Hudson, Bowen, and Nielsen (2011) seek to use evolutionary biology as a form of metafeminism, or as an ultimate cause to understand the roots of patriarchy. Patriarchy as a system that ontologically creates women's discrimination and legitimates violence is widely accepted within a range of feminisms and has been the foundational argument of feminist scholarship. The concern that is raised here in regard to Hudson, Bowen, and Nielsen's article is not the validity of their concern with investigating the relationship between inequity in family law and violence against women, but the basis of their argument in evolutionary biology. In this essay, I bring posthumanism and especially new (vital) materialism as a way to build bridges with the feminist evolutionary analytical approach (FEAA) and constructivist or linguistic-oriented approaches in International Relations (IR). Posthumanism is an approach to social theorizing that addresses the impossibility of the nature/culture distinction in novel ways.

I was delighted to be invited to participate in this symposium in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Women and Politics program at Rutgers because, to put it bluntly, I do not believe I could do the work that I do within the discipline of political science—interdisciplinary and normative research informed by feminist scholarship, democratic theory, and sexuality studies with an eye to practice—if not for the program, which played a key role in legitimizing feminist scholarship within the discipline of political science. When I entered the Rutgers Ph.D. program in 1988, as part of the third cohort, it was an exciting time. We were very much aware of being among the first students in the country able to make feminist scholarship a central part of our doctoral studies in political science, particularly those of us pursuing political theory. My entry into graduate school came on the heels of four years of political activism in the feminist, peace, and social justice movements, so the question of practice was pressing to me at the time and has always hovered around my academic work. The Women and Politics program was a perfect home for me because of the way in which it linked the theoretical and empirical questions of academic political science with the politically engaged concerns of women's and gender studies and nurtured in me an interdisciplinary way of thinking that always strives for creative connections.

Scholars of gender quotas have paid increasing attention to the ways in which formal and informal institutions shape the outcome of this electoral reform (Hassim 2009; Jones 2009; Zetterberg 2009). Quotas, however, are not only affected by the institutional context in which they are adopted; their transformative nature also implies that they (should) contribute to changing political institutions. This dynamic relationship has consequences for the analysis of key institutions within representative democracy: Electoral quotas may, in some cases, challenge well-defined analytical frameworks and established ways to study political life. This essay aims to demonstrate theoretically how quota adoption exerts an impact on established political structures and thus challenges existing understandings within subfields of comparative politics. More specifically, I bring up two institutions within representative democracy that are likely to be affected by quotas: the political recruitment process and intraparty politics within legislative institutions.

Gender mainstreaming is a curricular reform emphasizing the inclusion of gendered perspectives into required coursework for the political science major. The burden of mainstreaming gendered content (along with other diversity subjects) ultimately lies with the instructor, who must provide a rigorous, comprehensive, and intellectually challenging course. To the extent that instructors rely on textbooks to structure (and even streamline) course development, the textbook is an important entry point for exploring the prevalence of gender content in the political science curriculum. Given the symbolic status of textbooks as “repositories of official knowledge” for the discipline (Ferree and Hall 1996), the exploration of content on women in introductory-level American politics textbooks offers insight into the messages students commonly receive about the role of women in American political life.

In her piece on experiential learning in a Gender and Politics course, Cynthia Daniels (1997) discusses the ways students' democratic ideals are expanded and enforced through work outside the classroom. She describes the intersection of the classroom with service-learning activities as a way to tackle questions such as, how does gender equity require us to rethink the distinction between public and private life, and what might be the risks of using state power to regulate private relations of power in the home and the workplace (120)? Accomplishing gender mainstreaming through experiential learning serves the purpose of reemphasizing different group perspectives in all types of student learning while demonstrating the “uniqueness” of the effects of policy on women.

While we applaud Hudson, Bowen, and Nielson (2011) for demonstrating the correlation between two modes of contemporary sexist oppression (inequality in family law and violence against women), we are concerned about how they embed a contested narrative of human evolution into otherwise straightforward findings. We argue that claims about human evolution are unnecessary to their argument, and, more importantly, that the version of feminist evolutionary analysis they describe is less feminist than it could be.

