Gender and Political Theory challenges accounts of political theory and methods of political thinking that ignore the fact that we are, each of us, embodied individuals whose bodies take on complex political meanings influenced by history, culture, race, ability, gender, and sexuality. In other words, none of us are autonomous, disembodied, unmarked, and unmediated individuals free to make contracts and interact with others as we see fit. By now in American political life, this reality should be obvious. If it is not made clear by living and interacting in the world, witnessing the multiple ways that race, gender, and sexuality (among other bodily situations) mark our distinct and diverse experiences, one may pick up a book written by feminist, critical race, queer, trans, Indigenous, and disability scholars from the past 50 years.

Over the course of her celebrated career as a political theorist and a social policy and women and politics scholar, Mary Hawkesworth has published several works that center the experiences of marginalized, disenfranchised, or otherwise less visible or less listened-to persons in the United States and globally. The fact that embodiment situates one’s political experiences should have long ago become the starting point of theorizing how to create a better world. In this book, Hawkesworth sets out to synthesize scholarship that makes this fact incontrovertible.

The book begins with a discussion of a Canadian legal case concerning the exclusion of Kimberly Nixon from training to become a volunteer with the Vancouver Rape Relief Society. In August 1995, Kimberly Nixon, a trans woman, was taken aside by a training facilitator who asked her if she had been a woman since birth. After revealing that she had undergone sex transformation surgery five years earlier in 1990, Nixon was cut from the program because she had not been “oppressed since birth.” Nixon subsequently filed a case with the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which ruled in her favor in 2000, but on appeal the case landed in the BC Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled against Nixon.

In the first chapter of the book titled “Sexed Bodies: Provocations,” Hawkesworth offers a detailed reading of the decision by the leading justice on this case; she does so to introduce the thorny issues presented by the fact that we are all embodied individuals subject to political interpretation by courts, legislatures, executives, and even state, city, and local ordinances. Yet, as Hawkesworth deftly notes, if we look to the Western tradition of political theory, we routinely see sex, gender, and race presented as natural, pre-political, or even nonexistent or at least not worth worrying over or theorizing. In subsequent chapters of the book, Hawkesworth organizes her discussion into these themes: “Conceptualizing Gender,” “Theorizing Embodiment,” “Refiguring the Public and Private,” “Analyzing the State and the Nation,” and “Reconceptualizing Injustice.”

The book is at its best when discussing specific everyday examples that bring to life the many processes—public and private; local, state, national, and international; social and legal— that work to produce hierarchies within the population based on interpretations of embodiment. The last section of the chapter, “Analyzing the State and the Nation,” is exemplary in this regard. Discussing dress codes, Hawkesworth shows that stringent dress regulations are not just a feature of authoritarian regimes, but are also remarkably present in liberal democratic nations such as our own. She cites evidence from scholars who document that between 1848 and 1914, 45 cities in 21 US states passed laws against cross-dressing to prevent “gender fraud” (p. 137) and that, even today, women’s dress is often cited as a reason for rape. She introduces a section on post–Civil War Black Codes mandating that for Blacks, “standing on public sidewalks was criminalized as loitering” and that “failure to step into the gutter when a white person passed on a sidewalk was deemed a disruption of public order” (p. 139). Not much has changed as we think about police regulation, intervention, and even the murder of those seen driving while Black, texting while Black, shopping while Black, running while Black, and gathering while Black.

I also appreciate Hawkesworth’s practice of centering scholarship that makes the lived experience of people from oppressed categories the focus of attention. The book casually, and rightly (to my mind), assumes that political thinkers must take as their starting point the fact that we are entangled within spaces, time, and cultures that mark us by predetermined meanings attached to our bodies; that we are always situated in relationship to others; that freedom cannot be accomplished or experienced alone; and that, to work toward a more egalitarian and democratic future, we must join in coalition with others to listen and learn as we attempt to transform our world as well as ourselves within it. Although, to this reader, this is the political point of the book, as well as the reason to critique methods of political thinking that deny these conditions, Hawkesworth never directly (or indirectly) acknowledges these as her goals.

The first sentence of the final paragraph of the book states, “Despite diverse analytical approaches, contemporary feminist theory routinely involves disidentification from some of the guiding precepts of political theory, such as the norm of neutral, distanced, dispassionate analysis, and the quest for universal explanations” (p. 193). She ends the book with this sentence: “By troubling false universals and confining stereotypes, this form of feminist theorizing seeks to enable new ways of thinking, thereby creating the conditions of possibility for new modes of social, political, and intellectual life” (p. 193). Here I come to my criticism of this informative, scholarly, and well-researched book. My concern is that, although Hawkesworth is rightly critical of the “norms” just stated, her own writing style is itself dispassionate, analytical, neutral, and distanced. Packed with the work of other scholars, this book is primarily concerned with synthesis of material, and Hawkesworth does not amplify nor make space for her own voice. At times, I struggled to find the argument, and I looked to subheadings and section breaks to try to situate where she was headed in the narrative. Additionally, there are long indented quotations, and it was never apparent to me why certain scholars and contributions were studied in depth, some were quickly glossed, and others do not appear at all.

Scholars already familiar with the scholarship cited in the text will likely get the most out of Hawkesworth’s contribution, and graduate students will also find the synthesis of material useful and noteworthy. This is an important contribution to why and how the body needs to be the starting point of political theorizing, a perspective that, although studied now for several decades, has yet to be our default mode of engagement.