“What does queer theory teach us about x?” ask Berlant and Warner (1995). “As difficult as it would be to spell out programmatic content for an answer, this simple question still has the power to wrench frames” (p. 348). This challenge comes from an early essay published to circumvent queer theory's appropriation. Its power “to wrench frames” is what I am posing to intersectional research, not only to reflect on what intersectionality has allowed feminists to accomplish but also to identify some existing shortcomings in the scope and domain of its employment. Because there is little disputing intersectionality's theoretical contribution to feminist research in the past decades—one scholar calls it “the most important theoretical contribution that women's studies . . . has made so far” (McCall 2005, 1771)—it is important for us to take stock of the sorts of political problems that intersectional scholarship has addressed and the ones to which it has often been inattentive.

The earliest political behavior researchers documented the powerful effects of group attachments and other socioeconomic factors on vote choice and partisan identification in the 1940s and 1950s (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954; Campbell et al. 1960). Yet, research interest in the group-based origins of political behavior has waxed and waned in the intervening decades (Huddy 2003). The existence of both an African-American and female frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 provides an opportunity to consider the contemporary electoral consequences of in-group loyalties and out-group antipathies. We take advantage of select survey and poll data collected during the 2008 Democratic primaries to evaluate the power of gender and race as both positive and negative influences on voter calculus in an election in which the two major candidates were differentiated less by their issue positions and beliefs than by their skin color and gender.

Is there a common language of gender in political science research? One might expect the answer to be no, given the wide range of ways in which scholars employ the concept of gender in empirical and theoretical research. I maintain, however, that a common language of gender does exist and that we must articulate it in explicit terms in order to advance the way we build knowledge in this field. In this contribution to “Critical Perspectives on Gender and Politics,” I suggest two ways in which to employ “gender” as part of a common language that the subfield can employ for the purposes of empirical political research: gender as a category and as a process.

This contribution to the Special Issue on Gender and Conservatism uses expert and election surveys to explore the extent to which the feminist or traditional gender ideology of parties of the right relates to their economic and liberal/authoritarian ideology. We show that although parties of the left generally espouse more feminist ideologies than parties of the right, there are a significant number of rightist parties in Western Europe that combine laissez-faire economic values with liberal feminist ideals. That said, there is more homogeneity among parties of the populist radical right than rightist parties more generally. We find that despite some variation in their gender ideology, parties of the populist radical right overwhelmingly—with the exception of one party in the Netherlands—continue to adopt traditional or antifeminist gender ideologies. In terms of attracting women voters, we find that rightist parties who adopt a feminist gender ideology are able to attract more women voters than other parties of the right. We detect several examples of center-right parties that include feminist elements in their gender ideologies and are able to win over larger proportions of women voters than rightist parties that fail to adopt feminist positions.

As Sapiro (1981) pointed out many years ago, recognizing that women's interests are interesting is the vital first step in establishing the significance of women's political representation (or the lack thereof)—both in the “real” world and in the scholarly world. Indeed, the assumption that women's interests exist, that women have political interests that can be defined and measured, is central to much of the subsequent research and discussion of women in politics. It is central to our own research on the relationship between women's descriptive and substantive representation (e.g., Reingold 2000; Swers 2002), and it is central to this symposium. Yet we come together in this symposium not simply because we share this assumption, but more tellingly because we all grapple with this assumption. Defining and measuring women's political interests pose a number of very difficult questions or dilemmas, which we elaborate in the following. We highlight these challenges not to dismiss such endeavors as futile or necessarily misguided. Rather, we argue that the very uncertainty surrounding women's interests is what makes them so interesting.

At the U.S. 2012 general election, six minority women were newly elected to the House of Representatives, a net increase from 21 to 23, and a rise from 23% to 27% as a proportion of all women in the House (CAWP 2010, 2012). Among this group was Iraq War veteran Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI 2nd District), the first Hindu American to serve in Congress. Despite generally positive coverage, her local paper also framed Gabbard's identity as an “underdog … on the margins of popular respectability.” In Utah, Mormon Mia Love ran the first viable black female Republican campaign, securing 47% of the vote in the state's overwhelmingly white 4th District. Love was frequently framed positively as a “historic candidate” and was invited to speak at the GOP convention that year. Despite this, her self-portrayal as a product of the American dream—linking her second-generation Haitian identity to her partisan politics—drew sharp criticism. Local campaign coverage even interrogated the legality of her family history with headlines such as “Love's Immigrant Story may be True, but Some Questions Linger.”

