, the strength of postdeconstruction approaches is to place analytical emphasis on the material roots of gender inequality, the political dimension of emotions and the latter’s power to affect people, issues which are often understudied in the discipline of gender and politics. The shortcomings of new materialism and affect approaches include the extent to which they are really ‘new’ ways of studying gendered power, and the challenge of how to operationalize new materialist and affect theories in gender analyses of power. Throughout the chapters we drew upon the burgeoning feminist scholarship in the field of gender and politics to illustrate the analytical strategies and their significance empirically. To illustrate the application, contributions and shortcomings of the five approaches with reference to their analytical potential, we will here provide the concrete example of feminist political analyses of the 2008 economic crisis, which was featured in Chapter 7. Indeed, the crisis itself looks fundamentally different depending on the approach that is used to analyse it (see Kantola and Lombardo 2017ab). Women approaches show women’s underrepresentation in political and economic decision making at the time when the crisis exploded, and make visible the different impact of the crisis on women and men. Yet they might leave the structures of unequal gender power that provoked the crisis unquestioned. The strength of gender approaches, in turn, is to employ structural concepts to question the systemic causes of the crisis rooted in capitalist and patriarchal power. Its shortcomings are the risk of essentialism – unequal structures operating in the crisis are not only gendered but classed or racialized too – and the lack of concern for how the crisis is discursively constructed. This is precisely what deconstruction approaches do by analysing how neoliberal

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Women (men as comparison)

Positivism

Object

Epistemology

Deconstruction of gender

Gender as contested/ Gender as social constructed discourse structure and socially constructed relation Critical ‘realism’ Constructivism

Gender

• Expose/challenge • Address/ Contributions • Show immesubtle gendered challenge unequal diately visible norms and meanings gender structures data gaps on present in discourses and norms women and men (women’s under- • Challenge biologi- • Destabilize gender essentialisms cal determinism representation)

Women

Approaches

Postdeconstruction

New materialism (material realism and cultural materialism) • Relocate focus in the • Expose/challenge material and not just complex inequalities, the cultural roots marginalizations and and consequences of dominations that the inequality interactions of gender, • Relate emotions and race, class and other affects to structures systems of inequality of power and produce privilege that produce racialized or gendered effects on people

Multiple

Gender intersecting with Affects, emotions, other inequalities socioeconomic and bodily material

Intersectionality

Table 9.1  Assessment of the five approaches for doing feminist political analysis

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• Essentialism • Leave unquestioned the less visible unequal structures of male domination • Gender • Intersectionality • Postdeconstruction

• Question systemic • Expose how discourse prioritizes/ marginalcauses of patriarizes policy problems chal power and solutions • Incorporate multidimensional • Show gendering effects of discourses on peocharacter of ple (hegemonic vs. gender marginalized subjects) • Undermine women’s • Essentialism agency and shared • Binary identity understanding • Overemphasize of gender the symbolic and (opposed to sex discursive over the as unalterable socio-political power biological given)

Combinations • Gender • All approaches • Intersectionality

Limitations

• Show who is (not) in power • Provide numerical indicators of inequality

Table 9.1  continued • Coin new concept of intersectionality to address complex power inequality • Show the differentiated impacts of interacting systems of domination on people • Unsystematic application in political analysis (methodological challenges) • Reductionist application in policy practice (multiple discrimination) • All approaches

• Gender • Intersectionality • Deconstruction

• Not new, just updated materialism • Extensive research yet to be undertaken in relation to gender and politics

• Relate embodied experience of affect to potential of social transformation

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solutions to the crisis are constructed as hegemonic while other solutions are marginalized. Its strength is to destabilize gender essentialisms, showing that the crisis can be constructed in multiple gendered ways that have powerful effects on subjects. Its limitations are the priority given to the discursive and symbolic over the socio-political power, and the undermining of women’s agency and shared identity, both of which might subtract strength from feminist anti-crisis struggles. The strength of intersectional approaches is to show the interacting systems of domination at work in the crisis, producing differentiated impacts of austerity policies on, for example, migrant minoritized women, and to advance more inclusive policies. Its unsystematic and shallow application in political analysis, through a multiple discrimination approach, may limit its transformative potential. Postdeconstruction approaches contribute to the debate by relocating attention to the material underpinning of the neoliberal political economy that caused the crisis, and the emotions and affects that circulated during this event and cemented gendered and racialized inequalities. Limitations include the extent to which they are really ‘new’ ways of studying gendered power and the criticism that much of the discussion of new materialist approaches seems detached from any consideration of gender and politics. While the distinctions between the approaches were analytically helpful to us, and hopefully to readers, presenting the approaches separately clearly contains some dangers. In Chapters 1 and 2 we already highlighted that this is not a chronological or hierarchical distinction where one would linearly move from women to gender to deconstruction to intersectionality to postdeconstruction. Clare Hemmings (2011) provides a powerful critique of periodization of ‘waves’ of feminist theory, which encourages scholars to be cautious when using any kind of classification and periodization. Another and related danger is that feminist stories and citing practices that go with them often inflate differences between approaches, for example between deconstruction and postdeconstruction, and the rejection of what comes before relates to a need ‘to authorize a new terrain’ (Ahmed 2008: 33). Therefore, while we have discussed each approach separately for analytical purposes, we wish to stress again that the distinctions between approaches are not necessarily so neat in reality. The approaches are indeed often combined in political analysis. A women approach can be combined with approaches such as gender and intersectionality. Thus, for example, one can study power by combining an analysis of how women and men are represented in political parties, how gender intersects with other inequalities in this political representation, and

