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

The well-known analytical distinction drawn by Nancy Fraser between social movement struggles for recognition and those for redistribution is put to the test in this collection of essays drawn from a wide array of historical and case studies. In one sense, these are empirical studies that set out to confirm or to refute the analytical utility of distinguishing between economic and cultural injustice. If that premise alone bound the collection, it would be of limited interest. In another more expansive sense, these essays treat social movements as struggles for power and voice in political contexts, struggles that take shape in an always changing political landscape. Their strategies are determined more within the exigencies of politics than by fixed identities or visions of justice. The essays take a kind of political turn away from analytical and normative concerns that drive a great deal of the literature on social movements. It is perhaps overstating it a bit, but only a bit, to say that these essays disclose the fact that both recognition and redistribution are consequences of successful social movements, rather than their starting points. To be successful, social movements must act like any other collectivity by gaining power before they can secure justice.

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.

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.

How can we understand the signing of legislation targeting violence against women in postcommunist countries where women are electorally marginalized? Although women are underrepresented in Kyrgyzstan, the country's parliament has passed bride theft and domestic violence legislation. This article proposes a theory of transactional activism: in postcommunist countries where women are electorally marginalized, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can instigate legislative change if the state satisfies three necessary conditions permitting lateral links between NGOs working on behalf of women and vertical links between these nonstate actors and critical actors in parliament. The state must (1) establish a regulatory framework for NGO activity permitting the articulation and representation of women's interests; (2) demonstrate a rhetorical commitment to improving women's lives; and (3) facilitate the election to parliament of critical actors sympathetic to women's interests. In other words, women's substantive representation can occur without strong descriptive representation in the formal legislative arena if the state satisfies these conditions.

How does gender influence the American judicial system? Scholars interested in this question have focused on several areas, including the substance of the law (Bender 1993; Olsen 1995; Rifkin 1981), the presence of women on a jury (Fowler 2005; Marder 1987; Taylor-Thompson 2000), and the sex of criminal defendants (Sarnikar, Sorenson, and Oaxaca 2007; Starr 2012). Among political scientists in particular, most work has examined judicial decision-making and whether the rulings of female judges differ from those of their male counterparts. Results of these studies have been mixed: some indicate that female judges vote differently, at least in certain types of cases (Boyd, Epstein, and Martin 2010; Peresie 2005; Songer and Crews-Meyer 2000), but others have found no, or only a minimal, gender effect (Segal 2002; Songer, Davis, and Haire 1994; Walker and Barrow 1985).

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.

Black Sexual Politics: African-Americans, Gender and the New Racism. By Patricia Hill Collins. New York: Routledge. 2004. 374 pp. $26.00.

To a large extent, scholarship on black politics often focuses primarily on institutions, rule of law, processes, political actors, and citizens but with very little attention to issues of gender and sexuality. In contrast, the principal aim of this book is to explore what the author sees as the inextricable links between racism and gender. The basic thesis of this well-written, important, and provocative book is that the fight against racism, especially the “new racism,” can never be won without first challenging sexism, which simultaneously oppresses African-American men and women.

This essay connects feminist political economy and critical/feminist transitional justice through the analysis of macroeconomic interventions in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. Previous contributions to Critical Perspectives have argued for the need to establish a dialogue and bring down divides between feminist security studies and political economy in feminist International Relations (Elias 2015; Chisolm and Stachowitsch 2017) and to look at the spaces where security and political economy intersect as a productive line of research (Sjoberg 2015). To build these connections, feminist scholars have stressed the importance of multidimensional concepts and questioned their unidimensional use whenever relevant. Security is certainly one of the concepts benefiting from a feminist critique that has opened up its meaning, with reference to its referent objects as well as its multiple dimensions (e.g., to include women's economic security alongside physical security; see Chisolm and Stachowitsch 2017; True 2015). Another concept that has been productively reframed as multidimensional by feminist scholars is violence (Bergeron, Cohn, and Duncanson 2017; Elias and Rai 2015; True 2012).

How should scholars view and relate to activism and social change? Concern over this question is neither new nor limited to political scientists. Nevertheless, because of the special relationship between our academic enterprise and the larger women's movement outside the academy, this concern is particularly acute for those of us who approach the study of politics from a feminist perspective.

Jean Elshtain appeared in my life at a fortuitous moment in the early 1980s as I ventured into unexplored academic terrain—the vexed question of what Hannah Arendt intended by engaging with Christian political thought, particularly the work of the fifth-century bishop and theologian Aurelius Augustine. She was already a notoriously maverick Jewish writer on the Holocaust. What could be made of Arendt's regard for her “old friend” Augustine? A previous discovery—the fact that she had written her dissertation on the theme of love (caritas) as the binding agent in civil society—had led me to the Library of Congress in 1983 where the original 1929 German manuscript is housed, together with the English translation Arendt had begun in New York in 1958. Neither had been published. I proposed a paper on the subject for the APSA meeting in Washington in 1984, fully expecting a negative response, given the deviation from the norm of Arendt scholarship it entailed. Instead I was contacted directly by Elshtain who let me know that she found this new aspect of Arendt's writing very significant and wanted to hear more about it on the Arendt-themed panel that she was organizing and chairing. I knew her work but had never met or corresponded with her. I was, needless to say, surprised and grateful.

Western political thought, from the classical Greek era to our own time, is notorious for its relegation of bodily and family matters to the private sphere. Contemporary feminist and critical political theorists have taken measures to counter this impulse. Yet even as these discourses acknowledge the centrality of the body, vulnerability, and relationality for social and political theory, they continue to functionally disavow giving birth as an important cultural institution in which to engage political and ethical questions.