Household Hierarchies, Patriarchial Power, and Political Participation

While gender and sexuality aren’t “new topics” within political science, some subfields still privilege white, straight men and deny the full complexity of genders and sexualities. Halvard Leira, reviewing Elise Stephenson’s The Face of the Nation, notes that diplomatic studies only recently began to take women’s roles seriously. Stephenson’s book, based on interviews, historical analysis, and statistics, explores the “path-dependencies and institutional inertia which help perpetuate gender (and other) inequalities” in Australia’s diplomatic corps (see review, this issue). For instance, female diplomats accompanied abroad by a wife often had an easier time—revealing the ongoing challenge of balancing unpaid and paid labor, even at the upper echelons of government service. Similarly, Blessing-Miles Tendi’s The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe: Gender, Coups, and Diplomats argues that scholars have not paid enough attention to gender and gendered performance in their study of coups. Tendi shows how feminized language and sexism shaped the 2017 Zimbabwe coup. As Tendai Mangena notes in his review, Tendi’s study underscores “the patriarchal notion that international diplomacy is … a men’s game” (p. 147).

Patriarchal power and gendered divisions of labor also hinder women’s political agency. In The Patriarchal Political Order: The Making and Unraveling of the Gendered Participation Gap in India, Soledad Artiz Prillaman explores why Indian women’s rising voter turnout has not also been reflected in broader political participation, like attending meetings or campaigning. As Anirvan Chowdhury points out in her review, “household hierarchies” where “male family members act as gatekeepers” limit women’s political involvement in Madhya Pradesh. Whereas many men see women in their household voting as a way to “amplify” their own political clout, other forms of women’s political engagement may in fact be costly. These dynamics echo critiques made by Progressive-era feminists and antiracist activists of the U.S.’s “inconsistent democracy,” where universalist language does not translate into substantive equality. Leslie Butler’s Consistent Democracy revisits 19th-century U.S. debates over the “woman question,” as writers probed “the inconsistencies of a democracy in principle that supported in practice the institution of slavery and a patriarchal marriage contract” (see Critical Dialogue, this issue). Similarly, Wendy Sarvasy emphasizes that Progressive-era women saw economic independence as key to democratic participation. In Refounding Democracy, she imagines a set of “intersectional conversations” between thinkers like Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Rose Schneiderman, and Pauline Newman, whose democratic insights drew directly on their activism (see Critical Dialogue, this issue).

As Chowdhury writes in their review of The Patriarchal Political Order, political scientists must grapple with “power—how it is distributed, sustained, and reconfigured, within and beyond the household.” The design of our political institutions also shapes how women and sexual minorities are represented. Christina Xydias’ Beyond Left, Right, and Center finds that German parties “across the ideological map” fail to adequately represent multiply marginalized women and that traditional “left” parties can often be unreliable allies for women and women’s issues. Or as Francesca Scrinzi notes, while “the radical right has traditionally been seen as monolithically sexist… it does not have the monopoly of sexism” (see Critical Dialogue, this issue).

The Gendered, Racialized, and Imperial Conditions of Disciplinary Knowledge Production

But parliaments aren’t the only institutions where elite men consolidate power and authority at the expense of women and LGBTQ+ communities. As feminists have long noted, universities have also been shaped by white male gatekeepers from privileged backgrounds who determine whose knowledge counts. In Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men, Patricia Owens examines the early history of British International Relations, showing how women intellectuals were marginalized and silenced during the discipline’s formative decades (see symposium, this issue). While the title suggests a history without men, Owens acknowledges such a task is impossible: “I could not write the story of British IR without the men who were dependent on a racialized and heterosexual gender order that pushed out women and elevated white male mediocrities” (p. 11). The book details how male gatekeepers excluded women from the discipline and the canon through “outright intellectual appropriation and plagiarism,” “dismissive gendered” language, biased hiring and promotion practices, and the “devaluation of feminized labor” (see Kristensen’s review, this issue). Florence Melian Stawell had her book proposal stolen by Gilbert Murray, her mentor. Lucie Zimmern was reduced to her husband’s thinking. Other women were treated as mere “assistants,” even though they made substantive contributions to data analysis, archival research, and teaching. As Kristensen notes, being mentioned in the “acknowledgements does not get you tenure.” Even permanent posts did not guarantee respect; Sandra Whitworth’s review highlights the “many instances in which…men expend considerable effort to make the professional lives of these women unbearable” (see review, this issue).