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what the formal and informal gender norms and practices operating in political parties are. A gender approach can be combined with all other approaches; this might partly explain its dominance and be illustrative of the capacity of gender to take on different meanings. The deconstruction approach can be used in political analysis in combination with the gender, the intersectionality and the postdeconstruction approaches. For instance, one can analyse the phenomenon of the 2008 economic crisis in Europe by studying the ways in which the crisis is discursively constructed, how neoliberal solutions to the crisis are constructed as hegemonic while others are marginalized, and the effects of gendered constructions on subjects. One can then combine this deconstruction approach with postdeconstruction, by studying the material underpinning of the existing political economy that caused the crisis, its entrenched relations to neoliberalism, and the emotions of anger, shame and empathy that circulate during the economic crisis. Intersectional approaches can be combined with the former approaches in analysing the economic crisis, for example by complementing them with a study of the differentiated impact of austerity policies on migrant minoritized women and men, or on young female unemployed or pensioners (Kantola and Lombardo 2017ab). Intersectionality, in turn, combines with all approaches, and as with gender, this could also explain its dominance. The widespread adoption of intersectionality as an approach is also linked as much to its strong compatibility with the epistemological and ontological commitments of mainstream political science as to its resonance with feminist political goals. And postdeconstruction can be combined with gender, intersectionality and deconstruction.

Hegemonies and marginalizations Even if we have sought to give a balanced representation of the approaches, there are important differences in their popularity as analytical approaches to gender and politics, whose reasons we have begun to explore (Kantola and Lombardo 2017b). Some feminist approaches are more dominant than others in the field of gender and politics. The  criteria we employ for defining dominance of approaches are not quantitative, but based on our own experience as scholars participating in gender and politics debates, which are well represented in the European Conferences on Politics and Gender (ECPG) that have taken place since 2009, and in non-gender politics conferences such as

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those of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), the American Political Science Association (APSA) and the International Political Science Association (IPSA), as well as in gender and politics and mainstream politics journals. In a blogpost, Laura Shepherd (2012) discusses international relations (IR) as an example of an academic discipline that disciplines: The idea of a discipline (noun), in the academic sense, clearly derives from the verb: both relate to establishing clear boundaries between what is right and good (behaviour/research) and what is wrong and bad (behaviour/research); both have ways to correct transgression when an uninitiated (or resistant) person strays. (Shepherd 2012) Because of the disciplinary identity of gender and politics, it is particularly pertinent to ask how gender and politics disciplines gender and political analysis. After all, the distinguishing feature of feminist theories in its quest to challenge hierarchies and marginalizations has been the ongoing movement from margins to centre, to paraphrase bell hooks (2000). What are currently the centre and margins in the field of gender and politics? Women and gender approaches remain dominant in the discipline. The dominance of the women approach might primarily be due to the fact that the approach tends to show immediately visible data gaps, such as statistical data on women and men in the labour market, the gender pay gap and women’s representation in politics, which demonstrate the existence of inequality in an uncontestable way. Conscious of the male-dominated context of politics and political science, feminist scholars might strategically choose an approach that places the focus on numbers (Meier et al. 2005), which is easier for politicians and colleagues to grasp and accept in contrast to less obvious gender norms and structures. Finally, the influential role of a women approach can also depend on the predominance and legitimacy given to empirical studies in mainstream political science, which affects also the gender and politics scholarship, due to the emphasis on empirical evidence given in political science higher education contexts in which gender and politics scholars are trained. Gender approaches are still dominant in the discipline, as illustrated by the naming of the subdiscipline ‘gender and politics’, and the broader discipline of ‘gender studies’ (known before the 1990s as ‘women’s studies’), which is also reflected in gender and politics committees of national, European and international political science associations (e.g. IPSA ‘gender politics and policy’; ECPR ‘gender and politics’). Its hegemony in

