If a Ministry of Equality and Feminisms were created from scratch in the government of your country or region, would you accept leading it? In May 2021, when asked by the just-invested Prime Minister of the Government of Catalonia, I answered, “Yes, I do.” It was a big question, and the task ahead was even bigger, but a close friend helped me kill the vertigo. She said, “Years of gender and politics research, consultancy work, and social activism should do,” while adding that being accorded great leeway to build up a team of social movement activists, feminist academics, and party feminists with experience in executive office was a unique opportunity to bolster feminist change. This combination yielded substantive knowledge of both the priorities of the movements and the political world and, simultaneously, accorded personal ties with politicians and the bureaucratic elite (Mazur and McBride 2007).

Although authoritarian regimes often repress the rights of women, many autocrats have committed to international treaties protecting women’s human rights. Scholars have typically overlooked this engagement, focusing instead on autocrats’ commitment (and violation) of treaties protecting civil, political, and physical integrity rights. Yet existing explanations for autocrats’ ratification of these treaties—such as appeasing domestic opposition groups—do not necessarily apply to women’s rights (von Stein 2013). As authoritarian international law is increasingly viewed as an important area of study (Ginsburg 2020), scholars should explore how authoritarian regimes navigate participation regarding women’s rights issues, including their engagement with the main women’s rights treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). After taking a closer look at how autocracies shape, commit, and challenge women’s rights internationally, we suggest several research directions to build this area of study.

This essay considers the rapid uptick in anti-trans legislation that targets transgender girls and women as an occasion to critically interrogate the ways that gender is conceptualized and operationalized in political science (Murib 2022). I argue that the disciplinary tendency to view gender as a single-axis facet of identity that is static and rooted in biology needs to be reconsidered in light of two problems. First, collapsing biological sex and gender naturalizes the gender of non-trans women and men as static, normal, and self-evident; transgender people, in contrast, are locked into perpetual processes of gendering themselves against this biological baseline (Enke 2012). Second, and as a result of this limited view of gender, political scientists face difficulties anticipating, understanding, and addressing recent mobilizations invested in maintaining White, heterosexual, and reproductive families as the cornerstone of what it means to be a proper citizen (Alexander 1994).

This essay historicizes feminist protests in Kenya over the last decade to examine the changing patterns of protest action and how they illustrate the evolution of both feminist discourses and sites within which these debates are animated. I look beyond the streets and direct action as the epitome of protest action to examine strategic litigation, hashtag activism, and national campaigns as important ways through which feminist protest can be understood in Kenya, focusing on three recent cases.

On August 6, 2016, the week of the South African public holiday Women’s Day, an extraordinary protest held the nation spellbound. Then president Jacob Zuma was announcing the results of local government elections live on national television when four young women walked out of the throng of election officials and politicians. They stood in front of the president, silent but visible on the televised screen. They held up placards: “I am 1 in 3,” “Ten Years Later,” “Khanga,” “Remember Khwezi.” Although the protesters stood for the duration of the broadcast, they were forcibly removed by security agents immediately after Zuma left the stage and the cameras moved offscreen. Hustled to the back of the room, they were lambasted by senior women leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) for their “inappropriate” action. This was a spectacular demonstration: silent and nonviolent, its tactics and timing pierced the performance of presidential authority and made visible a new form of feminism.

There is growing evidence of the international and domestic political benefits for autocrats to advance women’s rights (Bjarnegård and Zetterberg 2016; Bush and Zetterberg 2021; Donno and Kreft 2019; Tripp 2019). Research on the adoption of gender reforms in autocracies—including contributions in this Critical Perspectives section by Audrey L. Comstock and Andrea Vilán (2022) and Aili Mari Tripp (2022)—emphasizes the dual role of international pressure (Donno, Fox, and Kaasik 2021; Edgell 2017; Okundaye and Breuning 2021) and women’s movements (Giersdorf and Croissant 2011; Htun and Weldon 2012; Tripp 2015). Reforms can be “top-down” if the autocrat advances rights even while suppressing the women’s movement, or “bottom-up” if the regime allies with—and seeks to co-opt—civil society groups.

