This study, which is based on a survey of women's organizations’ staff members, answers two previously unexamined questions about women's groups’ participation in the rulemaking process: (1) How do women's organizations participate? (2) What are the characteristics of the women's organizations that are the most likely to participate? About one-quarter (27%) of women's organizations reported that they lobby rulemakers, often using relatively low-cost methods, such as submitting comments or signing on to comments written by coalitions or like-minded groups. Women's organizations with large staffs that are structured the most like political insiders or influential economic interest groups were the most likely to participate in the process, potentially biasing participation in favor of relatively advantaged subgroups of women. Together, these results suggest that although rulemaking presents unique opportunities to represent women, the most marginalized women may be underrepresented during rulemaking debates.

This article advances and tests an original theory of a “feminine homestyle” to explain how female legislators develop relationships with constituents that both mitigate the potential for gendered biases and fulfill the communal goals that motivate women to run for political office. We use an original audit study that tests legislator responsiveness to direct email communication. We show that female lawmakers are more responsive to constituent communication and more likely to display compassion and empathy in responses compared with male legislators; but we also find important differences in women’s responsiveness across the race and ethnicity. Further, we find that responsive female lawmakers can change the behaviors of their male counterparts by creating stronger norms of responsiveness within legislative institutions. Our findings have important downstream implications for democratic accountability among voters and illustrate how female lawmakers substantively represent through direct communication with constituents.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states have increased their promotion of women in public life. The expansion of women's rights in these states functions as a central policy tool to stimulate modernization processes. This article investigates how the Gulf governments steer women's empowerment through the press. Regulated by the state, media outlets in GCC countries primarily serve to affirm and amplify the legitimacy of the government. Focusing on 15 English-language newspapers from 2008 to 2017, this article analyzes the degree to which women's empowerment in various arenas of society was addressed and the valence with which it was reported. Moreover, it analyzes whether foreign and domestic news were addressed differently. The article finds that once nondemocracies focus on women's rights, positive media portrayals, especially of domestic news, become central for legitimizing both women's empowerment and the regime. The article contributes to the growing literature on women's rights legislation and the state-media nexus in autocracies.

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.

In “Gender in the Aggregate, Gender in the Individual, Gender and Political Action,” Nancy Burns makes the compelling argument to integrate individual- and aggregate-level perspectives in the study of gendered political action. She issues a call for action for the two to assess similarities and differences in approaches, identify unique contributions and weaknesses, and move forward to better understand gender and political action. Beyond this general goal is an ambitious effort to build a theory of politicized context around gender in order to stake out a position for political science to contribute to our understanding of women in action. In this regard, her ambitions are to identify mechanisms that work to strengthen normative goals of enhancing equality and dignity in women's lives, and in politics more generally.For helpful comments, I thank Nadia Brown, Sue Carroll, Mary Hawkesworth, Hannah Holden, Anna Mitchell, Kira Sanbonmatsu, participants at the conference on Political Women and American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame in May 2006, and the editors of Politics & Gender.

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.

Clear conceptualization should be at the core of every comparative study. Gender scholars have a long history of challenging the public/private divide in conventional notions of the political and laying bare the gendered or androcentric character of established concepts such as welfare states (Sainsbury 2008), war (Goldstein 2001), work (Spierings 2015), or democracy (Paxton 2008; Walby 2009). This criticism often focuses on descriptive and normative meanings (see Goertz 2006, 3). It is descriptive where concepts seek to describe units of analysis such as countries and their levels of democracy and normative because the criticism shows how concepts legitimize androcentric practices. Comparative scholars, however, tend to go one step beyond descriptive comparisons; we seek to explain cross-national variation—for example, why certain countries are democratic, why certain welfare state policies are implemented, or why war occurs. This relates to the relatively new notions of “causal concepts” (Goertz 2006) and the “causal relationship guideline” (Goertz and Mazur 2008).

Dominant psychoanalytic paradigms locate the breast or penis/phallus as the touchstone for gender/sex/sexual development. This essay offers a critique of these accounts and an alternative theory of sexed forms of being: pregnancy envy and the kinship rules that result from this. The essay also provides an intellectual history of how previous efforts to theorize pregnancy envy, especially work by Ida Macalpine, were suppressed.This article has benefited from audiences at the Yale University Feminist Lesbian and Gay Workshop, the City University Lesbian and Gay Studies Workshop, and the University of Southern California Center on Feminist Research, as well as from comments by Marianne Constable, Lisa Ellis, Laura Green, James Martel, Hanna Pitkin, and Michael Rogin. Many thanks especially to the reviewers and editors for their extremely helpful suggestions, including the reference to Bruno Bettelheim (1962).

That issues related to migration and global householding are finally being taken seriously by mainstream development institutions is clear from the focus of the United Nation's 2009 Human Development Report. Subtitled Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development, it is the first major intergovernmental organization publication to view transnational mobility as integral to human development. The report makes a strong case for recognizing that the impact of migration in relation to development aims is significant for both sending and receiving countries. As the report states repeatedly, the old nation-centered growth and antipoverty frameworks and policies no longer fit when migrants work in one country yet send remittances that reduce poverty and promote human development in another country. Similarly, global householding—the reconfiguration of household and family arrangements as people move across national boundaries—necessitates new frameworks for understanding human livelihood strategies at the micro level. In addition to making the case for taking transnational mobility seriously in development policy, the report offers a set of recommendations that are centered on migration management, regularization, and liberalization policies, such as bilateral temporary workers' agreements that allow nations to enhance growth and competitiveness while simultaneously securing their borders.