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political analysis might be due, first, to the analytical and explanatory strength of the focus on social structures of inequality and, second, to the capacity of gender approaches to respond to the challenges of feminist contestations by incorporating them within a multidimensional concept of gender (Connell 2002), as discussed in Chapter 2. Intersectionality approaches have made important inroads, so that they are nearly always recognized as important in Anglo-American, North and West European contexts, if not applied consistently. The popularity of intersectionality in the field of gender and politics could be due to the fact that it goes to the core of long-standing feminist issues of power, oppression and privilege that have challenged feminist movement and theory from within. As Hill Collins and Chepp (2013: 70) argue, ‘As a knowledge paradigm of praxis, intersectionality knowledge projects offered feminist scholars and activists alike a theoretical template (but not actual politics) for addressing the unresolved issues from the feminist movement’. The possibility of employing intersectionality from multiple epistemological perspectives has also favoured its academic success within ‘gender and politics’. However, its popularity also depends on the context considered, being more accepted and influential in US and UK contexts (as special issues and publishers show, see Evans 2015: 55), than, for example, in Spain (Bustelo 2009). Deconstruction remains more marginal as an analytical perspective towards gender and politics. The criticisms about the deconstruction of gender being ‘only about discourses and ideas’ that are not immediately visible might help to understand why an approach that has been so influential in gender studies is nevertheless not as influential and accepted in gender and politics debates as the women, gender or intersectionality approaches are. An overview of the chapters of the 2013 Oxford Handbook on Gender and Politics (Waylen et al. 2013) gives an idea of the secondary role given to discursive approaches in the gender and politics debates as compared to the women, gender, and intersectionality perspectives. While the importance of ‘ideas’ tends now to be recognized in both politics and gender and politics (see e.g. Hay 2002), when used analytically ‘discourse’ tends to be applied in a narrow sense where it is not an overarching term but rather something communicative or measurable (Schmidt 2010; Bacchi and Rönnblom 2014). If deconstruction is by no means as dominant an approach as feminist political analysis or gender and politics research (see e.g. Celis et al. 2013), even less interest has been expressed in gender and politics debates for the postdeconstruction approach. Yet this is an approach

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that has acquired relevance in the fields of gender studies and cultural studies. We thus find it intriguing that while postdeconstruction issues have generated heated debates in feminist theory (see e.g. Disch and Hawkesworth 2016), there has not been much interest in applying them in gender and politics research. An indicator of this lack of interest is the absence of new materialist and affect approaches in the chapters of the Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics (Waylen et al. 2013; see, however, Coole 2014). Marginalization has a cost for political analysis, because each approach can only make visible one particular angle of political reality. It is therefore in the interest of the gender and politics discipline not to marginalize approaches but to create space for a diversity of perspectives and open up the field. For example, analysing the economic crisis, as illustrated in the former section, shows that to understand the crisis we need a plurality of approaches that can account for women’s representation in the economic and political areas, gender and intersectional impacts of the crisis, neoliberal discourses and emotional manifestations. The key point, we suggest, is that the crisis itself looks fundamentally different depending on the approach that is used to analyse it (Kantola and Lombardo 2017ab).

Political analysis: the link between theory and praxis In the introduction of this book we argued that political analysis is the analytical strategy that helps the researcher to move back and forth between theory and praxis. If political analysts wish to sharpen their ability to make sense of political developments, attentive to their gender and, more broadly, democratic significance, they need to connect what they theorize and what they practise. Feminist political analysis is particularly apt for training this ability to link theory and praxis for several reasons. First, a focus on inequality stimulates the creation of concepts and theories capable of understanding, explaining and transforming one of the most complex and tenacious systems of power: gender (Ackerly and True 2011; Ackerly and Mügge 2016). Second, experience with the diversity of embodied subjects and their respective claims exposes feminist political analysis to continuous contestation and negotiation of concepts from within the discipline of gender and politics. This experience of diversity and ongoing feminist

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discursive struggles feeds processes of learning and knowledge production that can help analysts address controversial and changing political problems. It has also the potential to make the discipline of politics more attentive to the processes of hegemonies and marginalizations mentioned above, and more active in bringing the margins – in terms of concepts, issues and actors – closer to the centre of analysis. Finally, feminist political analysis links theory and praxis, connecting the personal and the political in several ways. This connection gives meaning to the research that the analyst is doing, reconnecting it to existing social reality and orienting it to advance important social issues. Each feminist approach for doing political analysis contributes in its own way to developing the link between theory and praxis, applying its specific analytical focus to political reality and letting the practice inform its own theory (see Table 9.2). Women approaches do so by providing evidence-based data on the disparity between women and men that can persuade analysts and policymakers of the need for gender equality policies. Gender approaches apply their theoretical lenses to promote the transformation of gender-unequal political structures, processes, norms, institutions and practices. Deconstruction of gender approaches link theory and praxis by promoting analysts’ awareness of subjects’ unconscious gender bias in policy discourse; this awareness can in turn trigger discourse transformations towards equality. Intersectionality approaches connect theory with practice by questioning power dynamics in political analysis and in policy practice, and by promoting the making of more inclusive policies and practices. Postdeconstructionist approaches strengthen the link between the personal and the political by developing analyses on the role of emotions in politics and by relating individual material embodied experiences to the ordering of states and international systems. Altogether, feminist approaches link theory and praxis by promoting ‘reflexivity’ and ‘transformation’. Reflexivity is needed in doing research on gender and politics to become aware of the biases and taken-for-granted assumptions that shape our analyses (Lombardo, Meier and Verloo 2009). These assumptions can come from working narrowly within the approaches one is more comfortable with, and not being sufficiently open to other analytical contributions. Carol Bacchi (2009) suggests the practice of reflexivity in our analyses by drawing upon the variety of women’s diverse perspectives and experiences, especially by paying attention to the perspective of underrepresented