Mainstream comparative politics (CP) rarely attends to gender scholarship. Conventional wisdom urges gender scholars to speak to the broader concerns of CP to avoid this marginalization. But feminist concerns are broader than those of CP. Feminism promotes changes in power relations to advance “justice for women and everyone” and offers tools for assessing injustice (Weldon 2011, 443). In contrast, CP promotes stability and order that benefits elites; it values predictive models over usefulness (Clarke and Primo 2012). How can feminist quota scholars address their broader concerns and speak to CP? I argue that we need to lead with feminism. Doing so not only ensures that our work will address broader concerns, but also ensures that we will have insights to offer CP that demonstrate the value of feminist analysis. Leading with feminism, I evaluate whether legislative quotas for women change the political dynamics sustaining gender injustice. I find that they rarely do so. I then draw on feminist quota scholarship to highlight the limits of CP toward democracy and institutional change to demonstrate the value of feminist analysis. I conclude with suggestions on how to advance a feminist agenda in the discipline.

Interdisciplinarity, like other words, such as neoliberalism or globalization, has wide but seemingly endlessly varied use. Indeed, it is often used indiscriminately to apply to everything from a change of focus that is outside the substantive content of a discipline to the radical reorientation of methods and methodology to the call to escape disciplinary confines altogether. As someone who had the good fortune to receive an interdisciplinary graduate education at Rutgers (Women and Politics, Public Law, and Africana Studies as subfields) and begin her career in an “interdisciplinary” unit (what eventually became, in fact, a Department of Interdisciplinary Studies), I am well acquainted with the many debates surrounding the much-touted, but also still too infrequent, trek of not only boundary crossers per se, but also those who live in borderland spaces that merge and, at times, blur disciplinary lines. As a radical Black feminist political scientist and lawyer, interdisciplinarity has been a vital necessity for both theory and practice. Rutgers provided an intellectual space in which interdisciplinary approaches were deemed critical to mapping a feminist political science. In this essay, I briefly share some of the possibilities opened up by interdisciplinary investigation and its central role in ushering in a new political science.

In a recent text detailing the alleged wrongs of feminism, conservatives Suzanne Venker and Phyllis Schlafly pronounced,

Globally, women's movements share the twin concerns of equality within the family and freedom from domestic violence. The following questions conjoin and animate these debates: Given that violence against women is a global phenomenon, why are some states more effective at controlling domestic violence than others? What is the correlation between inequality encoded in family laws and the rate of violence against women in society? Are legally plural states more likely to demonstrate a higher degree of institutionalized inequality and gender-based violence within the family? The analytical peg for Hudson, Bowen, and Nielsen (2012) is the feminist evolutionary analytic approach (FEAA) that explains the almost universal prevalence of male dominance among humans during the course of formation of societies. It suggests that violence against women is greater in legal systems that design family law to maximize men's rights.

Although the presence of women in the political science profession has increased rapidly since the 1980s, women still constitute less than 30% of the political science faculty nationwide and are more likely to find themselves in lower-paying and/or nontenure track positions (APSA 2011, 39; Evans and Moulder 2011). In the discipline, the position of gender and politics as a legitimate course of study has improved markedly since the 1970s (Lovenduski 1998; Mackay 2004; Murphy 2010; Tolleson-Rinehart and Carroll 2006). As Childs and Krook (2006, 19) point out, “mainstream editors, publishers and conference conveners no longer feel able to ignore the work of feminist political scientists.” But they also present evidence that this improvement stops short of full incorporation into the discipline and note that there is still skepticism about the value of feminist scholarship. This skepticism is also present at the intersection of the profession and discipline: while there are no systematic data on the employment of gender and politics scholars, it is not rare for a gender and politics scholar to be told that her employment prospects would be better if she were to research something else (Childs and Krook 2006). Given the position of women in the profession and the status of gender and politics in the discipline, it is unsurprising that there is continued resistance to integrating gender into mainstream political science education (Baldez 2010; Lovenduski 2005; Murphy 2010).

One of the important perspectives that feminist analysis has brought to the study of politics is the value of the individual and the importance of capturing individual experience in our understanding of large social and political forces. Simple aggregation of individual experience can lose the richness of that reality. Yet the normative adherence to the critical appreciation of each person's life and experience need not prevent us from drawing inferences from patterns of behavior in order to help us intervene to improve the lot of those who suffer in the wake of systematic prejudice or discrimination.