The connection between women leaders and superior pandemic performance is likely spurious. This narrative overlooks that women currently govern precisely the kinds of countries that should mount effective pandemic responses: wealthy democracies with high state capacity. This article maps where women currently serve as presidents and prime ministers. The article then uses data from the Varieties of Democracy Project and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to show that many women-led countries score high on state capacity and that high-capacity states have low coronavirus mortality regardless of whether they are led by women or by men. Arguments emphasizing women chief executives’ superior pandemic performance, while offered in good faith, are misleading.

“Family law” is the term applied to the legal regulation of marriage and parenthood within a society, and may serve to express a society's accepted ideals concerning male–female relations. Adopting a feminist evolutionary analytic (FEA) approach, we hypothesize that nation-states with higher degrees of inequity in family law favoring men, codifying an evolutionary legacy of male dominance and control over female reproduction, will experience higher rates of violence against women. This hypothesis is borne out in conventional statistical analysis, both bivariate and multivariate, suggesting that policy attention to family law so as to make it more concordant with norms of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) may have salutatory effects on women's physical security over time. These results may also have policy implications for societies with, or contemplating, enclaves of inequitable family law.

Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential run brought with it an unwelcome reminder of the added obstacles women candidates often encounter. From “Iron my Shirt” banners to debates regarding whether Clinton was overly emotional or an ice princess, we were faced with gender stereotypes that have often plagued women in leadership roles. Her campaign strategy attempted to counteract preconceived notions of female candidates by accentuating Clinton's toughness and strength, even to the point of trying to “outmale” her opponents (e.g., see Lawrence and Rose 2010). The result was a prime example of the double bind in which women who appear strong are then seen as unlikeable (Jamieson 1995). However, Clinton reached new levels of popularity from 2008 to 2012 as secretary of state and a presumed presidential contender in 2016. This leads us to question whether she was able to successfully navigate the double bind—perhaps through additional offsetting information or her ability to competently handle the masculine position of secretary of state—or if public attitudes have evolved to a point where gender no longer matters in the assessment of political candidates.

Personalization has cultivated a bad reputation in politics. Initially, scholarship on the personalization of politics focused on what was often called “candidate-centered” voting: the idea that citizens would vote based on a candidate's personality. Many scholars viewed this evaluative approach as irrational and heralded the value of issue stances over charisma (see Fenno 1978; Popkin 1991). Focusing on the personal, it seems, was problematic. Another iteration of the personalization in politics was also problematic and focused on the use of the “personal frame” in news coverage of women candidates. Such news coverage focused more on women's personalities and personal lives as compared to men's (e.g., Bystrom 1999; Devitt 1999). On its surface, such coverage does not appear detrimental. However, this framing would often emphasize women's roles as mothers and wives and use that framing to question women's experience, fitness for office, and whether they could juggle domestic and political responsibilities (Braden 1996). Personalization in both iterations elicited a sense of triviality: voters’ focus on persona was deemed as a trivial way to form an opinion, and women candidates were trivialized via a focus on their personal, not political, lives.

We examine which Americans were likely to believe that American society has grown “too soft and feminine,” a concept we have characterized as gendered nationalism, and how such gendered nationalist attitudes influenced voting behavior in the 2016 presidential race. Our analysis shows that party, gender, education, and class shaped attitudes about gendered nationalism: Republicans, men, and members of the working class were more likely to support gendered nationalist views. We identify a strong, significant relationship between gendered nationalist attitudes and the probability of voting for Donald Trump, even after controlling for partisanship, ideology, race, religion, and other factors. Moreover, gender differences in candidate support were largely driven by gender differences in beliefs that the United States has grown too soft and feminine. Our research adds to the growing scholarly evidence indicating that gendered beliefs are likely to have a bigger impact on American political behavior than a voter's gender alone.

Election violence is an important issue from a number of perspectives. Understanding the causes and consequences of violations of personal integrity is always relevant, but election violence adds a different dimension to this already serious issue: it also violates electoral integrity and decreases democratic quality (Norris 2013). Therefore, election violence should be studied as a simultaneous violation of personal and electoral integrity. In this contribution, I define election violence as occurring when (1) the goal of the act is to affect an electoral outcome or prevent someone from running in an election, and (2) the means by which it is carried out violates the personal integrity of individuals involved in the electoral process.

