In sub-Saharan Africa, the history of women's involvement in liberation struggles and the realignment of gender relations following independence have long been characterized as a kind of gender backlash. Whether national independence from colonial or settler rule was achieved in connection with nationalist movements or armed struggles, the scenarios of gender relations are remarkably similar. Particular groups of women are mobilized during the struggle for national liberation, their issues become part of the liberation movements' agendas, but following the achievement of independence, these same women are rapidly demobilized and the issues they raised during the national liberation struggle get marginalized amid competing and “more urgent” state priorities. Scholars have illuminated the historical and cultural specificities of this pattern in particular cases (Geiger 1997; Kruks, Rapp, and Young 1989; Seidman 1984 and 1999; Tétreault 1992; Urdang 1989). While this pattern fits with colloquial understandings of backlash, identifying the pattern does little to shed light on how state power gets infused with gender meaning in postindependence politics or how these power dynamics evolve.

This article responds to earlier research on the role of Islam as a barrier to women's political nominations by assessing and comparing parties’ efforts to meet institutionally required gender quotas in Indonesia. With the provision of 30% candidate gender quotas implemented since the 2004 elections, how have parties responded? Do Islamist and pluralist parties differ systematically in this regard? More specifically, does religious ideology influence how parties go about meeting quotas, recruiting female candidates, and getting them elected? Or do all parties face the same challenges when it comes to getting women into parliament? Drawing on a unique dataset collected from 2004 to 2019 legislative elections and in-depth interviews with central party officers, faction leaders, and members of parliament, this article investigates these questions. The results indicate that Islamic ideology plays no obvious role in limiting female participation in legislative elections; Islamist and pluralist parties are equally good at achieving the percentage quotas of female nominees. Both groups are also similarly poor at putting female candidates first on the party lists. Indonesia's open-list proportional representation (PR) system is prohibitively expensive, and this hurts women candidates more than it does male candidates because women generally have less access to the capital necessary to purchase the top position on party lists.

In Peru, the adoption of a new school curriculum based on gender equality and nondiscrimination against sexual minorities led to the mobilization in 2016 of organizations connected to conservative churches under the slogan Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas (Don't Mess with My Children). This new countermovement uses street protests, the courts, and Congress to disseminate an antigender agenda that goes beyond its initial opposition to sexual education. Organizations in the countermovement consider the concept of gender to be a dangerous imperialist ideology, arguing that the state violates individual freedoms when it uses gender as one of the pillars of public policy.

Recent scholarship increasingly considers the representation of women in cross-national legislatures, often examining how the characteristics of the countries in a particular region affect the representation of women in these elected bodies. No studies have examined the representation of women on the high courts in a cross-national context. We attempt to fill this void by collecting an original data set of women's participation on high courts in the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from 2006 to 2007. Using this data, we examine how institutional choices of judicial selection and structural factors within the country affect women's representation. We find that the variation in women's participation on these courts, from 0% on some to 60% on others, is affected by the prestige of the court, the method of selection, and the tradition of and importance placed upon women's participation within the country. Our results suggest that choices made during the design of high courts can influence the representative nature of the institution.

As of June 2017, there were eight United Nations Security Council Resolutions (UNSCRs) on “women and peace and security”—UNSCRs 1325, 1820, 1888, 1889, 1960, 2106, 2122, and 2242. These UNSCRs recognize the gendered nature of armed conflicts and peace processes. They propose institutional provisions geared mainly toward protecting women and girls during armed conflicts and promoting their participation in conflict resolution and prevention. In addition, in March 2016, the Security Council adopted UNSCR 2272, which recommends concrete steps to combat sexual exploitation and abuse in United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations, an issue that is of significant concern for women, peace, and security (WPS) advocates. The volume of resolutions and policy literature on WPS would suggest that UNSCR 1325 and the follow-up UNSCRs have become central to the mandate of the Security Council. Yet there is a paucity of financial resources to pay for implementation of the resolutions; this has been described as “perhaps the most serious and persistent obstacle … over the past 15 years” (UN Women 2015, 372).

Although there is evidence that negative advertising “works” at least some of the time, it has been suggested that going negative poses a special risk for female candidates because it violates expectations about appropriate behavior that are rooted in the traditional gender stereotypes still held by many voters. In this paper, we employ data from a survey experiment to examine gender differences in the effectiveness of one particular attack made by a challenger against an incumbent of the opposite sex in a hypothetical race for the U.S. House of Representatives. Our interest is not limited to the attack itself, however, but extends to the question of how candidates should respond when they are attacked and whether certain types of responses/rebuttals (including counterattacks) work better for men than they do for women, and vice versa, in terms of mitigating the damage inflicted by an initially successful negative ad. Overall, we find little support for the idea that the effectiveness of either attack or response (denial, counterattack, counterimaging, justification, accusing one's opponent of mudslinging) varies significantly according to candidate gender. Further, shared partisanship matters more than shared gender in shaping how voters react to the campaign messages of male and female candidates.