At a time when both the value of gender mainstreaming as well as of higher education itself is being debated, this collection of essays on gender mainstreaming in the discipline of political science is an important rejoinder regarding the necessity of both. First, implicit in these essays is a reminder that the value of a college education resides as much in its contribution to the maintenance of democratic life in the United States as it does in the possibility of earning a good salary. Indeed, entwined with the advocacy of gender mainstreaming in the discipline of political science is a belief that the discipline itself contributes to the development of empowered democratic citizens and the cultivation of a robust political culture. The study and teaching of politics is part of how we learn to participate in political life: political science is a form of civic education. Including women—all women as well as all men—in the curriculum of political science ensures the vitality of our democracy. Further, including women in the discipline both as faculty and as students ensures that the agenda of the discipline itself will be transformed. After a decade of gender mainstreaming, the goal remains not only to ensure that women become part of the mainstream, but also that they transform the mainstream.

As a strategy to promote gender equality, gender mainstreaming has received considerable attention worldwide. The language of gender mainstreaming has been quickly adopted (True and Mintrom 2001), which is why, in the beginning, many hopes were pinned on this strategy. Scholars have shown that gender mainstreaming has triggered organizational and procedural changes within state bureaucracies, non-governmental organizations, and international organizations. Gender equality units have been established, new policy tools have been introduced, and new procedures have been created. But feminist scholars also have shown that, all these changes notwithstanding, gender mainstreaming has not proven to be successful in achieving gender equality (cf. True and Parisi 2013). More than 15 years after the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action, there are serious problems in translating the commitment into action. This is, as many scholars argue, not only a result of institutional and political resistance to substantially changing gender relations, but also a matter of conceptual clarity (Daly 2005; Lombardo and Meier 2006; Meier and Celis 2011; Subrahmanian 2004).

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 their article, Hudson, Bowen, and Nielsen (2011) argue that inequities in family law codify an evolutionary legacy of male control over female reproduction that correlates with increased rates of violence against women. Their general argument is comprised of three fundamental premises. First, the authors provide empirical evidence indicating a relationship between inequities in family law, defined as “state regulation of marriage, parenthood, dissolution of marriage, custody of children, and transmission of goods across generations” (454), and levels of physical violence against women in particular societies. Second, the authors anchor their general argument in a feminist evolutionary analytic approach (FEAA). They contend that evolutionary forces are an ultimate cause of patriarchy and violence against women, even as they acknowledge the importance of more proximate causes of specific forms of violence against women. According to the authors, an FEAA approach can help explain “persistent patterns of patriarchy throughout human history” (464) and “…tells us that there is a strong evolutionary component to violence, and that its origin is male-female conflict over reproduction, and that these influences will be mirrored in human systems of family law” (468). Finally, the authors draw upon the two previous premises to build the third and most critical premise of their argument. Because the authors believe that evidence showing a correlation between inequities in family law and levels of physical violence are ultimately rooted in evolutionary dynamics, they conclude that “[s]ocieties that persist in safeguarding inequitable family law are societies built upon evolutionary male reproductive strategies of structural control and higher levels of coercion of women by men” (470).

I work in neither political science nor the United States. I was trained in both, and I visit often, but I am now employed on the faculty of a critical law school in the United Kingdom. My work is in gender, development, and political economy. It could fit into politics, but it fits better elsewhere at present. As a result, my reflections on the themes of gender scholarship and knowledge transformation are somewhat removed from the discipline. Hence, in this piece, I offer some thoughts from outside political science on the subject of border crossings and theory/practice in feminist academic work.

Claiming the rights of women in a world of blatant gender hierarchies is an international feminist strategy that has been around for a long time. Rhetorically, it has been part of the human rights framework since its very inception, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 already contains important elements of gender equality, thanks to the lobbying efforts of a handful of women's rights advocates at the time. But it took the wave of global consciousness regarding gender inequality that swept the world in the 1970s to make women's rights relevant enough to codify them in a human rights treaty: the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). A decade and a half later, the Vienna Conference on Human Rights (1993) coined the slogan “women's rights are human rights” and thus emphasized the centrality of women's experiences for a holistic understanding of human rights. In the time since then, the human rights discourse has become increasingly intersectional and inclusive. While the scope and content of human rights remain contested, many women's rights activists around the world rely on this framework in their struggles for global justice.