This short commentary aims to think through the need to return to a more “integrated” feminist IR through a focus on some of the ways in which feminist political economy (FPE) scholars, such as ourselves, might better integrate a focus on gendered forms and practices of violence into our analysis. We do this via an intervention into debates about the nature of the “everyday” political economy. At the same time, we hope that this intervention might also draw attention to the need for a clearer understanding of the gendered structures and practices of the global political economy in feminist security studies (FSS).

Invite a woman to run for office. Based on findings that women are most responsive to and reliant on encouragement in making the decision to run for office, this invitation refrain is pervasive among those seeking greater gender parity in U.S. politics. For example, in 2007, the Women's Campaign Fund launched She Should Run, complete with an online tool that, to date, has been used to ask just under 200,000 women to run for office. In 2014, another organization, Vote Run Lead, adopted a similar strategy, launching Invitation Nation to send e-invitations to run to nearly 10,000 women within their first year of launching the project. My own organization, the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), has “invited” countless women to run for office through online communications, training programs, and recruitment campaigns and initiatives. While each of these organizations has also sought to provide potential women candidates with training, information, and resources to assist them throughout the recruitment process, our obsession with inviting can constrain a more complex and comprehensive approach to female candidate recruitment in both research and practice.

Disability is the new gender. I make this claim with trepidation and a sense of irony. Certainly, disability studies today is like women's studies was in the 1970s and 1980s, when feminist scholars had to convince colleagues in “mainstream” political science that gender was something worth attending to, that it was a serious enterprise, and that it should be part of the mainstream. The fields of history and English have been somewhat more welcoming of disability as a valid topic of study, just as these fields preceded political science in realizing that gender was an important category of study. But political science has been slow to catch on.

What country currently boasts the highest percentage of women in parliamentary office? If you ask most people, they will guess one of the Nordic countries: Sweden, Norway, Finland, or Denmark. These guesses are close in one sense but very far off in another. The answer is Rwanda. As of this writing, women make up nearly half of the members of the Rwandan Chamber of Deputies—48.8% according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (2005b). Most people find this answer surprising. Sadly, we tend to associate Rwanda with the genocide of 1994 rather than with gender equality. What has put Rwanda in the number one spot on the list of women in elective office, an important indicator of women's equality?

Gender inequality in the Muslim world has become the object of high drama on the international scene. Ghostlike images of women wrapped in burqas and begging in the streets of Afghan cities swept television screens in the United States following 9/11. The number of articles on Muslim women in English newspapers has increased exponentially in the last few years. Although the popular press and the media continue to emphasize seclusion and subordination in their description of Muslim women, scholars have written extensively and persuasively to debunk the myth of the Muslim woman as a victim, passively suffering the subordination imposed on her. Starting in the 1970s and continuing to the present, a rich literature has argued that as elsewhere in the world, Muslim women have not only resisted subordination but have actively shaped their own destiny (e.g., work by Leila Ahmed [1992], Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt [2008, 2009], Elizabeth Fernea [1998], Nikki Keddie [2002, 2007, 2008], and Fatima Sadiqi and Moha Ennaji [forthcoming]).

Theories of democracy commonly assume that citizens must have a certain degree of information and factual knowledge to be able to understand the functioning of institutions, the performance of the incumbent government, and the actions of the main political actors. Political knowledge helps people to better assess their interest as individuals and as members of groups (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). Moreover, governments have more incentives to be responsive when they can be held accountable, but citizens are able to hold governments accountable for their actions only when they know what governments are actually doing.

Current scholarship offers conflicting conclusions about whether female candidates have a feminine advantage or a disadvantage. Previous work does not consider whether voters respond similarly to all types of messages that might emphasize feminine stereotypes, such as feminine trait and feminine issue messages. I argue that voters will respond differently to trait-based feminine messages relative to issue-based feminine messages. I test the effects of trait-based and issue-based feminine messages through two survey experiments. The results consistently show that emphasizing feminine traits harms female candidates, whereas emphasizing feminine issues helps female candidates. I use role congruity theory to argue that feminine traits activate feminine stereotypes about women, and feminine issues do not activate these stereotypes. I also show that trait-based and issue-based feminine messages affect Democratic and Republican female candidates in very different ways. These results have implications for the ability of women to win elected office and reverse the pervasive underrepresentation of women in politics.