José Esteban Muñoz opens his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by stating that “queerness is not here yet. Queerness is an ideality … an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.” Queerness, continues Muñoz, “is a longing that propels us onward … Queerness is essentially about the rejection of the here and now” (2009, 1). He identifies queer utopias with an idea of futurity as an attempt to think of something else that goes beyond the “here and now,” an act of resistance: “the present is not enough. It is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative tastes and ‘rational’ expectations … The present must be known in relation to the alternative temporal and spatial maps provided by a perception of past and future affective worlds” (27). In this article, I aim to show just the opposite. The argument I make here is that queer utopia—transgender—is a futurity of the here and of the now, a virtuality that does not belong to the past nor does it lend itself to projections of the future, but it is totally immersed in the very now of the present.

A growing body of work on candidate traits shows that people with a given social characteristic tend to prefer candidates or leaders who share that characteristic (Campbell and Cowley 2014; Cutler 2002). However, the existing evidence for whether women vote for women is mixed. For example, Kathleen Dolan found that candidate sex was a driver of voting behavior for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1992, but not in 1994 or 1996 (Dolan 1998, 2001, 2004). Eric Smith and Richard Fox used pooled U.S. data from 1988 to 1992 and found that well-educated women were more inclined to support women candidates in House but not Senate races (Smith and Fox 2001), and others have found that women are more likely to vote for women candidates only when they are perceived as being pro-feminist (Plutzer and Zipp 1996). By contrast Fulton (2014) found that women are not more likely to vote for women candidates in the United States, but that male Independents are somewhat less likely to vote for them. Others have found little evidence whatsoever of an association between candidate gender and vote choice (McElroy and Marsh 2010).

Among the most well-documented and long-standing gender gaps in political behavior are those relating to political ambition, as men have consistently been shown to express a significantly higher level of political ambition than women. Although this gap is well established, the reasons for the differences between men and women remain largely unknown. One possible explanation is that negative stereotypes about women's political ability are responsible. Stereotype threat, as it is referred to in the psychology literature, is a phenomenon where individuals of a social group suffer cognitive burdens and anxiety after being exposed to negative stereotypes that relate to their identity. These disruptions have been shown to alter attitudes and behavior. In order to test this possibility, we employed an experimental design whereby we randomly assigned 501 undergraduate students into threat and nonthreat conditions. While men exhibited higher levels of political ambition in both conditions, women in the nonthreat condition expressed significantly higher levels of political ambition than those women who were exposed to negative stereotypes. The results of this study therefore suggest that the gender gap in political ambition may be partly explained by negative stereotypes about women in politics.

Previous studies of women's participation in legislative debates could not disentangle the possible effect of institutionalized gender discrimination from the effect of gendered patterns because of women lacking seniority and leadership posts. Costa Rica's Legislative Assembly offers an opportunity to control for seniority and leadership. The prohibition on immediate reelection means that no legislators have seniority. The country's successful gender quota, presence of an equal number of men and women committee presidents, and election of the first woman president in 2010 all point to women having relatively equal access to formal positions of power. In this context, unequal debate participation between men and women legislators would indicate that it is very difficult to change the gendered nature of an institution. We use multilevel modeling to analyze repeated observations of individual-level participation in three of six standing committees during the 2010–14 term (Agriculture, Economics, and Social Issues) to explore differences in patterns of participation under various conditions (sex ratios, discussion topics, sex of committee leaders). Findings indicate that women are active participants in committees with both stereotypically feminine and masculine policy jurisdictions, but also that women are more active when the gender composition of the committee is less skewed.

Despite the popularity of electoral gender quotas, the substantive impact of quotas on the plenary behavior of members of parliament (MPs) has yet to be thoroughly empirically explored, and in particular, there is a dearth of evidence from non-Western cases. Here we create a unique content analysis dataset from 14 years (1998–2011) of plenary debates, including the contents of more than 150,000 unique MP speeches recorded in some 40,000 pages of the Ugandan parliamentary Hansard to test how MP characteristics affect patterns of gender-related legislative speech. We find that female MPs speak about issues related to women's interests significantly more than male MPs. Further, we find no evidence of significant differences between female MPs elected with and without quotas, suggesting that, in the Ugandan case, gender is a more salient predictor of the tendency to “speak for women” than electoral pathway. To our knowledge, this is the first study that examines the effectiveness of quotas in promoting women's substantive representation in parliamentary debates across all policy domains over a significant time period. We discuss the implications of these findings in the Ugandan context, as well as how our evidence speaks to substantive representation through reserved seat quotas in semi-authoritarian regimes more broadly.

Proportional electoral systems tend to be more beneficial for women's descriptive representation than majority systems. However, within proportional systems the gender equality of election outcomes differs, highlighting the importance of studying the actual use of electoral provisions in proportional representation (PR) systems. Therefore, we investigate the determinants of voting for female candidates in Belgium's local elections. This case is particularly interesting given the equal number of men and women on the candidate lists due to quota regulations, the possibility to cast multiple preference votes (lowering competition), and the high visibility of these local elections and its candidates. At the individual level, we find that women are more likely than men to vote for several women, yet same-sex voting is more common among men. Politically sophisticated respondents vote more often for candidates of both sexes. Against our expectations, a left-wing orientation does not increase the likelihood of voting for women. At the electoral district level, a larger supply of women at the top list position increases the chance to vote for this top woman, but there is no spillover effect to women lower on the list. District magnitude affects the number of preference votes but, against expectations, not the likelihood of voting for women.