In this study, an examination of the legal treatment of “crimes of passion” points to important gendered aspects of the construction of both reason and passion in the law. In crimes of passion, criminal responsibility is mitigated because the perpetrator was in the grip of a strong emotion – in other words, not in his or her right mind. The legal concept of passion is, therefore, society's formal recognition of the limits of reason as a basis for social behavior.

Feminist scholarship has long argued that reason in law is not neutral but reflects dominant social interests. Less attention has been given to passion as reason's recognized opposite. It might be expected that the law's partial toleration of passion would privilege different interests. But this is not the case; in effect, although passion is reason's opposite, its construction in law reflects the same dominant values. Recent efforts to eradicate gender disparities in criminal law have led to some reconsideration of the construction of reason and the recognition of passion in some systems.

The final round of Peru's 2011 presidential campaign featured two dramatically different candidates. Ollanta Humala was a leftist nationalist who sought to increase redistribution to the poorest and most marginalized. Keiko Fujmori was a right-wing proponent of the free market and the torchbearer of her father's presidential legacy of overcoming economic crisis and terrorism in the 1990s. According to the extant scholarship on the relationship between left parties and gender equality, we should have expected the leftist candidate to support gender equality policies more strongly.

Maciej Górecki provides a detailed and interesting discussion of our analysis regarding women's electoral success in the Polish open-list proportional representation (PR) system and the impact of a gender quota implemented in 2011. In essence, he claims that it remains an open question whether the gender quota had a ‘paradoxical’ effect (i.e., whether the introduction of the gender quota had a negative impact on female candidates) due to ‘debatable’ methodological choices in our analysis. In this article, we respond to Górecki's critique. First, we demonstrate that we do not necessarily disagree on the paradoxical impact of the gender quota but rather on the strength of the paradoxical effect. Second, we discuss some drawbacks of using the raw number of votes cast for a candidate as the dependent variable. Finally, we respond to the critique of including the ballot position in the regression model. We emphasize that even if one agrees with Górecki's critique that the ballot position is endogenous, excluding this variable leads to a severely misspecified model that does not allow one to reliably identify the effect of gender.

There is a growing body of work examining gender stereotypes in media representations of female candidates, but much of this literature is based on analysis of media sources in developed countries, including the United States (Braden 1996; Jalalzai 2006; Kahn 1994, 1996; Smith 1997), Australia (Kittilson and Fridkin 2008), Canada (Kittilson and Fridkin 2008), France (Murray 2010b), and Germany (Wiliarty 2010). The increase in female presidential candidates and presidents in Latin America has encouraged research on media portrayals of women in Argentina, Chile, and Venezuela (Franceschet and Thomas 2010; Hinojosa 2010; Piscopo 2010; Thomas and Adams 2010). To date, however, there has been little research exploring media representations of female politicians in Africa. (Exceptions include Adams 2010; Anderson, Diabah, and hMensah 2011). A question that emerges is whether the gender stereotypes common in coverage in the United States, Europe, and Latin America are also prevalent in Africa.

Women's representation by elected women is a major research arena for scholars of women and politics. Comparativists and U.S. politics scholars, as well as feminist theorists, have given extensive attention to the question of whether or not women's political presence in legislatures is necessary for advancing policies favorable to women. Recent research and theorizing have sought to identify the conditions under which women-friendly policy might be advanced and the explanatory links between women's parliamentary presence and public policy outcomes. A key potential explanatory model has been partially constructed on the concept of “critical mass”: a threshold number (or percentage) of women in a legislature necessary for transforming the legislative context from one in which women-friendly policy is unlikely to one in which the opportunities for women's policy success are increased. If, as Mansbridge asserts, women's descriptive representation improves women's substantive representation, do increasing numbers of women in legislatures result in more and better public policy for women? Is there a critical mass of elected women that, once achieved, accelerates their policymaking opportunities? If so, what mechanisms explain such a transformation? Should activist women target a specific critical mass as a political strategy for advancing favorable legislation? The following four critical essays address these questions, taking in their different ways a critical perspective on the concept of critical mass.