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groups. In line with her, this book suggests practising reflexivity by trying to stay open to the richness of the different gender and politics approaches, particularly those that are more distant from the centre of the discipline. Concretely, it means training political analysts’ awareness of the gender and other inequality biases and taken-for-granted assumptions that shape political analyses (see Table 9.2). This reflexivity training can be developed through openness to theoretical and methodological pluralism and the continuous contestation of unequal norms and practices within the discipline. In the case of gender analyses, it also means creatively combining different approaches for doing feminist political analysis. Doing feminist political analysis means not only understanding and explaining inequalities in the social and political world, but also changing them. Once one recognizes ‘that gender analysis is a skill and not yet a mainstreamed skill in undergraduate or graduate training’, as argued in the special issue ‘Mainstreaming Gender in the Teaching and Learning of Politics’ (Ackerly and Mügge 2016: 2), feminist approaches for doing political analysis encourage researchers to link this knowledge to transformative practice in their research, teaching and academic politics (see Table  9.2). We will mostly mention here the contribution of feminist political analysis to the transformation of research and teaching in political science, which are more closely related to the topic of this book (for an updated account of the changes that the gender and politics community suggests to political science see the special issue by Mügge, Evans and Engeli 2016). The transformation in political analysis that feminist approaches promote in research involves rethinking key political research questions and inventing new questions inspired by the different feminist approaches. It involves a revision of key political concepts (Goertz and Mazur 2008) – among them power, agency and institutions – and key political issues – such as polity, politics and policy – through feminist lenses. This revision gives visibility to problems or actors that existing concepts of politics neglected. Gendering the concept of democracy has meant, for example, the inclusion of women’s suffrage in measuring democratization, which has an impact on shifting the dates of democratization for many countries (Switzerland is a notable example here, shifting from 1848 to 1971) and on increasing the relevance of international factors (Paxton 2008). Feminist political analysis also leads to the invention of new concepts, such as intersectionality, able to render inequality dynamics visible and to grasp the complexity of

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Women

Gender

Deconstruction of gender

Intersectionality

Postdeconstruction

Link personal and political Question power Awareness Transformation Link Evidence-based through: dynamics in political and change of gendertheory–praxis data to persuade analysis and practice a) analysis of role of emotions of subjects’ unequal political analysts and in politics Promote inclusive unconscious structures, policymakers b) relation of embodied expepolicies and gender bias in processes, norms, of the need for rience to ordering of state practices policy discourse institutions and gender equality and international systems practices policies Transformation Strengthening the link between theory and praxis: a) Reflexivity of political • Awareness of the biases and taken-for-granted assumptions that shape political analyses analysis and • Openness to theoretical and methodological pluralism political • Openness to continuous contestation of unequal norms and practices within the discipline science • Combination of different approaches for doing feminist political analysis b) Transformation (research, teaching, academic politics) • Understanding, explaining and changing inequalities in the social and political world • Rethinking key political research questions and inventing new questions from feminist lenses • Revision of key political concepts through feminist lenses (power, agency, institutions) • Invention of new concepts able to render inequality dynamics visible and to grasp the complexity of political and social reality (e.g. intersectionality) • Revision of key political issues through feminist lenses (polity, politics, policy) • Prioritizing issues of gender, class, race and sexuality in political science curricula • Putting equality and diversity into practice: promote inclusive and egalitarian discourses, policies and practices within political science discipline and structures

Approaches

Table 9.2  Feminist approaches to political analysis: the link between theory and praxis

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political and social reality (Erzeel and Mügge 2016). Another example of the development of new concepts is that of ‘state feminism’, a useful conceptual tool to understand how the state in post-industrial Western democracies has addressed women’s movements’ demands for greater gender equality (Goertz and Mazur 2008). Transforming the teaching of political science means prioritizing issues of gender, class, race, sexuality and ability in political science curricula, rather than treating inequality as a marginal subject. Considering that political science is ‘the field with the expertise in the study of power’, as Ackerly and Mügge (2016: 3) argue, it ‘can be at the forefront of cultivating in our students the ability to understand all aspects of power, including race, heteronormativity, class, ­ability-centricism, and gender’. In short, putting equality and diversity into practice implies activism to promote inclusive and egalitarian discourses, policies and practices within political science discipline and structures. To paraphrase Pateman (1995), political science (PS) ought to put into practice democratic ideals in the classroom, the department and the PS associations. Despite its contribution to a political analysis capable of linking theory and transformative praxis, and its increasing professionalization, gender and politics is still a marginalized discipline within political science. While it struggles for acceptance within the field of political science, it needs to resist the dangers of co-optation in the mainstream that might add to its own internal marginalization processes. Openness to a plurality of approaches and creating space for the margins can keep the discipline of gender and politics self-reflexive about its own hegemony and marginalization processes, strengthening its capacities for understanding and transforming the political.