Owens embarks on a radical act of reclamation, reconstructing the lives and intellectual contributions of 18 women who shaped thinking about the (imperial) international: Lucie Barbier Zimmern, Margery Perham, Eileen Power, Lucy Philip Mail, Lilian Friedlӓnder Vránek, Merze Tate, Agnes Headlam-Morley, Claudia Jones, Margaret Cleeve, Coral Bell, Rachel Wall Susan Strange, F. Melian Stawell, Elizabeth Wiskemann, Gwaladys Jones, Sibyl Crowe, Lilian Knowles and Betty Behrens. As Whitworth writes, “it surprised me (mortified me would not be an exaggeration) to discover I’d spent my entire career teaching International Relations as someone associated with feminist IR and yet knew nothing about most of these women.” These erasures matter not only for what they reveal about the men who shaped IR in the UK but also because “the discipline might have looked quite different” had these women’s contributions been recognized (see Tickner review). Owens shows that these women made use of a broader methodological toolkit than their male peers, embracing interdisciplinary and more historically informed approaches. And they foregrounded political questions that disciplinary IR tried to forget—including British imperialism and racism. Erased, in turn, raises urgent questions for political science today about who we canonize, who we exclude, and how knowledge is produced and legitimated. As Jenna Marshall notes in her review, “decolonial scholars… may demand that we extend this exercise further still to displace the exclusions built into the scholastic episteme,” such as the foreclosure of Indigenous knowledges.

British IR is not the only subfield grappling with its racialized, masculinist, and imperial foundations. In peace studies, scholars have criticized the masculinist approach to peacekeeping and the marginalization of the “peace-kept,” as Marsha Henry puts it. In Fixing Gender: The Paradoxical Politics of Training Peacekeepers, Aiko Holvikivi examines gender training for UN peacekeepers, drawing on field experience and ethnographic work carried out in Europe and Africa. These courses often reproduce colonial thinking and heteronormativity, Holvikivi concludes, while also leaning into militarized masculinities. The authoritative knowers who design and implement the courses hail from the Global North, while women in conflict zones in the Global South are treated as “objects of knowledge,” their experiences used without citation, as Karie Cross Riddle notes (see Critical Dialogue, this issue). Henry takes the critique further in The End of Peacekeeping, arguing UN peacekeeping is “a male-dominated, colonial, and militarist power-project that needs to be abolished” (p. 4) (see Jenny Lorentzen’s review). This abolitionist stance echoes Vasuki Nesiah’s critiques in International Conflict Feminism, which examines how the UN’s “Women, Peace, and Security Agenda” mobilizes racialized and gendered tropes of “women in need of protection” (see Laura J. Shepherd’s review). Such narratives cast the international community as the noble “protector” and deny women in conflict zones their agency. This is why Nesiah describes this version of International Conflict Feminism as an “imperial feminism” that reproduces racialized and neocolonial relations of power.

These critiques have led scholars like Shepherd to seek “feminist engagements with peace and security that exist in parallel to, below, or outside of contemporary systems of global governance.” Riddle makes a similar attempt in Critical Feminist Justpeace, which draws on extended fieldwork in Manipur to examine women’s peacebuilding activities that take place outside of the WPS framework. As Holvikivi summarizes, the book details “life under martial law, extrajudicial killings, inter-ethnic violence, and the struggles of women widowed by the conflict; as well as their remarkable acts of protest, practices of mutual care, and attempts at inter-ethnic dialogue” (see Critical Dialogue). Riddle’s work exemplifies ethical field research in conflict zones and reminds us that women are already practicing peace-making and peacekeeping at the grassroots level.

