In this article, I argue that contemporary theories of agonistic democracy offer provocative insights into democratic activism and protest but require a more robust account of intersectional gender to adequately theorize the challenges of disruptive dissent. To this end, I propose an agonistic and feminist account of “dissident citizenship,” the democratic practices of disruption used to problematize and disturb the status quo when formal channels of democratic change are inadequate. My account foregrounds how intersectional gender formations pervade dissident practices, including activists’ ongoing struggles with their critics over their democratic standing and performances of disruption. I illustrate these theoretical claims through a case study of dissident citizenship drawn from U.S. politics, the welfare rights movement of 1966–75. Intersectional gender formations assisted welfare activists in claiming democratic standing as loving, hardworking mothers and in becoming bold dissidents. It was nonetheless exceedingly difficult for the poor, usually minority “militant mamas” to remain intelligible as full citizens when critics rejected their claims as the greediness of “breeders” and “cheaters” and dismissed their democratic disruptions as offensive, violence-causing disorders. Attending to intersectional gender dynamics highlights critical dimensions of democratic contestation that agonistic theories must address more carefully.

Research indicates that fundraising is not an impediment to women candidates because women raise just as much money as men after accounting for seat status. However, previous research focuses solely on general election candidates. By examining both primary and general election candidates, we find both gender and partisan differences in fundraising. While incumbency, competitiveness, and candidate quality predict fundraising in the general election, we show that Democratic women raise more money than their male counterparts in the primary election. However, Republican women do not enjoy greater fundraising success compared with their male counterparts, and in limited cases, being a Republican woman can be an obstacle to fundraising in the primary election.

While breastfeeding mothers generally possess an official legal right of access to public places, the lived experience of breastfeeding mothers in public is marked by inequality and lack of autonomy. The motivating question of this article is, from the perspective of a breastfeeding mother, what characterizes an ideal—that is, equal and autonomous—public sphere in a liberal society? I explore in particular the issue of people, including breastfeeding mothers, who evoke discomfort or disgust. I argue that public and private spheres must be accessible in certain ways: first, every person must be able to occupy public space while embracing all significant aspects of their personhood; second, the comfort of others cannot weigh more than an individual's own needs in public; finally, all people must be able to opt for privacy in a way that does not entail invisibility or coerced exclusion. In making this argument, I describe three main ways in which breastfeeding mothers respond to the antipathy of the public sphere: exclusion, accommodation, and affirmation. I end with an exploration of the ideal of public and private spheres defined by equality and autonomy and offer concrete steps that can improve the position of breastfeeding mothers in public.

Women's legislative underrepresentation has emerged as perhaps the most stable feature of the postcommunist Hungarian political system, resisting Europeanization, changes in the electoral and party systems, and a new constitution. Early research on the decline in women's access to power in postcommunist transitional democracies focused on common legacies of communist rule, but those legacies cannot account for widening disparities in women's representation across the region over time or the persistent underrepresentation of women in Hungary. Using a pathway case analysis of Hungary's 2010 parliamentary elections, this research examines how cultural, structural, and institutional factors interacted to keep Hungary stuck in the basement with respect to women's legislative recruitment.

The idea that Muslim women need to be liberated from religion and tradition has animated feminist support for imperialist projects. The idea that tradition itself is women's oppressor prevents Western feminists from perceiving cultural and religious destruction as potentially harmful. In this article, I make conceptual space for traditionalist feminisms by showing that feminism does not require any particular stance toward tradition as such. What should matter to feminists is whether the content of a given tradition is oppressive—not whether it belongs to a worldview that places a high value on traditional adherence. I show this by arguing that, contra some liberal feminists, opposition to sexist oppression does not entail value for what I call “Enlightenment freedom.” I draw on Islamic feminisms to demonstrate the possibility of opposition to sexist oppression grounded in worldviews that value traditional adherence, and even ones that hold certain traditional dictates to be beyond question.

Studies expressing concern over the continued underparticipation of women in politics rest on the assumption that increasing the number of female representatives in democracies leads to greater substantive representation of women's policy interests. This article advances the discussion by conducting a comparative analysis of men's and women's attitudes across 27 countries in the European Union. Using the European Election and Candidate Studies 2009, I find that differences between the policy preferences of men and women in the EU do exist and that these differences are replicated between male and female candidates in European elections. The findings provide empirical support for the argument in favor of a greater gender balance in European policy-making institutions.

The spread of women's quotas in legislative bodies across the world since the mid-1990s has become one of the most significant factors impacting levels of women's political representation (Dahlerup 2013; Krook 2009; Tripp and Kang 2008). In the Middle East, a region that has long held a place at the very bottom of global rankings of women's representation, the adoption of such quotas is transforming levels of representation (Kang 2009). But there is still much debate over the utility of quotas for women's meaningful participation in political life. There is now a well-established literature that examines the effects of quotas on women's descriptive or numerical representation. We have a fairly robust idea about the types of quotas that are appropriate for particular sets of electoral system contexts when the goal is to generate a target percentage of women elected to legislative bodies (Jones 2005; Larserud and Taphorn 2007). However, questions about whether and how quotas benefit women beyond the simple addition of several women parliamentarians to the political game remain contested. The various arguments for the utility of quotas rest mainly on two underlying propositions. The first is that quotas, by bringing more women to the political sphere, promote the substantive representation of women's interests. The second is that quotas have a symbolic effect. They help demonstrate that women are fit and able to govern and so contribute to countering women's historical exclusion from politics.

Notwithstanding the importance of winnowing, scholars have devoted little attention to deciphering and systematically explaining the effects that gender may have on determining which small proportion of bills ultimately receive committee attention from the thousands that are introduced every legislative session. Building on past research evincing gendered differences in legislative behavior and effectiveness, this study analyzes the 111th and 112th Congresses in order to ascertain the extent to which gender affects winnowing in the U.S. House of Representatives. The findings suggest that female lawmakers are working hard to achieve legislative success by sponsoring a greater number of bills than their male colleagues, but that their efforts are not being similarly rewarded. Female sponsored bills fail to progress past the winnowing stage at rates comparable to male sponsored bills. Thus, policymaking may be skewed toward the preferences of male lawmakers despite the numeric and positional gains of women in the U.S. Congress.