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Index

ableism  63 Aboriginal people  157 abortion  126, 160, 163 Acker, Joan  30, 98 Ackerly, Brooke  4 activism  6, 68 affective atmospheres  110, 111 affective economies  46, 67 affective turn  135, 179 affects  14, 15, 43, 44, 45, 46, 67, 68, 69 Afghanistan  132 Africa  89, 126, 131, 146 African American  39, 43, 87, 106, 172, 177 age  63, 67 agency-structure debate  71, 72, 78, 85, 185 Ahmed, Sara  45, 46, 67, 69, 89, 90, 135, 157, 179, 180 AIDS  68, 133 Allen, Amy  51, 53, 66 alliances  66 American Political Science Association (APSA)  3, 8, 16, 194 androcentric  9, 11, 94, 164, 165 anger  9, 15, 69, 109, 157, 193 Anglo-American  16 Annesley, Claire  54, 147 Anthias, Floya  156 anti-discrimination law  165 anti-eviction  143, 144 anti-racist  65, 66 Arendt, Hannah  1, 52, 57 Argentina  58, 96, 120 Aristotle  9

Asian  40, 154 Athanasiou, Athena  130 austerity policies  15, 43, 155 Australia  109, 157 Austria  9 Autocracy, autocratic polities  18, 115, 120, 125, 126, Bacchi, Carol Lee  16, 103, 104, 109, 110, 169, 170, 174 Barcelona  151 Barrett, Michele  123 Baylis-Flannery v. De Wilde  154 Beauty Solomon  87, 88, 153 Bedford, Kate  104 Beijing  165 Belgium  74, 80 Benhabib, Seyla  37 Berlant, Lauren  68 biological determinism  28 biopolitics  60, 135, 157, 178 biotechnological  178 biopower  60, 61, 185 Bjarnegård, Elin  100 black and lesbian feminism  29, 38 black women  64, 65 Blair, Tony  109 bodies  14, 15, 35, 44, 60, 68, 110, 132, 135, 158, 169, 170, 178, 180 Braidotti, Rosi  44, 169 Britain  135 Brown, Wendy  6, 7, 127 Brunila, Kristiina  62 Burkitt, Ian  109 Butler, Judith  34, 37, 44, 61, 81, 82, 83, 128, 129, 169

235

236

Index

Callerstig, Ann-Charlott  81 Canada  154 candidate selection  100 capitalism  28, 29, 37, 56, 60, 122, 123, 134 care  32, 41, 79, 100, 101, 102, 143, 162, 179 caregiver parity model  32 Catalonia  151, 174 CDU  142 Celis, Karen  8, 9, 25, 73, 76, 163 Central and Eastern European Countries  149 change  6, 12, 21, 44, 51, 61, 72, 75, 77, 80, 81, 83, 88, 89, 94, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 105 Chappell, Louise  99, 101 childcare  6, 72, 141, 160, 164 Childs, Sarah  8, 12, 25, 74 Chile  126 citizenship  9, 79, 117, 127, 153, 164 civil society  40, 41, 42, 122, 125, 143, 147, 166 Cixous, Hélène  44 class  5, 13, 14, 29, 38, 39, 41, 42, 57, 63, 66, 67, 85, 129, 131, 155 clientelism  58, 100 climate change  5, 45, 89 colonialism  68, 132 Connell, R.W.  30, 31, 57, 97 constitution  118, 138, 139 constructivism  2, 10, 22, 88, 190 contested concept  1, 10 Coole, Diana  44, 88, 89, 134 Cooper, Brittney  64 corporeality  44, 89 Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU)  107, 153 courts  56, 93 Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)  67 Crenshaw, Kimberlé  14, 39, 41, 43, 64, 65, 87, 172, 178

crisis (see economic crisis) critical actors  25, 73, 78 critical realist  13, 27 cultural studies  14 cultural symbols  30 culture  28, 30, 45, 46, 58, 75, 132, 152, 178 Dahl, Robert  24, 52 Dahlerup, Drude  8, 9, 55, 58 de Beauvoir, Simone  10, 27 de-democratization  125 De la Fuente, Maria  54, 55, 100 deliberative democracy  89, 91 democracy  7, 18, 24, 57, 76, 115, 116, 120, 121, 125, 126, 133, 138, 146, 151, 198 democratization  19, 145, 146 Derrida, Jacques  34 descriptive representation  24, 25, 163 development  162 development studies  74 disability  63 disciplinary power  59, 61 discourse analysis  10, 14, 30 discursive institutionalism  102, 103 discursive politics  35 diversity  5, 10, 11, 15 diversity mainstreaming  151 domestic violence  149 (see also gender violence, violence against women) domestic work  179 domination  61, 63, 65 Driscoll, Amanda  96 East Asia  146 Eastern European  146 ecological  67 economic crisis  15, 16, 25, 43, 53, 54, 67, 115, 125, 139, 140, 147, 149, 150, 155, 157, 179, 189, 193

