Where does gender express itself politically? What does gender mean, in political terms, for women? Is it possible to study gender expressed in and by individuals, across the aggregate, without dissecting the methodological and normative assumptions of (at least part of) our subfield?

In this Critical Perspectives section, Nancy Burns and Jane Junn speak to these questions from distinctly different but intersecting viewpoints. Both understand that the political meanings of gender are rooted in power and powerlessness, in “systematic disadvantage and advantage” (Burns, p. 104), and that our task as scholars is to explicate “when social and political contexts can make gender relevant” (p. 105). Both scholars speak primarily to gender in these essays, but also reflect on race as well.

Nancy Burns considers gender in the aggregate and in the individual, and maps how the relationship between the two might be explicated through their interaction with a theorized political context. She delineates a framework for understanding when and under what conditions “politics enables gender to shape individuals' political actions and public opinions” (p. 119). Using Burns's essay as a starting point, Jane Junn cautions us that such a project will face inherent difficulties that result from the conjunction of methodology and normative assumptions that underpin the kind of research Burns advocates. Conceptions about the individual and assumptions of “equality of agency among individuals” (p. 125), Junn argues, not only obscure political inequalities imbedded in gender but also produce unintended consequences.

Gender in the Aggregate, Gender in the Individual, Gender and Political Action

Square Pegs and Round Holes: Challenges of Fitting Individual-Level Analysis to a Theory of Politicized Context of Gender