Past research has identified several factors that help explain what happened to civic engagement after World War II, but it has not adequately explained how these factors mattered to particular groups of citizens defined by gender, race, or class. This essay reexamines the dominant account of postwar civic decline by highlighting the relational nature of political change and the processes through which social groups transform. It explores the development of three women's associations: the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC), National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC), and Woman's Division of Christian Service (WDCS) (predecessor of the United Methodist Women). A variety of postwar changes—in the realities of women's lives, the appearance of new social movement organizations, and the formation of the United Nations, for example—pressured the GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS to adopt new organizational methods that blurred civic–political distinctions. Postwar women's associations experimented with the structures, strategies, and identities now common to modern-day interest groups, providing a critical foundation for a new politics of gender that would emerge in the 1960s. If these reinvented and ascendant organizations were more attuned to emerging political opportunities, however, they also translated into less active and less inclusive forms of participation.The author would like to thank Kristi Andersen, Elisabeth Clemens, McGee Young, Kathleen Laughlin, and the editors and anonymous reviewers from Politics & Gender for their thoughtful contributions to this manuscript. Draft sections of this essay were presented at 2004 annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, the Journal of Policy History, and the Social Science History Association.

The late Jean Bethke Elshtain was a difficult feminist, a public intellectual and scholar who drew on feminist thinking but interpreted or applied it so idiosyncratically that many feminists disavowed her. Elshtain's early works encapsulated the best hopes of 1980s' feminists to bring women and gender to the fore across many academic fields. She was influential in political theory, religious studies, and feminist analysis, and she was one of the leading lights of feminist international relations (IR) well into the 1990s. Yet she was moving in other directions and would let it be known that she disapproved of gay marriage and endorsed George W. Bush's war in Iraq as just. These positions were anathema to most western feminists, and Jean Bethke Elshtain slid down the feminist reputational ladder from pinnacle to the point where she was almost persona non grata, deemed an imperialist traitor to feminist causes. She did not draw back or go quiet under attack: to the last public address she gave shortly before her death, Elshtain was on the road defending her controversial political viewpoints openly and forcefully. Let it not be said that the difficult feminist is shy.

Underlying almost every conversation about descriptive representation are questions about whether gender does and should always matter in politics. More specifically, those conversations rest on assumptions about whether political scientists should always evaluate the performance of political actors based on their membership in historically disadvantaged groups. How one answers that question can be problematic: A “yes” suggests that democratic citizens should evaluate the performance of members of historically disadvantaged groups using criteria (burdens?) beyond those used to evaluate members of privileged groups. A “ no ” seems to challenge the theoretical arguments for why the presence of historically disadvantaged groups is necessary. Admitting that not every woman in politics is a preferable descriptive representative for women seems to implicitly support having more men in politics and, thereby, the preferences that perpetuate male dominance in politics. Faced with such a quagmire of competing assumptions, those who study descriptive representation must balance concerns about essentializing women on one hand and reinforcing male dominance in politics on the other hand.

When a party selects an out lesbian as its leader, do women and LGBT people evaluate that leader more positively? And do they become more likely to vote for that party? We answer these questions using the case of Kathleen Wynne, premier of Ontario, Canada, from 2013 to 2018. We draw on four large-sample surveys conducted by Ipsos before and after the 2011 and 2014 Ontario elections. We compare shifts in best premier choice and vote choice among non-LGBT men, non-LGBT women, LGBT men, and LGBT women from 2011 to 2014. We find gender and LGBT affinity in leader evaluations. However, we find that only non-LGBT women and LGBT men were more likely to vote Liberal after Wynne became leader. This article contributes to research on affinity by examining LGBT affinity in a real-world election and the intersection of gender and LGBT affinity.

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.

In this essay, I consider whether or not the contestatory potential of rights politics turns on replacing identity claims with universalist ones, and why one might be inclined to urge such a move from “the ontological” to “the political.” While this argument has much to commend it, as it sheds light on the constitutive dimensions of identity-based rights and their depoliticizing tendencies, I remain unconvinced that a better form of rights necessarily requires detachment from identity per se. Engaging the work of Wendy Brown, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, and Judith Butler, I argue that an understanding of rights as political claims should include an appreciation of the importance of identity and injury, for rights can function as a discourse through which identity is contested and reconfigured rather than simply reified.This article has gone through many revisions and left me with a debt to generous readers too numerous to list here. But for their direct impact on this version and ongoing enthusiasm for the project, I must thank wholeheartedly Paul Apostolidis, Sam Chambers, Michaele Ferguson, Tim Kaufman-Osborn, Jill Locke, Patchen Markell, Laurie Naranch, and the anonymous reviewers at Politics & Gender.