Recent research finds that states with more women involved in government are also less prone to corruption (Dollar, Fisman, and Gatti 2001; Swamy et al. 2001). But a review of experimental evidence indicates that “women are not necessarily more intrinsically honest or averse to corruption than men” in the laboratory or in the field (Frank, Lambsdorff, and Boehm 2011, 68). Rather, the attitudes and behaviors of women concerning corruption depend on institutional and cultural contexts in these experimental situations (Alatas, Cameron, and Chaudhuri 2009; Alhassan-Alolo 2007; Armantier and Boly 2008; Schulze and Frank 2003). If women's inclination toward corruption is contextual, then what are the contexts in which we would expect female involvement in government to fight corruption? The answer is important to understand where gender equality initiatives present a cost-effective and politically feasible approach to cleaning up government.

Do strong and active political parties enhance women's representation, or do they contribute to the ongoing inequality in men's and women's candidacy rates? Studies have examined this question by looking at a variety of measures of party strength, focusing particularly on the role parties play in candidate emergence. For qualified individuals in the pool of potential candidates, being encouraged to run for office by a political actor is the most important step in considering a candidacy (Lawless and Fox 2005). Such encouragement is especially important in increasing the typically lower political ambition among women in the candidate pool (Fox and Lawless 2010). Yet the limited research examining the effects of party recruitment on men's and women's candidacies finds negative (Niven 1998; 2006) or no (Sanbonmatsu 2006) effects of recruitment on women's representation. Some studies even find evidence that parties more often run female than male candidates as “sacrificial lambs” in unwinnable races (Carroll 1994; Stambough and O'Regan 2007).

Since the development of modern survey methods, political scientists have identified gender-based differences in the political behavior of men and women. Early research found women to be less politically engaged than men and to be more likely to vote for right-wing parties (Lipset 1963). Beginning in the 1980s, however, these differences in political participation dissipated, and the gender-based pattern in vote choice was reversed (DeVaus and McAllister 1989; Inglehart and Norris 2000). These gender differences in political behavior, and the many others that could be added here, are commonly referred to as “gender gaps.”

When women run for office, they win at the same rate as men. A significant body of research substantiating this claim has been touted by scholars and women's groups alike. “Gender neutral” outcomes, however, mask important sex differences in congressional candidacies. Indeed, extensive research has revealed a gender gap in political ambition: women are more hesitant to run for office and are more concerned about their credentials and viability than similarly situated men.

I was delighted to be invited to participate in this symposium in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Women and Politics program at Rutgers because, to put it bluntly, I do not believe I could do the work that I do within the discipline of political science—interdisciplinary and normative research informed by feminist scholarship, democratic theory, and sexuality studies with an eye to practice—if not for the program, which played a key role in legitimizing feminist scholarship within the discipline of political science. When I entered the Rutgers Ph.D. program in 1988, as part of the third cohort, it was an exciting time. We were very much aware of being among the first students in the country able to make feminist scholarship a central part of our doctoral studies in political science, particularly those of us pursuing political theory. My entry into graduate school came on the heels of four years of political activism in the feminist, peace, and social justice movements, so the question of practice was pressing to me at the time and has always hovered around my academic work. The Women and Politics program was a perfect home for me because of the way in which it linked the theoretical and empirical questions of academic political science with the politically engaged concerns of women's and gender studies and nurtured in me an interdisciplinary way of thinking that always strives for creative connections.

Interdisciplinarity, like other words, such as neoliberalism or globalization, has wide but seemingly endlessly varied use. Indeed, it is often used indiscriminately to apply to everything from a change of focus that is outside the substantive content of a discipline to the radical reorientation of methods and methodology to the call to escape disciplinary confines altogether. As someone who had the good fortune to receive an interdisciplinary graduate education at Rutgers (Women and Politics, Public Law, and Africana Studies as subfields) and begin her career in an “interdisciplinary” unit (what eventually became, in fact, a Department of Interdisciplinary Studies), I am well acquainted with the many debates surrounding the much-touted, but also still too infrequent, trek of not only boundary crossers per se, but also those who live in borderland spaces that merge and, at times, blur disciplinary lines. As a radical Black feminist political scientist and lawyer, interdisciplinarity has been a vital necessity for both theory and practice. Rutgers provided an intellectual space in which interdisciplinary approaches were deemed critical to mapping a feminist political science. In this essay, I briefly share some of the possibilities opened up by interdisciplinary investigation and its central role in ushering in a new political science.

In a recent text detailing the alleged wrongs of feminism, conservatives Suzanne Venker and Phyllis Schlafly pronounced,

My first course in women's studies was Gloria Anzaldúa's “Women of Color in the U.S.” I took the course with a group of women with whom I shared a house in Santa Cruz. We were Chicana and Filipina, all of us activists in MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán) and APISA (Asian/Pacific Island Student Association). That spring quarter, we worked our way through Anzaldúa's recently published Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza while also reading essays by Audre Lorde, Norma Alarcón, Janice Mirikitani, and Chela Sandoval. We read lesbian erotica by Azucena Coronel and listened to Cherríe Moraga read poetry. Along with my housemates and activist friends, I spent the quarter reading and talking and learning about how to think more deeply about questions of gender, race, and sexuality and about how these categories helped to shape my personal, intellectual, and political identity.

I work in neither political science nor the United States. I was trained in both, and I visit often, but I am now employed on the faculty of a critical law school in the United Kingdom. My work is in gender, development, and political economy. It could fit into politics, but it fits better elsewhere at present. As a result, my reflections on the themes of gender scholarship and knowledge transformation are somewhat removed from the discipline. Hence, in this piece, I offer some thoughts from outside political science on the subject of border crossings and theory/practice in feminist academic work.

For the last twenty years, my research has focused on the ways that legal, medical, and community organizations respond to sexual violence in the United States. This research has been informed and, I believe, enriched by my work in local organizations that provide supportive services to survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence and to those seeking access to abortion. When I arrived at Rutgers for graduate school, I was surprised and frustrated at how few of the stories I heard as a service provider had made their way into the academic discussions about feminism, feminist movements, and feminist organizations that I encountered in the political science literature.

Transforming conceptual insights about gender into political practice is a critical element of feminist scholarship in the field of political science. This transformational project often entails engagement with activism and advocacy. Examining particular activist modes of translation has been the focus of my own scholarship beginning with my work in the Women and Politics program and at the Center for American Women and Politics while in graduate school at Rutgers. Feminist theorizing, Grosz explains (2010, 96), “enable[s] us to understand the logic at work in culture, social relations, or individual psychology, its points of vulnerability and its capacity for change.” Moreover, feminist theorizing is self-consciously normative; it is about exposing, explaining, and elaborating that which makes possible systems of injustice, with the goal of bringing forth a more gender-just reality.