One question at the heart of the analysis of gender and politics is whether women and men act and speak in different ways to significant political effect. In terms of political representation, this issue is particularly important. Arguments for increasing the number of women representatives in parliament, for example, are not about an abstract numerical parity, but rest on a claim about the distinctive voice and experience that women bring to political debate and decisions. For some, the difference turns on the view that women bring a more empathetic and less adversarial style to politics. A number of feminist scholars have suggested that the quality of deliberation is correlated with the presence of women in a group—for Mansbridge (1996, 123), for example, the process of persuasion is related to a consultative and participatory style that seems to characterize women more than men. For others, arguments for increasing the number of women representatives in parliament turn on a difference of values. Such views were particularly widespread in the 1980s, when psychological and social theories of gender differences claimed to have found evidence of parallel but different moral reasoning in women and men (Gilligan 1982; Ruddick 1989; Tronto 1993). Gilligan (1982, 57), among others, advanced in her seminal work, In a Different Voice, that female politicians are more likely to espouse an “ethic of care” concerned with responsibility and interpersonal relationships, while men are, by contrast, prone to embrace an “ethic of justice.”

In many countries, compulsory sterilization is still a precondition for amending juridical sex. Drawing on feminist and queer debates on the entanglement of recognition with governmentalization, this article moves beyond a human rights frame to examine how struggles for legal gender recognition are bound up with the production and discipline of trans subjectivities, bodies, and relationships. It argues that rights and recognition may not only reinscribe regulation, but also they are a means of rendering trans subjects governable. By theorizing gender identity as a biopolitical discourse that produces trans subjects, the article genealogically examines the problematization of “gender identity” in Finnish welfare population governance practices leading up to the 2003 Finnish gender recognition law. The analysis demonstrates how the discourse of “equality” was key for producing a clearly defined trans population that could be identified, assessed, and, hence, governed. While the sterilization requirement was justified as a replacement for former castration laws which had been used by male-to-female transsexuals to access genital surgery, it also acted as a disciplinary technology to neutralize the alleged threats to normative forms of kinship that could be produced through gender recognition. Finally, the article considers points of resistance and avenues for further research.

The question of whether or not we still need a women's movement is legitimate and important, but it usually presumes a conflation of women with feminist. Certainly, significant gains in women's rights and status are due to decades of feminist activism, but feminists have not been the only ones advocating on behalf of women. Indeed, as long as there have been feminist women's movements, there have been conservative women contesting them. The increase in the number of conservative women running for office and the growth of a conservative women's movement prompts further questions about identity and representation, women's interests, and the future of feminism itself.

Domestic violence is the predominant form of violence against women in most countries in Africa and Latin America. Scholars have theorized the adoption of domestic violence laws and policies in both regions. However, policy implementation is understudied and under theorized. Therefore, we compare how international organizations and women's nongovernmental organizations have influenced the implementation of domestic violence policies by police officers in Liberia and Nicaragua. We introduce the concept of the transnational implementation process and describe how international organizations and women's organizations have employed training, institutional and policy restructuring, and monitoring to influence police behavior at the street level. The effects of these strategies have been conditional on the political environment. We identify two patterns of international and domestic influence on street-level implementation: internationally led and domestically supported implementation in Liberia, with domestically led and internationally supported implementation in Nicaragua.

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, freedom was the dominant term used to describe the United States in national political discourse. It was articulated as sovereign power, unencumbered agency, and military triumph. “Freedom” eventually animated global violence, becoming a justification for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as for substantial increases in state surveillance. A significant body of feminist scholarship has interrogated the discourse of post-9/11 freedom, examining how the call to “free the women of Afghanistan and Iraq” legitimated the push for war (Bhattacharrya 2008; Marso 2007; Mohanty 2008). For these scholars, “freedom” transformed feminist concerns into tools of militarism and imperialism, while worsening living conditions of women across the globe. In this essay, I also examine the discourse of post-9/11 freedom from a feminist perspective, but I ask a different question: How can feminist political theory critique the discourse of American freedom and challenge its trajectory of sovereign and violent state power? In other words, I examine the discourse of Americans upholding their own freedom, rather than their quest to free others, and insist that feminist theoretical arguments are directly relevant to post-9/11 problematics.

In the Concept of Representation, Hanna Pitkin (1967) argues that legislators should be judged by their actions—substantive representation—and not just their closeness in characteristics to their constituents—descriptive representation. Pitkin's theoretical framework is the standard that political representation scholars use when evaluating whether the presence of women or racial and ethnic minorities in legislatures results in greater responsiveness to female or minority interests. Do female legislators better represent the interests of women in U.S. congressional committee hearings on domestic violence than male legislators? Are minority legislators more active in advocating for minority interests than white legislators in hearings relating to racial profiling? Although Pitkin is skeptical that descriptive representatives alone improve legislators' responsiveness to the interests of constituents that they descriptively represent, extensive normative and empirical analyses focusing on race and gender have demonstrated that it is not a question of whether descriptive representation matters, but rather when and how it matters to improving substantive representation (see, for example, Bratton 2005; Canon 1999; Casellas 2011; Gamble 2007; Gay 2001; Grose 2011; Haynie 2001; Lublin 1997; Mansbridge 1999; Tate 2003; Thomas 1994; Whitby 1997).

