Transforming conceptual insights about gender into political practice is a critical element of feminist scholarship in the field of political science. This transformational project often entails engagement with activism and advocacy. Examining particular activist modes of translation has been the focus of my own scholarship beginning with my work in the Women and Politics program and at the Center for American Women and Politics while in graduate school at Rutgers. Feminist theorizing, Grosz explains (Reference Grosz2010, 96), “enable[s] us to understand the logic at work in culture, social relations, or individual psychology, its points of vulnerability and its capacity for change.” Moreover, feminist theorizing is self-consciously normative; it is about exposing, explaining, and elaborating that which makes possible systems of injustice, with the goal of bringing forth a more gender-just reality.
The international human rights system shares an intentionally normative approach with feminist theory; both have a raison d'être about promoting a world where individuals and groups of people are not unjustly treated simply because of who they are, what they believe, where they live, with whom they have sex, or what they do. The past two plus decades, however, have seen the emergence of sustained substantive discussion of women's human rights. Feminist activists and scholars have dramatically increased investments in the discourse and politics of the international human rights system in the last 25 years because they saw the human rights discourse offering a framework with more general political legitimacy than feminism. Moreover, they observed that human rights, as international norms and standards, provided institutional mechanisms that they hoped could be mobilized for feminist ends. Since feminist work in the human rights arena has always been about making both conceptual and practical inroads, it is a particularly interesting place from which to think about the relationship between feminist theorizing and its translation or transformation into political practice (Liebowitz Reference Liebowitz, Rai and Waylen2008a).
The need to examine why and how work on gender manifests in policy is becoming more urgent as feminists can claim an increasing number of policy “successes” in the sphere of international politics. Many governments and international organizations, like the United Nations, World Bank, and the European Union, have, for instance, adopted policies of “gender mainstreaming.” Even the United Nations’ Security Council has responded to pressure from advocates for gender justice by passing five resolutions related to women, peace, and security between 2000 and 2010. The same kinds of policy successes are increasingly evident in the area of women, gender, and human rights. But without more attention to what happens to ideas about gender inequality as they become policy directives, these policy successes are unlikely to yield desired results.
GENDER AS A CONCEPT VERSUS A POLICY DIRECTIVE
Feminist theorizing, in and out of political science, is theoretically sophisticated, incorporating not only an understanding of gender as socially constructed inequalities, but also the complex ways that disembodied ideas about gender, masculinity, and femininity structure binary categories that undergird the polity. Increasingly, these ideas incorporate an intersectional analysis of the relationship among hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, ability, class, and the like. Yet these ideas about gender are not so easily translated into policy directives. As my own research on women's human rights policy illustrates, complex ideas about gender are often reduced to looking only at where women are located, without sufficient attention to how to avoid this reductive impulse in policy making and implementation.
In this brief essay, I focus on this tendency toward reductionism by looking at the implementation of a women's human rights law passed in San Francisco in 1998 (modeled on the CEDAW Convention).Footnote 1 This ordinance instituted a number of important changes in policy and practice, many of which are detailed in my report assessing the law's implementation (Liebowitz Reference Liebowitz2008b). The challenges that arose in this law's implementation are particularly instructive because the city bureaucrats, to whom I will refer, clearly wanted the law to reduce gendered inequalities. They largely considered themselves feminists and were motivated to have their agencies implement the policy. Moreover, the policy itself was largely crafted by feminist activists working on behalf of women's, immigrant, and human rights groups. In other words, the challenges discussed here are not reflective of a general lack of interest or the product of manipulative attempts to subvert the law. Rather, the limitations I identify demonstrate the undeveloped space that exists between feminist ideas and policy directives.