Much of the scholarship on the modern Civil Rights Movement (CRM) has recaptured dramatic and poignant events through eyewitness accounts and oral narratives—from letters, speeches, newspaper editorials, press releases, photographs, and documentary films that summon vivid images of fire hoses and police dogs, peaceful protestors, and violent rioters (McAdam 1982; Morris 1984; Payne 1994; Robnett 1997; Williams 1988). The conventional approach to (or master narrative of) civil rights history has focused almost exclusively on extraordinary, elite men from W.E.B. DuBois to Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall to such notable civil rights organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—that led the fight for equal protection under the law, desegregated lunch counters, and the right to vote in local and national elections (Branch 1988, 1998, 2006; Carson 1981; Fairclough 1987; Garrow 1986; Lewis 1993; Reed 1997; Sullivan 2009). Rather than broaden and deepen our understanding of individual and collective forms of resistance, however, such an approach simplifies and distorts a more nuanced and complicated version of civil rights history in the United States. All too often people come to associate the modern CRM with celebrated heroes and a static, fixed understanding of discrimination that is less than critical of hierarchal relationships determined solely (or primarily) by a racial caste system—specifically, an era of Jim Crow when “separate but equal” accommodations were legally sanctioned by the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Far less common is an association of the modern CRM with a richer, more nuanced understanding of discrimination that is critical of hierarchal relationships determined by interlocking systems of oppression—namely, racism and sexism—experienced by forgotten heroines who similarly risked their lives and reputations for equality and justice before the law (notable exceptions being Collier-Thomas and Franklin 2001; Giddings 1984; Gilmore 1996; Ling and Monteith 2004; Olson 2001; Robnett 1997).

Women have organized around their gendered identity to accomplish political goals both inside and outside legislatures. Formal and informal institutional norms shape the form this collective action takes and whether it is successful. What, then, are the favorable conditions for organizing women's caucuses inside legislatures? Using an original dataset and employing an event history analysis, we identify the institutional conditions under which women's caucuses emerged in the 50 US states from 1972 to 2009. Within a feminist institutional framework, we argue that women's ability to alter existing organizational structures and potentially affect gender norms within legislatures is contextual. Although we find that women's presence in conjunction with Democratic Party control partially explains women's ability to act collectively and in a bipartisan way within legislatures, our analysis suggests that institutional-level variables are not enough to untangle this complicated phenomenon. Our work explains how gender and party interact to shape legislative behavior and clarifies the intractability of institutional norms while compelling further qualitative evidence to uncover the best conditions for women's collective action within legislatures.

Leading up to the 2016 election, single women were heralded as the “hot” new constituency. With unmarried women posed to comprise approximately half of the population of adult women and 23% of the electorate (Traister 2016), pundits claimed that the rising number of single women could transform American politics. Building on this recent enthusiasm about single women, this study provides one of the first systematic analyses of how contemporary women's organizations represent single women by analyzing 1,021 comments that women's organizations submitted to rule makers between 2007 and 2013. Using automated text analyses and a series of statistical analyses, it shows that despite the rising numbers of American single women, women's organizations only very rarely explicitly refer to single women during their comment writing campaigns, preferring to highlight the experiences of married mothers instead. Moreover, it shows that the political context unexpectedly has little to no effect on the degree to which women's organizations focus on single women, possibly because they so rarely mention them at all. Altogether, the results suggest that for single women to become politically powerful, they will need more than just large numbers; they may also need niche organizations that can help them organize and articulate their broader policy needs.

In America, the arguments for same-sex marriage are articulated primarily in the language of liberalism: justice, rights, and equality. Activists in the public square appeal to rational and intuitive, or at least culturally relevant, notions of justice and fairness. In countering such a defense of same-sex marriage, feminists may feel compelled to rearticulate fundamental concerns about how gender normativity of marriage oppresses women. Marriage, feminists are certain, has never been a good thing, economically or politically, for women.

This article analyzes the implementation of gender mainstreaming at the local level in Sweden by investigating implementation gaps in the operations of two municipalities, Eskilstuna and Jönköping. The study draws on the literature on policy implementation, particularly the dimensions of comprehension, capacity, and will, as well as the feminist institutional literature on resistance. The data are based on a micro-study of the implementation of gender mainstreaming in two model municipalities, comprising interviews with key actors and a document study. The study shows that the key obstacles to the implementation of gender mainstreaming are complacency—that is, the perception that work on gender mainstreaming is satisfactory and that no extra attention to the matter is needed—and the congestion of perspectives—the fact that the gender equality perspective must compete with other relevant perspectives, a process in which gender equality is often the loser. Another obstacle is lack of political will. However, lack of political will, even in model municipalities, may be compensated for by solid systems of governance. The study contributes to research on implementation theory and feminist institutionalism by demonstrating the gendered barriers and obstacles to affecting change, even in best-case scenarios.