In representative democracies, political parties organize the public will, giving expression to political differences in society (see Katz and Mair 1995; Klingemann, Hofferbert, and Budge 1994; Sartori 1967). Parties can also deepen democracy by broadening the connections between representatives and constituents, helping to hold political institutions accountable and increasing the participation of previously marginalized groups (see Costain 2005; Kitschelt 1993; Shugart 1994; Kittilson and Tate 2005; Young 2000).

The election of Michelle Bachelet as president of Chile on January 15, 2006, was an historical milestone for women and gender equity, both in her own country and for Latin America in general, where women have made significant gains in terms of parliamentary representation but continue to confront great difficulties in being elected as heads of state. Bachelet's election as the first female president was astonishing and surprising in many respects. In contrast to the experiences of other societies where women have been competing for high-ranking offices for quite some time (see Holli in this issue), Bachelet was only the second woman ever to run for president in Chile, following Gladys Marin, a longtime Communist Party leader who ran for president in the 1999 election and won less than 4% of the vote.

The literature on gender and political action comes in two forms—one that is aggregate, sometimes institutional, and often centered historically, and one that is individual and largely focused on the here and now. We care about both, of course—about the social organization and deployment of gender and about what gender means in individual lives. In this essay, I argue that we should encourage these two kinds of analysis to engage each other more intimately. This engagement would give political scientists the tools to say more about when, for whom, and for which outcomes gender matters. The conversation would give us better ways to understand how context makes gender relevant.Kate Gallagher provided incredibly thoughtful research assistance for this essay. Support for her work was provided by the Center for Political Studies at Michigan and by the Miller Professorship. I want to thank Jane Junn for a fabulous conversation about how to improve the essay. Lisa Baldez, Karen Beckwith, and Christina Wolbrecht provided important, critical feedback. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences gave me the space in my life—and the amazing library staff—to finish the essay. Of course, all of the mistakes and omissions are mine.

International relations (IR) feminists have significantly impacted the way we analyze the world and power. However, as Cynthia Enloe points out, “there are now signs—worrisome signs—that feminist analysts of international politics might be forgetting what they have shared” and are “making bricks to construct new intellectual barriers. That is not progress” (2015, 436). I agree. The project/process that has led to the separation/specialization of feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist global political economy (FGPE) does not constitute progress but instead ends up embodying forms of violence that erase the materialist bases of our intellectual labor's divisions (Agathangelou 1997), the historical and social constitution of our formations as intellectuals and subjects. This amnesiac approach evades our personal lives and colludes with those forces that allow for the violence that comes with abstraction. These “worrisome signs” should be explained if we are to move FSS and FGPE beyond a “merger” (Allison 2015) that speaks only to some issues and some humans in the global theater.

A rural poor woman wants to withdraw from the microcredit scheme, but her husband slaps her when she even suggests not renewing her loan.

When the 113th Congress convened in January 2013, women occupied only 17.9% of the 435 seats in the U.S. House, ranking the United States 80th globally in terms of the percentage of women serving in the lower legislative assembly. The underrepresentation of women is particularly puzzling, as political scientists since the 1990s have consistently shown that women candidates are not of demonstrably less quality than men on average (see Fulton 2012, 2014; Fulton et al. 2006; Lawless and Fox 2010), do not suffer from a gender-related funding disadvantage (Berch 1996; Burrell 2008; Gaddie and Bullock 1995; Fox 2010; Herrick 1995, 1996), and do about as well as men at the polls, accounting for differences in incumbency status (Fox 2010; Smith and Fox 2001).

In the past several decades, many scholars of public opinion in the United States have argued that American women are less likely than American men to endorse military action as a means to deal with international problems. Evidence for this “gender gap” has been found in studies of public opinion during major international conflicts (Bendyna et al. 1996; Wilcox, Ferrara, and Allsop 1993), as well as studies of longitudinal trends that examined pooled data sets from multiple conflict periods (Berinsky 2009; Burris 2008; Fite, Genest, and Wilcox 1990; Shapiro and Mahajan 1986). Researchers sometimes view men's generally greater rates of support for military actions as part of a more general “gender gap” phenomenon in U.S. politics, but the cumulative evidence has suggested that foreign policy issues and questions of peace/war generate the widest and most consistent gender gaps (see Holsti 2004, 209–10 for a review).

Imagine this: a court presided over by a majority of women judges—many of whom are from racially marginalized backgrounds—and which has a “constitution” that has gender justice at its core. Incredibly, given what we know about gender and judging cross-nationally, this is not some utopian vision but the current reality at the International Criminal Court (ICC). As of May 2010, the 18 member ICC bench consisted of 11 women judges, most of whom were from outside the West and many of whom have expertise in gender-based violence. This development raises a range of important questions, two of which I want to speculate on in the following discussion: How is it that the sex profile of the ICC bench differs so dramatically from domestic-level courts? What difference might this profile make to the transformation of international law in terms of expanding gender justice principles?