Index economic liberalization  147 economic power  54 economics  147 economization  157 economy  28, 30, 36, 37, 40, 42, 45, 53, 104 Ecuador  104 education  64 Eisenstein, Zillah  123 electoral systems  7 emotions  14, 43, 44, 45, 46, 69 empathy  15, 68 empiricism  10 employment  28, 36 empowerment  1, 51, 57, 74, 120, 124 Engeli, Isabelle  4, 7, 12, 25, 167 Enloe, Cynthia  24, 120 environmentalism  89, 91 epistemology  9, 20, 33, 45 equality  25, 35, 36, 53, 56, 65, 108 equal pay  171 essentialism  25, 29, 34, 57, 82 ethnicity  42, 63, 65, 67, 129, 130, 155 Europe  3, 8, 10, 15, 16, 42, 43, 54, 62, 66, 72, 89, 108, 125, 132, 141, 155, 158, 166 European Central Bank (ECB)  115, 139 European Commission (EC)  107, 115, 152 European Conference on Politics and Gender (ECPG)   16, 193 European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR)  8, 9, 16, 193 European Constitutional Convention  139 European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR)  87, 153 European integration  19, 144, 145 European Parliament (EP)  107

237

European Parliament Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM)  139, 152 European Union (EU)  5, 36, 40, 65, 81, 84, 107, 108, 115, 126, 129, 139, 145, 147, 148, 149, 152, 153, 166, 175, 176 European Women’s Lobby (EWL)  152 Europeanization  108, 126, 144, 148, 149 Evans, Elizabeth  7, 12 evidence-based policy making  62 experience  9, 12, 23, 25, 31, 39, 41, 47, 64, 65, 75, 109, 193, 196, 197, 199 family  172 family policy  141 fatherhood  124 fear  15, 67, 68 federalism  58, 144 female genital mutilation  42 feminist killjoy  69, 90 feminist new institutionalism  18, 58, 94, 99, 124 feminist new materialism  43, 44, 67 feminist standpoint theory  24, 75 Ferree, Myra Marx  21, 35, 40, 42, 43, 65, 66, 74, 84, 105, 171, 177 financial crisis  125 (see economic crisis) Finland  9, 36, 61 forced marriages  42, 155 Foucauldian  52, 57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 69, 103, 104, 111, 134, 135 Foucault, Michel  1, 34, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 82, 185 Franceschet, Susan  58 Fraser, Nancy  32, 33, 37, 58, 79, 133 Freedom House  120 Friedan, Betty  53 Frost, Samantha  44, 88, 89, 134 electoral participation  140 electoral system  7, 21

238

Index

Gains, Francesca  54 Galligan, Yvonne  115, 117, 121, 133, 145 Gatens, Moira  44 gay  37, 66, 68, 82 gender bias  26, 30, 57, 71, 80, 84, 148, 158, 161, 186, 197, 199 gender budgeting  166 gender equality  61, 80, 141, 146, 167 gender equality policies  60, 62, 126 gender mainstreaming  60, 77, 80, 102, 151, 165, 166 gender regime  30, 31, 32, 126 gender roles  10, 28, 31, 80, 84, 130, 143, 156 gender stereotypes  9 gender studies  10, 16, 71 gender system  57 gender training  102, 165 gender violence  152, 153, 172, 175 Gendering Equality Policy in Practice (GEPP)  166, 167 Germany  9, 42, 65, 115, 142 Giddens, Anthony  72 Gould, Deborah  68 governance  62, 129 governance feminism  129 governmentality  60, 65, 90, 135, 185 Grabham, Emily  64 Greece  150, 155 Grosz Elisabeth  44 Habermasian  102 Hancock, Ange-Marie  42 Haraway, Donna  169 Harman, Harriet  54 harmful traditional practices  162 happiness  67, 90 hate  15, 45 hate politics  141 hate speech  128

Hawkesworth, Mary  106, 120, 164 Hay, Colin  1, 2, 137, 140 Hayward, Clarissa  55 Hemmings, Claire  47, 192 Hernes, Helga Maria  124 heteronormativity  35, 36, 61, 63, 124, 133, 171 Hewitt, Patricia  54 Heywood, Andrew  3 Hill, Collins Patricia  64, 105 homonationalism  132, 133 homophobia  63, 150 homosexuality  133 homosocial capital  100 hooks, bell  14, 64, 194 Htun, Mala  146 humanitarianism  68 Hungary  67 Hussein, Saddam  109 identity  14, 27, 29, 30, 35, 38, 64, 65 identity politics  64, 65 ideology  6, 56, 62 ILGA-Europe  152 implementation  80, 167, 168 India  126 Indignados movement  66, 157 Indonesia  119, 131 Inglehart, Robert  120 International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFjP)  16 International Monetary Fund (IMF)  115 international organizations  143 International Political Science Association (IPSA)  16, 194 International Relations (IR)  7, 10, 24, 148 Intersectionality  38, 63, 85, 105, 131, 150, 173, 188 Iran  85 Iraq  109, 132