Intersectionality and the Analysis of Multiple Marginalizations

Women’s subordination, of course, must be situated with respect to what Patricia Hill Collins calls, in Black Feminist Thought (Routledge, 2000, p. 228), the interlocking “matrices of domination” that operate through race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, nationality, and ability. Several books reviewed in this issue stress the importance of adopting an intersectional approach to gender and sexuality in political science. Intersectionality has long been central to Black feminist scholarship, but as Jessica D. Johnson Carew notes in her review of Intersectional Solidarity: Black Women and the Politics of Group Consciousness (this issue), the concept has since been “appropriated, repackaged, and commodified… [erasing] the original purpose.” By contrast, Chaya Y. Crowder’s book shows us that “intersectional solidarity is distinct from concepts such as empathy, racial sympathy, altruism, and linked fate” in that it stresses an awareness of multiple forms of marginalization—and a commitment to the politics that would alleviate them. In turn, Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar, and G. Venkatasubramanian use an intersectional lens to examine caste stigma faced by Dalit women in rural India when it comes to securing credit. In The Indebted Woman, they explore “debt as a patriarchal power relation,” challenging the neoliberal celebration of microfinance as a tool for women’s empowerment (see Smitha Radhakrishnan’s review). And they show how women become entangled in power asymmetries as they seek to manage household and kin debts, at times by offering “the bodily collateral…that makes women creditworthy under neoliberalism,” as Radhakrishnan summarizes.

It is not just caste and capitalism that hierarchically differentiate between women. States also play a vital role in managing and policing gendered and sexualized difference. In The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State, Gina Vale shows how the IS proto-state institutionalized “strict hierarchies based on gender and Sunni Arab identity that subordinated Kurds and Ezidis” (see R. Latham Lechowick’s review). Vale’s book underscores the need to avoid treating women living under extremist movements as a monolith and to reckon with the “intersectional hierarchies [that] determine women’s access to rights, resources, and protection,” as Lechowick concludes. State bureaucracies also shape gendered, racialized, and sexualized hierarchies in the Global North. As Douglas Page explores in a review essay in this issue, European states have recognized certain LGTBQ+ communities when it serves their interests. For instance, Koen Slootmaeckers demonstrates in Coming In how Serbia used a “Ghost Pride” to performatively demonstrate LGBTQ+ friendliness to the European Union while seeking member status, despite prior opposition. In turn, Katharina Kehl (Boundaries of Queerness) and Christopher Ewing (The Color of Desire) explore how the radical right in both Sweden and Germany weaponizes queer politics to assert Western moral superiority over Muslim “Others.” Similarly, in The Racialization of Sexism, Scrinzi shows how France’s Front National and Italy’s Legal Nord instrumentalize “women’s rights” talk to ground a racialized civilizational antagonism between Europe and Muslim communities (see Critical Dialogue).

The radical right’s weaponization of grievance against migrants and racialized minorities reminds us that victimhood is never apolitical. As Lilie Chouliaraki puts it, “the figure of the victim… is a contingent and performative political category” (see Critical Dialogue). In Wronged, Chouliaraki explores how pain becomes a basis for political claim-making over and against others, from the #MeToo movement to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is why, Roxani Krystalli cautions in response, “we must ask what political work different claims to victimhood are doing and what power actors are mobilizing in the process of making these claims.” In Good Victims, Krystalli draws on ethnographic work in post-conflict Colombia to show how women must navigate state bureaucracy to win recognition of and compensation for their “victimhood.” These institutions, however, are more accessible to some victims than others. As Chouliaraki notes, “Not all citizens possess the status credentials, cultural capital or communicative fluency required to render their pain recognizable.” In turn, Juliet Hooker warns that, in a racial democracy like that of the U.S., not all losses will be recognized as grievable (see Critical Dialogue, this issue). In Black Grief/White Grievance, she points out that U.S. histories of settler colonialism and racial slavery mean that certain groups (Indigenous peoples, Black Americans) are always forced to bear losses, while white Americans organize around “anticipatory loss”—fears of losing their privileges. Hooker calls for a politics that refuses to instrumentalize Black grief for white recognition. As Lisa Beard writes in their review, “loss doesn’t automatically make a we.”

