Sally Kenney's essay reminds us of the range and the limitations of our scholarship on gender and judging. At one point in her discussion, after reviewing the views of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O'Connor discounting the role of gender in their own decision making, Kenney says this:

The institution of the family has changed, but U.S. public institutions and policies generally have not kept pace. In response, a number of feminist theorists have argued that we should recognize and support more diverse family forms. They argue that equality, respect for personal autonomy, recognition of diversity, and facilitating relationships of care demand such a move. Building on their work, I explicitly situate the necessity of redefining “family” within a public ethic of care and offer a comprehensive working definition of family that focuses on recognizing relationships that combine intimacy and care. In so doing, I address how to handle biological ties without excluding or marginalizing other bases upon which people form families.The author would like to thank the following individuals for sharing their expertise and comments on earlier versions of this manuscript: Eileen Botting, Fred Dallmayr, Daniel Engster, Neve Gordon, Jyl Josephson, Michael Kirsch, Victor Levy, Hugh Wilson, Christina Wolbrecht, Catherine Zuckert, the editors of Politics & Gender, and the anonymous reviewers. An earlier draft of this piece was presented in Chicago at the 2002 National Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association.

I offer a reading Sara Ruddick's account of feminist solidarity as grounded in her reconceptualization of “work” in order to suggest that she provides a framework for transnational feminist solidarity that offers an important augmentation to other contemporary theories of transnational feminist solidarity. Feminist solidarity, according to Ruddick, forms through struggles to work. But what she means by work has not been fully appreciated in the literature on Ruddick. Scholars who focus solely on maternal thinking or even the work of mothering obscure the fact that such work is just her prime example of the reconceptualized notion of work she develops. I unpack her notion of work and show how it functions in a theoretical account of transnational feminist solidarity and feminist resistance movements.

Challenging Parties, Changing Parliaments: Women and Elected Office in Contemporary Western Europe. By Miki Caul Kittilson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2006. 190 pp. $64.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This is an ambitious book that takes a comprehensive and multimethod approach to understanding the question of women's participation in parliaments. Miki Caul Kittilson proposes a gendered-institutions argument that focuses on political parties as the key mechanism for increases in women's parliamentary representation. She moves away from supply arguments that place the onus on women to run by instead focusing on how parties can be transformed to encourage women to run. She argues that women will be most effective in their efforts to gain a political foothold where they “recognize favorable conditions within the party and party system, and where they devise context-contingent strategies for inclusion” (p. 2).

Women were at the forefront of the popular uprising that overthrew Sudan’s dictator, Omar al-Bashir, in 2019 (Al-Nagar and Tønnessen 2021). In the aftermath of the uprising, different forms of feminist mobilization emerged. Based on interviews conducted in Sudan in early 2022, we argue that this feminist mobilization was sparked by the backlash facing women during and after what is popularly known as the “December revolution.”1

Moral rhetoric presents a strategic dilemma for female politicians, who must navigate stereotypes while appealing to copartisan voters. In this article, we investigate how gender shapes elite moral rhetoric given the influence of partisanship, ideology, gender stereotypes, and moral psychology. Drawing on moral foundations theory, we examine how female and male representatives differ in their emphasis on the five foundations of care, fairness, authority, loyalty, and purity. Using the Moral Foundations Dictionary, we analyze a corpus of 2.23 million tweets by U.S. Congress members between 2013 and 2021. We find that female representatives are more likely to emphasize care and less likely to emphasize authority and loyalty than their male peers. However, when subsetting by party, we find that gender effects are most pronounced among Democrats and largely negligible among Republicans. These findings offer insight into the rhetorical dynamics of political leadership at the intersection of gender and partisan identities.

Does information about the way victims of gender-based violence (GBV) are treated by the police influence evaluations of government policies to combat gender-based violence? I theorize that because most citizens have incomplete information about such policies, information about procedural fairness should be given more weight when forming evaluations of the government’s performance in this domain. Using original experiments embedded in public opinion surveys collected from Brazil, I find that information about procedural unfairness powerfully predicts more critical evaluations of GBV laws and the government’s performance in helping victims. In addition, these critical opinions influence bystander intervention attitudes. Mediation analysis confirms that views of procedural unfairness are critical in explaining these effects. The implications of the findings for the implementation of specialized services are discussed in the results and conclusion.

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.

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.

Women who ran for office in 2018 used a variety of strategies on the campaign trail, with some highlighting more masculine traits and others more feminine traits, but the latter was more common than in prior years. We ask how effective these strategies are for trait evaluations, perceptions of leadership and competence, likeability, and vote choice and how this effect varies based on respondent’s views about the role of women in society. To explore these relationships, we use data from a two-wave panel conducted in the winter of 2019. Results from our experiment show that female candidates who highlight more masculine traits are perceived as more agentic, less communal, and more competent, and, importantly, they do not appear to suffer from a backlash effect. Those higher in sexism also evaluate women who display these qualities as more competent, though as less warm and likable.

Under what conditions are voters likely to invoke gender-trait stereotypes and ethnic biases when they evaluate the performance of local political leaders? We test arguments from role congruity and social identity theories and employ intersectional analysis to explore voter reliance on gender-trait stereotypes and ethnic biases across four diverse Russian regions. We find that the structure of the regional economy matters for the reduction of gender-trait stereotypes, while spatial and labor market integration matters for the dissipation of ethnic favoritism in leader evaluation. Our findings have important implications for policy makers aiming to reduce political biases in diverse contexts. On the one hand, we encourage scholars to pay careful attention to stereotypes of underrepresented social groups and evaluate how they can translate into understanding the traits associated with good leadership. On the other hand, we demonstrate that the roots of social biases stem from complex structural phenomena, such as limited labor opportunities for women and minorities, and thus require transformative political and economic changes.

In 1990, the same year Iris Marion Young published Justice and the Politics of Difference, she also published a volume of essays called Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. The title essay in this volume, along with several others in the same volume, explores a range of women's embodied and sentient experiences, using a style of phenomenology explicitly indebted to the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Given the predominance of men among elites, it is remarkable how little scholarship there is on the challenges of qualitative empirical work on elite men, especially work that interrogates the intersection of gender and class. We have both sought to include elite men as subjects, noting that the gender of our subjects, their social power, and our own gender performance have played a central role in defining our efficacy as researchers. Darren has researched top French corporate boards (e.g., Rosenblum and Roithmayr 2015). Janet has researched male dominance in the politics of Iceland and Russia (e.g., Johnson 2016; Johnson, Einarsdóttir, and Pétursdóttir 2013). This essay elaborates the challenges in researching elite men and explores the tactics we developed in response to the dynamic gender performances in the interviews, bringing Darren's insights as a legal scholar looking at economic elites to questions about male overrepresentation in politics.