Gender and Political Analysis

Johanna Kantola, Emanuela Lombardo

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780230214187
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350311756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

A major new text on gender and politics by two leading authorities, which introduces the main issues and debates about the politics of gender and its role in both domestic and international politics and feminist approaches to political analysis.

Chapter 1

Introduction

This book explores questions about feminist political analysis. What does it mean to do political analysis from a gender perspective? Why and how to do it? By political analysis – borrowing from Colin Hay (2002) – we mean the diversity of analytical strategies developed around ‘the political’. Since the political has to do with the ‘distribution, exercise, and consequences of power’, political analysis focuses on the analysis of ‘power relations’ (Hay 2002: 3). Power itself is a contested concept that is theorized and studied in a variety of ways with variety of methods (Lukes 2005). Thus, the conceptualization of the political is inextricably connected to distinct interpretations of power.

For those who conceive power as conflictual, ‘the political’ is a space of ‘antagonism’ and contestation ‘constitutive of human societies’ that ‘politics’ tries to organize through institutions and practices (Mouffe 2005: 9). Those, by contrast, who are inspired by a more consensual notion of power such as Hannah Arendt (1970: 52), for whom power arises ‘whenever people get together and act in concert’, see the political as a site of collective empowerment through public deliberation and coordinated action to achieve a common goal.

Feminist theorists often prefer a definition of power as the ‘interplay between domination and empowerment, between power and counterpower’ (Allen 1999: 18) and see the political as a space where unequal relations are continuously produced and transformed and where the public sphere is just as important as the private (Pateman 1983). For scholars taking a poststructuralist approach inspired by Michel Foucault (1978), power is an omnipresent relation that produces subjects through practices and discourses, and the political is the result of an ongoing process of discursive construction between social actors that define what is important and what is to be challenged (Onuf 1989; Bacchi 1999; Rönnblom 2009). This is just a brief account of the many different conceptualizations of the political that have been proposed.

Our aim in this book is to provide ways to navigate through these various definitions of the political and power from different feminist perspectives. The book will explore the contribution that gender approaches offer to the analysis of political phenomena and concepts. Since any political science perspective offers only a partial and partisan analysis of political and social reality, we will also discuss some of the limitations of each approach for doing political analysis. Our intention is to explore questions of feminist political analysis with a self-conscious and reflexive openness, which involves not only making explicit our own analytical and contextual origins but also recognizing the variety of gender and politics approaches as something valuable in itself.

The field of politics has created its own canons and hierarchies, which do not always make it easy for different approaches to enter the mainstream of political science and be legitimately recognized and adopted despite their analytical purchase. In other words, dominant approaches in political science today still tend to consider gender and politics a marginal field of political science, and influence the type of feminist approaches that are more accepted within the mainstream of the discipline. Let’s take an example from what is, in our view, a text on political analysis that is more open to analytical pluralism. In his mapping of the mainstream of political science, Colin Hay (2002: 7–29) argues that rational choice theory, behaviouralism and new institutionalism are considered the main approaches in mainstream political science. Hay’s textbook includes a broad definition of the political that covers both public and private issues and welcomes the emergence of alternative analytical approaches to political analysis.

Considering this openness to analytical pluralism, two points are worth noting to situate today’s approaches to political analysis: first, feminist approaches, despite being mentioned as a challenge to ‘mal-estream political analysis’, are not given much relevance for doing political analysis. Indeed, gender and sexuality do not even appear in the index of Hay’s book and the term ‘queer’ is not used once (Smith and Lee 2015: 53). Second, while constructivist and postmodern approaches are discussed more extensively, Hay states that the inclusion of constructivism and postmodernism in the mainstream is ‘more contentious’ (Hay 2002: 14). Despite its ‘inexorable rise’, constructivism supposedly ‘still has much to prove – not least its scientific status and its substantive contribution to the understanding of world politics’ (Hay 2002: 14, our emphasis). Postmodernism is even less potentially part of the mainstream because it is a ‘challenge to the very notion of a mainstream’ (Hay 2002: 16).

This mapping of approaches to political analysis, coming from a scholar who welcomes analytical pluralism, is interesting for the purpose of our endeavour because it informs what approaches are more legitimate and ‘canonical’ in the discipline of politics today and what are still considered more controversial. It also speaks of absences in the mainstream, which do not come as a surprise but nevertheless need to be made visible: feminist approaches do not appear in this mapping. Gender scholars have criticized political science textbooks for their inaccurate account of gender and politics concepts. This is, for instance, the case with Andrew Heywood’s introductory Politics textbook (2013, 4th edition) that has received a protest letter from the gender and politics standing groups of US, UK and European political science associations with regard to its inaccurate treatment of the concept of descriptive representation.

The protest letter challenged Heywood’s claim that the concept of descriptive representation, especially through electoral quotas, would be dangerous to democracy because supposedly only women could represent women and only members of minority groups could represent the interests of that group, a claim which the gender and politics literature does not make at all (PSA Women & Politics Specialist Group 2016). The letter clarified that what women and politics research actually claims is: that the argument for descriptive representation was developed to promote the participation of historically underrepresented citizens, and that therefore methods for correcting women’s exclusion from elected bodies can foster democracy rather than undermine it.