People inhabit multiple identities, and practices of identification are more complex and contradictory than many crude versions of identity politics suggest. As Michele Margolis remarks in her review of Yes Gawd!, many assume that LGBTQ+ individuals will not also hold strong religious beliefs. But Royal G. Cravens III finds that many LGBTQ+ Americans remain committed to their religious identities, even as those identities may shift through the coming-out process. Adopting a complex and nuanced approach to identity is therefore critical. As Margolis writes, “we cannot silo identities and experiences.” This is why Beard calls for a renewed attention to the politics of identification and the construction of solidarities across reified group boundaries. In If We Were Kin, they explore “intimate identificatory appeals crafted by Black, Latinx, and queer and trans activists and thinkers” in the U.S. (see Hooker’s review). Activists like Sylvia Rivera called upon differently situated others to recognize their political “kinship,” Beard argues. This is a “hopeful,” nonessentialist identity politics which foregrounds “more expansive visions of political community,” as Hooker puts it.

Capitalism, Depletion, and the Crisis of Care

No reckoning with the role of gender and sexuality in shaping our political worlds is complete without a critique of capitalism and its gendered devaluation of unpaid care work. As Fiona Robinson notes in a review essay in this issue, “capitalism is reliant on care for its continued functioning and yet simultaneously fails to support or invest in that care work”—with devastating effects on women, especially on poor women, women of color, and migrant women. In Depletion, Shirin Rai theorizes the harmful effects of unrecognized and undervalued care as “depletion” (see symposium). Depletion, as Rachel Brown summarizes, is when “the ‘outflows’ of engaging in socially reproductive labor (stress, poor health, social isolation) exceed the ‘inflows’ (familial and community support, adequate welfare policies, health care).” As Christopher Paul Harris writes, “care work has consequences,” burdening individuals, households, and communities. Rai’s case studies from India, the U.K. and the Eastern Cape in South Africa, show “how harm is incurred unevenly across race, class, sexuality, ableism, location, and other axes of difference,” as Catherine Rottenberg puts it. For Rai, identifying depletion is the first step toward reversing it.

The care crisis—thrown into sharp relief by COVID—has sparked a “radical turn” in these debates, Robinson argues. In Revolutionary Care, Maurice Hamington calls care a “categorical commitment—the foundation of our moral selves and an expression of our relational humanity” (p. 68). It should be central to our politics, rather than devalued and ignored. In Lean on Me, Lynne Segal similarly advocates for “caring futures,” emphasizing everyday acts of compassion and resistance to institutions like the carceral state. More pragmatically, Jennifer Nedelsky and Tom Malleson propose “Part-Time for All”—a strategy for reducing the hours of paid work in the Global North to enable us to care more and care better. While their strategies for dismantling our “collective failure to care,” differ, Robinson points out these authors share “the same kind of optimistic urgency” and a “conviction that care must provide the basis for a new radical, even revolutionary, politics.”

Where does that leave scholars in political science? What might it mean to embody an ethos of care within academic institutions and disciplinary norms? Many authors reviewed here take up these ethical concerns, especially around questions of methodology. As Erased shows, which methods are accepted or sidelined within political science is itself political. Methods shape what we see and how we interpret. Harris emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches, where “our methods… stem from the questions we ask,” not disciplinary trends. Scholars like Riddle, Scrinzi, and Rai used ethnography and storytelling to better listen to women as they narrate their lives. And historically minded researchers like Owens developed new tactics for working with incomplete archives to recover women’s stories. Regardless of method, Holvikivi stresses that feminist research must attend to reflexivity and the “politics of location”—often beginning with one’s own body. Or as Chouliaraki puts it, “writing from the body is, to me, about writing with accountability; about understanding that our positions, our privileges and our vulnerabilities shape what we can see and how we can speak.”