Index Irigaray, Luce  44, 52 irrationality  96 Islam  86 Israel  130 Italy  66 Johnson, Janet Elise  142, 143 Jones, Adam  26 justice  65 Kenney, Sally  97 Klein, Naomi  89 kinship  64, 156 knowledge production  64 Kristeva, Julia  52 Krizsan, Andrea  108, 149, 172 Krook, Mona Lena  8, 12, 25, 74, 96 Kulawik, Teresa  103 Lam v. Univ. of Hawaii  154 Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo  120 Latin America  7, 16, 126, 146 Lee, Donna  8 legal studies  39 legitimacy  61, 62, 99 Lehman Brothers  139, 140 lesbian  68, 82 lesbian feminism  14, 38 Leyenaar, Monique  55, 58 LGBT  66, 87, 132, 133, 143, 150, 151, 152, 169, 171, 174 liberal feminism  21, 52, 53, 94, 95, 118 Lloyd, Moya  128, 129 London  109, 111 Lorde, Audre  29, 38 Lovenduski, Joni  8, 24, 77, 94, 97, 163, 167 Lowndes, Vivien  93, 94, 99 Lykke, Nina  11, 43, 44 Machiavelli  9 MacKinnon, Catharine  81, 82 Madrid  109

239

MAGEEQ  84 Mahmood, Saba  85, 86 male breadwinner model  162 Mannevuo, Mona  110 market feminism  129 marriage  56, 100, 132 Marxism  27, 28, 44, 56, 57, 179 Marxist feminists  29, 52, 58, 116, 123 masculinity  13, 27, 28, 33, 36, 51, 57, 105, 118, 124, 127, 129, 142, 164 masculinity politics  143 materialist feminists  28, 79 materiality  45, 46 Mazur, Amy  76, 77, 167, 198 McCall, Lesley  41, 43 McNay, Lois  37, 79, 82, 83, 86, 88, 90 media  56, 84, 143, 148 Meier, Petra  35, 36, 62, 74, 84, 85, 144, 156, 160 melancholy  67 men  21, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 36, 38, 41, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 100, 101, 105, 118, 122, 130, 154, 155, 163, 164 Mendoza, Breny  7, 16 Merkel, Angela  141, 142 methodological  15, 30 migrant  42, 66, 85, 153 military  64, 93 Millett, Kate  122 Miraftab, Faranak  143, 144 modern  62, 67 Mohanty, Chantal Tapalty  14, 25, 38, 85 Montoya, Celeste  94, 95, 96, 97 Mouffe, Chantal  127 Mügge, Liza  7, 12 multicultural  68 multiple discrimination  43 Murray, Rainbow  54

240

Index

Mushaben, Joyce  141, 142 Muslim  42, 85, 89, 152, 155, 174, 175 nationalism  5 nationalist struggles  120 nation-state  116 nature  44, 45, 46 naturecultures  46 neoliberal governance  87 neoliberalism  11, 60, 62, 65, 122,126, 129, 145, 147, 157, 158 Netherlands  9, 14, 30, 132 new materialism  14, 44, 45, 46, 47, 179 new technologies  44 New York  133 nodal points  11 non-governmental organizations  152 nonhuman  88 Nordic countries  36, 62, 107, 132 Nordic feminism  124 Norris, Pippa  120, 140 Northern Ireland  144, 151 Norway  54 Nussbaum, Martha  37 Okin, Susan Moller  118 Oksala, Johanna  59, 63 ontological  20 organizations  80, 84, 88, 98, 99, 124, 165 organized religious institutions  125 parliament  53, 55, 93 parliamentary rituals  94 Pateman, Carol  117, 122, 127, 200 patriarchy  28, 31, 56, 63, 72, 122, 123, 127, 131 Paxton, Pamela  24, 138 Pedwell, Carolyn  46, 135 performative politics  148 performativity  35, 61, 82, 104, 178

pink pound  38 pious mosque movement women  86 Piscopo, Jennifer  58 pluralism  2, 3, 10, 188 Podemos  109 Poland  67 Politics  1, 2, 5, 137, 138, 142, 148, 150, 155 political behaviour  19 political economy  45, 179 political intersectionality  39, 64 political leadership  19 political parties  7, 54, 55, 76, 100, 121, 148 Politics & Gender  16 populism  130 populist right parties  155 pornography  82 Portugal  66 positive action  165, 176 positivism  9, 21 postcolonial feminism  14, 38 postcolonialism  82, 131, 132 post-feminist  83, 84 postmodern  2, 37, 83, 127, 129, 169 Povinelli, Elizabeth  46 Power  1, 2, 51, 52, 56, 59, 63, 66, 67 practices of the self  63 Prügl, Elisabeth  125, 129 PSA Women & Politics Specialist Group  3 psychology  60 Puar, Jasbir  132 public-private distinction  55, 119, 136, 143, 145 Pussy Riot  143 Putin, Vladimir  142, 143 quantitative methods  10 queer  2, 8, 15, 17, 35, 37, 133, 180