This is not to say that all political science ignores gender theory. The follow-up of the protest letter of the Women and Politics Specialist Group was a positive response on the part of both the author of the Politics textbook and Palgrave Macmillan, assuring that in the next edition of the volume they would address the concept of descriptive representation in light of the received comments. Another example of increasing concern for gender issues in political studies is the American Political Science Association’s recommendation, in ‘The Wahlke Report’, to mainstream gender into politics courses (Wahlke 1991). Textbooks that mainstream gender into political science are growing (see, for example, Goertz and Mazur 2008; Abels and Mushaben 2012; Lois and Alonso 2014; Abels and MacRae 2016), and articles on the mainstreaming of gender into political science research and teaching helpfully provide a state of the art and practical recommendations for gendering the discipline (see the special issues by Mügge, Evans and Engeli 2016, by Ackerly and Mügge 2016, and by Lovenduski 1998; Siim 2004; Tolleson-Rinehart and Carroll 2006; Dahlerup 2010; Eerzel and Mügge 2016; Mazur 2016). Drawing on the rich and diverse gender and politics research, the argument of our book is precisely that feminist approaches have much to contribute to political analysis and political science in general, since they offer important insights ‘for the understanding of politics as a whole’ (Mügge, Evans and Engeli 2016: 2).

Feminist political analysis: a link between theory and praxis

What is distinctive about feminist political analysis? What can gender analysis contribute to understanding and explaining politics? Brooke Ackerly and Jacqui True (2011: 63) suggest that ‘gender analysis opens up a whole landscape of new research questions as well as giving us tools to rethink old research questions’. They continue to explain how ‘gender as an analytic category can illuminate new areas of inquiry, frame research questions or puzzles in need of exploration and “provide concepts, definitions and hypothesis to guide research”’ (Hawkesworth 2005: 141). In other words, gender requires political analysis to rethink research questions, what is studied and how it is done, the concepts, theories and methods.

Our book is very much about these analytical concepts and the thematic issues that feminist approaches require political analysis to rethink. Hence in the substantive chapters we focus not only on ‘gender’ but on the key concepts of political analysis – power, agency and institutions – and the key issues in political analysis – polity, politics and policy. While this is not a book about methods, the concepts are closely tied to broader methodological questions (Ackerly and True 2011).

We approach political analysis as the analytical strategy that helps the researcher to move from theory to practice and back again. A fundamental tenet of feminism is that ‘theory is always coextensive with practice’ (Hirsch and Fox Keller 1990: 2). We suggest that, in the field of politics, it is political analysis that does this job and that gender analysis is particularly apt for linking the two (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Political analysis as the link between theory and praxis

One can also argue that politics as a discipline is in special need of connecting theory and praxis. We are living in times of austerity politics adopted in response to the ongoing economic crisis, war at the borders of the European Union, the rise of nationalisms, refugee crises, xenophobic and populist parties in Europe, processes of de-democratization, and at a global level the consequences of climate change, among other challenges. To be able to make sense of these political developments, their effects and gendered, classed or racialized significance, we need to establish a connection between theory and praxis, between what we theorize and what we practice. Some would say this connection is also needed if we wish to contribute to making this world a more just and equal place. To reiterate, political analysis in general, and feminist political analysis in particular, can be understood as attempts to maintain this link between theory and praxis.

Feminist analyses contribute to link theory and praxis for a number of reasons. First, they talk about equality between people, addressing both the theory of equality and how to put equality into practice. They deal with problems of increasingly diverse societies and complex intersections between class, gender, race and sexuality inequalities. The search for more sophisticated political analyses is aimed at making policies that are more inclusive of people’s diverse concerns. Since dealing with equality and diversity in practice is at the core of feminist analyses, it has made the discipline more open to continuous contestations of unequal norms and practices within the discipline itself. Theorizing equality, then, is not detached from what is going on in the real world but rather engaged with it, questioning power hierarchies and looking for ways to put equality into everyday practice. As Carole Pateman would say: ‘Democratic ideals and politics have to be put into practice in the kitchen, the nursery, and the bedroom’ (Pateman 1995: 222).

Second, feminist analyses have expanded the borders of ‘the political’ to include gender relations and issues formerly considered private. The famous feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ is a good example of the link between theory and praxis. Feminist scholars have demonstrated that power relations are not abstract but rather embodied in gendered subjects. Two main consequences for conceptualizing ‘the political’ follow from this: the first is that power relations and values are considered gendered, as well as racialized, classed or sexualized, because they reproduce gender norms and biases against women; the second is that the political includes both public and private/personal issues, which means that care, violence against women or sexual and reproductive rights are political issues as important as finance, agriculture or defence (Pateman 1983; Okin 1989; Benhabib 1992; Hawkesworth 1994; Fraser 1997). In other words, feminist analyses consider issues formerly defined as personal – or that are still de facto marginalized in politics in spite of their inclusion in existing legislation – such as sexual violence or childcare, as highly political.

