Moving to a Comparative Politics of Gender?

Extract

The subfield of women and politics research, established two decades ago, has followed a developmental trajectory of empirical research, original feminist theorizing, and new concept formation and evaluation. An early emphasis on women and politics—concern with political behavior, with voting patterns and gender gaps, with political institutional presence and women as political elites—involved crucial foundational work for the subfield. Empirical research focused on finding where women were politically located, what political power they had, and what “politics” meant for women; the availability of survey research data that included a “sex” variable, and the identification of specific female political elites channeled early work into questions that could be answered by—or that permitted the contestation of—these data. The earliest research grappled with comparisons of women and men in politics; subsequent research focused primarily upon women, and upon women across politically relevant differences (in the U.S. case, particularly in regard to race). Feminist theory began to contest, to deconstruct, and to reconstruct gendered concepts of power, of equality and difference, of justice, and of democracy, some of which empirical scholars began to import into their research.