Index QUING  84 quotas  3, 24, 54, 58, 140, 146, 163 race  5, 13, 14, 18, 29, 38, 39, 41, 42, 63, 65, 77, 85, 105, 106, 129, 131, 135, 153, 156, 157 racism  30, 63, 68, 155 radical feminist  28, 94, 122, 123 rational choice institutionalism  94, 96 Razavi, Shahra  147 Reality TV  68 Rees, Teresa  165 reflexivity  16, 183, 197 religion  42, 64, 155 Repo, Jemima  60 reproduction  27, 28, 31, 44 reproductive rights  5 reproductive technologies  178 Research Network on Gender and the State (RNGS)  77 resistance  9, 51, 60, 61, 67, 73, 81, 91, 94, 105, 166, 167, 185 Roberts, Mark  93, 94, 99 Roggeband, Conny  81, 145, 153 Rolandsen Augustín, Lise  152, 153, 175 Roma women  67 Romania  67, 130, 149 Russia  142, 143 Rönnblom Malin  103, 104 Saari, Milja  170 same-sex marriage  66 sameness-difference distinction  53 Schmidt, Vivien  102, 103 schools  56, 93, 95 school shootings  36 scientific method  38 Scotland  144 Scott, Joan  30 Serbia  119, 130 sex/gender distinction  27, 34

241

sex workers  153 sexual harassment  154, 162 sexuality  2, 5, 8, 27, 29, 30, 34, 38, 63, 85, 131, 135, 152, 169 shame  46, 68, 157 Skeggs, Beverly  68, 90, 111 Skjeie, Hege  108 Siim, Birte  10, 11 Shepherd, Laura  194 Slovenia  67 Smith, Nicola  8 social change  44 social flesh  110 social movements  14, 39, 40, 66, 75, 78, 106 social sciences  8 social transformation  21 socialist feminists  57, 94, 123 societal change  6, 14 sociology  71 soft law  176 solidarity  51 South Africa  81, 143, 145 South America  81, 145 Spain  9, 62, 66, 87, 109, 149, 156, 157 Spivak, Gayatri   45, 82 Squires, Judith  107, 108, 150, 151, 165, 166 state feminism  129, 200 strategic essentialism  82, 91 structural change  165, 168 structural intersectionality  39, 64 subaltern  61 subjectivities  14, 36, 44, 59, 62, 134, 169 subordination  61, 65 substantive representation  25, 73, 141, 142, 163 suffrage  24, 138, 198 suffragettes  31 Suski, Laura  68, 69 Sweden  130 Switzerland  198

242

Index

symbolic  37 symbolic representation  84 symbols  124 Syrian  89 technologies  45 Thailand  100 Third World  131 Third World Women  85 Towns, Ann  118 transgender  29 transition  138, 145, 146 Tripp, Aili Mari  126, 146 True, Jacqui  4 UK  3, 8, 9, 36, 54, 144, 194 UN  76, 165, 170 universal male breadwinner model  32 universal caregiver model  32 US  3, 7, 8, 39, 42, 65, 68, 96, 132, 139, 140, 149, 154, 157, 195 US Congress  105 veiling  42, 85 Verge, Tània  54, 55, 100 Verloo, Mieke  35, 40, 108, 152, 153, 164, 165, 166, 171, 174 violence  6, 28, 30, 36, 39, 40, 42, 158, 178 violence against women  140, 153, 160, 162, 170, 172 Vleuten van der, Anna  81, 145 Von Wahl, Angelika  141, 142

Walby, Sylvia  28, 30, 31, 40, 41, 42, 107, 108, 125, 126, 139, 140, 147 Wales  144 Wahlke Report  3 Waylen, Georgina  99, 101 Weberian  99, 134 Weldon, Laurel  106, 125, 146 welfare policies  162 welfare states  36, 60, 62 Western  31, 46, 72, 86, 96, 167, 194 Western feminist  85, 86 What’s the problem presented to be? (WPR) approach  169 white feminists  39 Wilcox, Lauren  178 women-friendly welfare state  125, 130 Women in Black  130 Women in development (WID)  74, 162 women’s interests  25, 76 women’s movements  76, 77 women’s policy agencies  76, 77, 78, 107, 118, 126 Wood, Helen  68, 90 Woolf, Virginia  119 World Bank  36, 104, 105 World Economic Forum  120 xenophobia  16, 180 Young, Iris Marion  55, 60, 97 Yuval-Davis, Nira  156