Heteronormativity has recently emerged as a fully shaped and well theorized concept in numerous fields, and it proves central to sexual politics and the politics of sexuality. In Antigone's Claim (2000), Judith Butler explores the heteronormativity of kinship as structured by the state, and she links this language of kinship to the incest taboo. This article focuses on Butler's politicization of kinship structures in her reading of the figure of Antigone. Because she sees the incest taboo as a social force that maintains heteronormativity by producing a particular configuration of the family, Butler advances the critique of heteronormativity. She does this through both her introduction and explication of the concept of (un)intelligibility and her explicit attention to the “incest born” person. The unintelligibility of the incest-born demands a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the liberal framework of tolerance: The unintelligible cannot be tolerated because they have not even been granted access to the category of the human. By asking us to reconsider kinship outside the defining and dominant terms of heteronormativity and the incest taboo, Butler promotes a distinct conception of politics. She thereby makes a noteworthy contribution to the political project of undoing gender hierarchy.

While there has been a significant amount of research on transnational feminist activism at the global level, many feminist transnational advocacy networks are mobilizing within world regions. The lack of attention to the regional level has created a considerable imbalance in research on transnational activism. This article's first objective is to define regional advocacy networks (RANs) as a collection of individuals and organizations from the same world region working together toward a common goal. The article's second objective is to explore the conditions under which RANs are influential. We investigate conditions for RAN success through a case study of an African network that helped create one of the world's most progressive treaties on women's rights, the African Union Protocol to the Charter on Human and People's Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa. From an analysis of primary sources and interviews with key participants, we suggest that three factors are crucial for network success: whether a RAN builds alliances with key politicians and civil servants, whether a RAN is able to participate in the decision-making process, and whether a RAN's goals overlap with the target institution's priorities. The broader implication of our study is that scholars seeking to understand the creation of women's rights commitments, the diffusion of women's rights norms, and compliance with women's rights treaties need to look beyond the international and domestic levels of action to include the regional level in their analyses.

The alienation of affection tort, which allows a plaintiff to sue a third party for interfering with the plaintiff's marriage, has been disparaged by many as a relic of women's former status as their husband's property. Despite its archaic roots, the tort as it operates today is in many ways quite modern and addresses some of the problems, expectations, and obstacles of modern American marriage. Furthermore, it fits in with developments in tort law toward more actions for nontangible, nonfinancial damages. Given the tort's history, one might assume that it benefits men, but women also benefit from and use this tort, as demonstrated in a case study of North Carolina, a jurisdiction where the tort is frequently pursued. In its current form, the alienation tort can be reconciled with feminist theory and with women's interests, and should not be abolished without reconsideration.

We argue that since the term state feminism first appeared in the 1980s, it has gone through three stages of development, becoming a formal concept useful in cross-national analysis in the last stage. Scholars first used the term loosely to describe a range of state activities with a gender/women's issues focus. Next, the concept became associated with the study of women's policy agencies. Most recently, a group of comparative gender and policy scholars—the Research Network on Gender Politics and the State (RNGS)—has developed systematic nominal and operational definitions of state feminism to study if, how, and why women's policy agencies make alliances with women's movements within the state to achieve feminist outcomes.

Britain's use of state agencies to address gender relations has evolved significantly over the past 30 years and is currently entering a new phase, characterized by a commitment to a generic equalities, or “diversity,” approach in which multiple equality strands are to be addressed via a single equalities body, the Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR). The CEHR will replace three existing equality commissions that focus on gender, race, and disability, respectively. This shift appears to involve the demise of a singular focus on gender equality and with it the justification for separate women's policy agencies.

Since the 1970s, institutions with the explicit purpose of advancing women's rights and status have been established in an overwhelming majority of countries. In political science research, these institutions usually are called “women's policy machineries,” “state feminist institutions,” or “gender equality agencies.” The people who work in them are often referred to as “state feminists.” This article offers a general overview of academic studies on state feminism, the majority of which were published in the last decade. Generally speaking and with few exceptions, social scientists researching state feminism in postindustrial countries tend to consider only academic work on other postindustrial countries and ignore scholarly analyses of developing countries and new democracies. Countries outside the postindustrial world have women's institutions, and there is no reason to disregard them.