As the number of ethnic minority politicians increase across countries like the United Kingdom and the United States, so too have instances in which these officeholders act against the communities they descriptively represent. In this contribution, we introduce the concept of paradoxical representation which we argue functions through neoliberal, post-racial scripts of color-blindness and meritocracy. Similar to research on gender representation which calls into question assumptions that substantive representation will follow unproblematically from women’s descriptive representation (Celis and Childs 2012), we argue that ethnic minority representatives can act as “post-racial gatekeepers.” This means paradoxically working against rather than for marginalized ethnic minority groups (Saini, Bankole, and Begum 2023). Through political discourse and policymaking, these representatives construct and “gatekeep” hegemonic ideas around race, racism, gender, and migration.

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 past decade has witnessed a significant increase in women’s presence in local politics. According to the newly published United Nations (UN) Women in Local Government data set, women constitute 36% of local deliberative bodies worldwide compared to merely 25% in national parliaments.1 Much of this increase is the result of gender quotas: the Gender Quotas Database (International IDEA 2022) shows that as of 2021, 75 countries had some form of gender quota on the local level, 24 of which were authoritarian regimes. Yet, extant work on gender politics in authoritarian regimes tends to focus on the national level, given the highly centralized decision-making processes in such contexts. We contend that the study of women’s engagement and representation in local politics can help scholars better understand not only gender and politics, but also authoritarian politics more generally.

This article analyses the possibility of an intersectional understanding of “disability” in relation to Article 14(2)(c) of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol). Adopted in July 2003 and enforced since November 2005, the Maputo Protocol is considered a ground-breaking international human rights instrument (Johnson 2023, 329). It is the first treaty to comprehensively protect the reproductive rights of African women, including the contentious issue of abortion (Maputo Protocol 2003, Article 14(2)(c); Banda 2006, 82).

Authoritarian regimes around the world have increasingly implemented policies and reforms to strengthen women’s rights, ranging from adopting gender quotas to penalizing gender-based violence. Recent literature highlights that authoritarian leaders are at the forefront of these initiatives, often aiming to strengthen their rule rather than advance women’s rights (e.g., Bjarnegård and Zetterberg 2016; Bush and Zetterberg 2021; Donno, Fox, and Kaasik 2021). While we cannot ignore the contributions of grassroots activism in advancing gender equality (e.g., Kang and Tripp 2018; Krook 2009), authoritarian regimes, by nature, have less incentive to pay attention to popular demands. Thus, women’s rights reforms in autocracies tend to be top-down: initiated by the leadership, with a lack of citizen involvement in the design process. This essay considers how top-down gender reforms may be viewed by the public, and as a consequence, how the public’s perceptions of them may affect women’s status in the broader society.

For decades, African women have participated in the Black feminist struggle for women’s rights and racial, social, economic, and political justice (Collins 2017; Tamale 2020). In the 1950s, during the fight for independence across the continent, a radical and transnational feminist movement emerged with African women’s protests to “crack the norms of gender and colonial order” (Ndengue 2016) in both urban and rural postcolonial contexts (Falola and Paddock 2011; Mougoué 2019; Nchoji Nkwi 1985; Ndengue 2018). Protests have transnational effects (Johnson-Odim 2009; Terretta 2013). Today, transnationalism relies on social media platforms as sites of calls to action. They constitute alternative public spaces for expression and activism in constrained political environments (Ngono 2018) and platforms that facilitate informal transnational connections. These transnational connections are accompanied by explicit and assertive claims of feminism by a growing number of (young) women.

In 2020, Asian Americans were the least descriptively represented at all levels of elected office compared to whites, Blacks, and Latinos (Sedique, Bhojwani, and Lee 2020). In this context, Asian women lagged behind Asian men in holding local-level positions, yet they surpassed Asian men in holding federal and statewide offices, and they led 81% of state- and local-level Asian civil rights organizations (AAPI Power Fund 2020; Reflective Democracy Campaign 2021). Do gender disparities in Asian American political representation arise because Asian women are less likely to run for office than Asian men, or because they are less likely to win elections? Do these disparities vary across levels of office? And are they unique to Asian Americans?