Third, feminist political analysis is particularly apt to link theory and praxis because of its normative component. This component, on the one hand has made feminist political analysis vulnerable to critiques of being ideological in the eyes of mainstream political science. On the other hand, however, the normative aspect of the feminist project is a distinctive character that adds to the strength of the feminist project for explaining, understanding and changing the real world through political analysis. Feminism implies activism because it is a commitment to change relations of male domination of women and promote gender equality (Ferree 2006; Ewig and Ferree 2013). It is also possible to do gender and political analysis without subscribing to the feminist project of societal change (see Chapter 2 on the use of gender as a variable; see also Ackerly and True 2011), though in this case the link between feminist theory and praxis is weak or absent, depending on the studies considered.

Rather than simply aiming at describing and explaining ‘the political’, feminist political analyses, then, seek to promote gender equality, difference or diversity (Squires 1999, 2007) in social relations. This interest in transformative political practice marks feminist political analysis as both an empirical and a normative project. Feminist political analyses on the one hand study how gender power relations are constituted, reproduced and counteracted by political actors in a variety of political processes, institutional settings and policy-making; and on the other assess how these institutions, processes and policies could be changed to contribute to a more gender-equal world. This normative element that is present in political theory is extremely relevant for the praxis too, because as Wendy Brown reminds us, political theory is speculative work that provokes thinking and imagination through the ‘production of a new representation’ of the world (Brown 2002: 574). Political praxis needs to be fed by theory to envision what to do. Feminist scholars often link theory and practice – engaging in activism – in their daily work as political scientists studying inequalities and striving for social transformation towards greater gender equality in their home, their work and their social and political community (Celis et al. 2013).

If political analysis is an attempt to keep the link between theory and praxis alive, and feminist analyses of the political contribute to this endeavour for the reasons we have discussed so far, gender and political analysis are also beneficial to political science as it exists today (Ackerly and Mügge 2016; Erzeel and Mügge 2016; Mügge, Evans and Engeli 2016). As Wendy Brown (2002) argues, connecting theory and political praxis is, indeed, needed to prevent debates within increasingly professionalized disciplines such as political science, from becoming self-referential and thus narrow their analytical and imaginative capacities. Brown’s critique is that US political science has become a professionalized discipline that is accountable only to itself, where political scientists are their own audience and judges, and whose existence is justified by peer-reviewed journals, conferences and prizes (Brown 2002: 565). According to Breny Mendoza (2012: 47), ‘this has led to a political theorization that is more preoccupied with electoral systems, political parties, governance, polls, and only marginally with political cultures and disenchantment with liberal democracy’. Electoral and party issues are indeed important objects of political analysis, also from a gender perspective.

What Mendoza criticizes is that due to this electoral focus ‘issues of gender, race, and sexuality are painfully absent from political science curricula’ (Mendoza 2012: 47). Since most countries have US political science as the referent, argues Mendoza (2012: 35) from the Latin American context, the question is how can political science and ‘how can political theory be decolonized?’. Addressing issues of equality and diversity that directly affect people’s lives, as feminist political analyses do, is one way to reconnect political science to social reality. But to what extent is ‘feminist political analysis’ a recognized field within political science?

Feminist political analysis within political science

Political science and International Relations (IR) are an important context for the development of studies on feminist political analysis. Dominant approaches in the disciplines of politics and world politics affect the recognition of gender studies in the field and influence the emergence and marginalization of particular feminist approaches to political analysis. Liza Mügge, Elizabeth Evans and Isabelle Engeli (2016: 2) argue that ‘Gender scholarship is gradually becoming part of mainstream political science, while retaining its distinct identity’. Indicators of this are the fact that gender and politics publications are increasingly present in political science journals that do not specialize in gender; new gender-specialized political science book series have been created; and gender and politics research is now embedded in the work of national and international political science associations.

At the same time, many studies have illustrated how teaching gender is marginalized or non-existent in most UK and US political science departments (Childs and Krook 2006; Foster et al. 2013: 13; Ackerly and Mügge 2016; Mügge, Evans and Engeli 2016: 2). In their study of citational practices in political science, titled ‘What’s Queer About Political Science?’, Nicola Smith and Donna Lee (2015: 50) write:

Far from being the broad and inclusive discipline it purports to be in modern textbooks, today’s political science is consciously marginal-ising issues of gender and sexuality and hardly doing justice to the political analysis of social relations that queer theorists have been successfully doing for quite some time.

They argue that there is a sharp discrepancy in this sense between political science, on the one hand, and other social sciences and humanities, on the other, suggesting that the policing of disciplinary boundaries, epistemologies and analytical approaches is stronger in politics than in other disciplines (Smith and Lee 2015: 50).

The marginalization of gender and politics approaches in political science, despite their recent gradual integration into the discipline, argue Celis et al. (2013), still exists because men are overrepresented in the fi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Feminist Political Analysis: Five Approaches
• Part I: Concepts: Chapters 3–5
• Part II: Issues: Chapters 6–8
• Bibliography
• Index