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.

October 3, 2005, marks a dozen years since Argentina started the quota ball rolling via the first use of gender quota legislation applying to all parties for the election of national legislators. For the October 3, 1993, Argentine Chamber of Deputies election, all political parties were required to present closed party lists on which women accounted for a minimum of 30% of the candidates, and furthermore, a comparable proportion of these women had to be placed in “electable” positions on the lists (Jones 1996). Although the initial implementation process was not free of problems (Durrieu 1999), in a short time the gender quota became an established fixture of the Argentine political system. The impact of the quota legislation on the representation of women in the Argentine congress was nothing short of dramatic, with women now accounting for 34% and 44% of the seats in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies and Senate, respectively, a marked contrast to the situation prior to the adoption of the quota legislation, when women on average held a mere 5% of the seats in both legislative bodies.

In 2019, visible, “rapid onset” climate-related disasters displaced roughly 24.9 million people, with more than 143 million anticipated to be internally displaced by 2050 in Latin America, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa (Kaczan and Orgill-Meyer 2020). Not only can climate change induce migration, but, I argue, climate shocks—which I define as discrete, unanticipated destruction due to weather such as floods, drought, or windstorms—can also destabilize gendered social systems. Climate shocks can initiate political transformations that open new space for women in representative politics. Additionally, they can compel women to mobilize—as representatives and their supporters—to redirect local and national political agendas to respond to the vulnerabilities exposed by climate shocks.

The interaction of the legislative and executive is gendered in nature. Gender shapes what actors in these two institutions demand from each other. This pattern is visible, for instance, in the distinct policy priorities of women and men in parliament (e.g., Allen and Childs 2019; Bäck and Debus 2019; Lowande, Ritchie, and Lauterbach 2019) and in the ways that women engage and oversee related government initiatives. At the same time, gender influences the strengths and weaknesses that actors in the legislature and executive ascribe to each other and, hence, their mutual assessment. Members of parliament (MPs) and party gatekeepers, for instance, tend to favor men for the most influential and well-resourced portfolios, since they believe that masculine traits are necessary or suitable to succeed in governmental positions, and membership in men-dominated political networks remains an important route to qualify for ministerial office (see, e.g., Annesley, Beckwith, and Franceschet 2019; Krook and O’Brien 2012). Change in these dynamics is scarce or occurs only gradually, meaning that the ways in which executive-legislative interactions are gendered are usually stable.

Women’s access to political leadership positions has increased greatly in recent decades, which calls for research concerning the conditions of women’s political leadership in more gender-balanced contexts. This article responds to this need by exploring the leadership ideals, evaluations, and treatment of men and women leaders in the numerically gender-equal Swedish parliament (the Riksdag). Drawing on interviews with almost all the current top political leaders in the Swedish parliament, along with an original survey of Swedish members of parliament, we reveal a mainly feminine-coded parliamentary leadership ideal that should be more appropriate for women leaders. Masculine practices remain, however, and women leaders continue to be disadvantaged. To explain this anomaly between ideals and practices, we argue that a feminist institutionalist perspective, which emphasizes how gender shapes a given context in multiple ways, contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the conditions for women’s political leadership than that provided by the widely employed role congruity theory.

Feminists protesting gender-based violence and state violence have been instrumental to contesting the status quo and the shifting discourses, modes of organizing, and registers of protest in Senegal. Some 40 years after the emergence of Yewwu Yewwi, a major feminist movement, Senegalese feminists have returned to radical feminist organizing, despite increasing anti-gender backlash. In this essay, I draw on interviews with feminist activists and politicians between 2013 and 2022 to analyze the March 2021 protests in Senegal in light of previous protests. I argue that the intertwined dynamics of class, gender, and generation are critical to understanding the protests. I do this following the example of some feminist academics who have used intersectionality as a method, theory, and research agenda (Collins and Bilge 2016; Mohammed 2022). Innovations in protest strategies have allowed activists to overcome generational and ideological divides between feminist and women’s rights organizations, as well as within feminist movements, and to resist strategic alliances between patriarchal and political powers.