The San Francisco ordinance requires the city government to assess its policies and practices to ensure that all municipal acts are nondiscriminatory and appropriate to meeting the needs of all communities of women and girls. The ordinance's primary mechanism for so doing is the requirement that city agencies and departments undergo a “gender analysis,” monitored by a committee set up for this purpose and intended “as a preventive tool to identify discrimination and, if identified, to remedy that discrimination.”Footnote 2 The CEDAW gender analysis tool provides a framework for examining the civil, cultural, economic, legal, political, and social relations between and among women and men, taking account of the ways that gender is linked to other identity categories like race, immigration status, etc. The gender analysis tool specifically requires government agencies to examine their actions, policies, programs, services, and employment practices to ensure that they are nondiscriminatory, relevant, and gender appropriate and that they fully serve all communities of women and girls (Liebowitz Reference Liebowitz2008b).
The San Francisco Department on the Environment (DEP) was widely regarded as the ordinance's departmental poster child by the feminist advocates who helped pass the law and those on the committee charged with monitoring its implementation. Despite this, the DEP was able to use the gender analysis process to make changes only in the area of employment. Through their use of the “gender analysis tool,” DEP bureaucrats ensured a diverse pool of workers and pushed for environmentally friendly city-wide programs with the residual benefit of providing additional workplace flexibility that benefitted workers with caretaking responsibilities. They were not able to make corresponding changes in their programmatic work, and, indeed, my interviewees were explicit about their inability to understand what it would mean to do so. DEP bureaucrats did not know how to examine whether their programs and services were shaped by or through ideas about gender, race, class, and the intersections thereof.
The Department on the Status of Women (DOSW), the city agency charged with leading the process of CEDAW implementation in the city, ran into the same barrier when they used the gender analysis tool. The DOSW subcontracts with a host of community-based organizations, and rather than using the process to evaluate the type of issues their subcontractors address or how their grantees operationalize and conceptualize their gender equality work, they investigated whether the agencies to which they subcontracted were headed by women or men. In the end, they concluded that their programs were in line with the substantive norms of nondiscrimination and equality articulated in the human rights ordinance because the majority of these agencies were headed by women.
The limited responses of these two departments reflect their inability to comprehend the theoretical constructs undergirding the policy directive. In both departments, the responsible staff was unable to distinguish between “women” as an embodied, biologically constituted category and “gender” as a set of social relations and hierarchies that structure and shape human interaction, policies, and practices. Fully implementing this feminist human rights ordinance would have required moving beyond looking at where and how women were situated to using gender as an analytic category, yet none of these actors had a clear sense of what this actually meant. The result of this incomprehension is that the gender justice vision that drove the policy's development is not being fully realized in governance practice.
CONCLUSION
The fact that motivated, concerned, self-identified “feminist” bureaucrats could not figure out what it would mean to implement this law fully, speaks to the role that individuals and small groups play in the norm diffusion process. They are integral to the process of “vernacularization”—of appropriating ideas and translating them into local realities (Levitt and Merry Reference Levitt and Merry2009). These actors are the bridge builders connecting theory and practice and as such are critical to processes of change (Acharya Reference Acharya2004; Liebowitz Reference Liebowitz2002). And, as these examples illustrate, we have a lot more work to do to ensure that the vernacular of the “vernacularizers” actually manifests the content of the ideas and translates complex analyses of social and political relations into policies with the potential for far-reaching impact.
The case of San Francisco's women's human rights law illustrates the wide (even yawning) gap between theoretical articulations of women's human rights norms—those promoted and articulated by feminist activists and scholars—and concrete political action at the policy level. This is evident even in cases where individuals and institutions are motivated to use these ideas to shape their work. The inability of these government officials to conduct a full gender analysis of their programs and budget highlights what I see as a central challenge facing scholars of gender, politics, and human rights today: how to make the links between feminist theory and political practices (my interest in which was piqued by the strength of the Women and Politics program at Rutgers). We need more concretely and specifically to engage in the theory-practice translation process, recognizing that the common conceptual and practical elision between definitions of women and gender constrains our ability to use the tools of governance to make substantive political change.
