Collection: Gender and Politics
As a taster of our publishing on Gender and Politics, we put together a collection of free articles, chapters and open access titles. If you are interested in trying out more content from our Politics and International Relations Collection, European Journal of Politics and Gender, our brand new Gender and Justice journal, or research on Global Social Challenges themes, ask your librarian to sign up for a free trial.
Gender and Politics Collection
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This introductory chapter introduces the readers to the rise, diffusion and contestation of pro-gender equality norms and feminisms in foreign policy. It presents the core research questions that provide the overarching rationale and the theoretical framework guiding the book and its focus on foreign policy change and continuity. How can feminist scholarship advance the field of foreign policy analysis to understand contemporary foreign policy actions and challenges? The chapter provides the latest state of the art in the study of gender, feminisms and foreign policy, and presents the emerging new subfield of feminist foreign policy analysis. It identifies new novel avenues for scholarship by drawing upon two strands of research: feminist International Relations theory and foreign policy analysis. Finally, the chapter introduces the contributing chapters of this book.
In 2016, by moving from armed struggle to collective reincorporation, Colombian women ex-guerrilleras of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP) – the farianas – reconfigured the ‘combatant’ identity by leaving their weapons and engaging in post-war politics with their own feminist vision: insurgent feminism. Drawing upon feminist ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the north-east of Colombia in 2019 and 2022, this article has two interlinked objectives. First, through the lenses of embodiment and affects, it explores the challenges and contradictions of transiting from an armed organisation to a civilian identity for women militants. From there, the article then uses the continuum of militancy to explore the (ongoing) consolidation of farianas’ insurgent feminism and the tensions emerging in this endeavour. In doing so, the article contributes, theoretically, to the inclusion of emotions and embodiment in the theorisation of reincorporation and, empirically and politically, to the construction of knowledge and practice about insurgent feminism.
This article examines the potential of feminist democratic innovations in policy and institutional politics. It examines how feminist democratic innovations can be conceptualised and articulated in local institutions. Combining theories on democratic governance, feminist democracy, social movements, municipalism, decentralisation, gender equality policies and state feminism, it conceptualises feminist democratic innovations in policy and politics as innovations oriented at (a) transforming knowledge, (b) transforming policymaking and public funding, (c) transforming institutions, and (d) transforming actors’ coalitions. Through analysis of municipal plans and interviews with key actors, the article examines feminist democratic innovations in the policy and politics of Barcelona’s local government from 2015 to 2023. Emerging from the mobilisation of progressive social movements after the 2008 economic crisis, the findings uncover a laboratory of feminist municipal politics, following the election of a new government and self-proclaimed feminist mayor. Critical actors and an enabling political context play a pivotal role in the adoption of this feminist institutional politics. The article concludes by arguing that feminist institutional politics at the local level contribute to democratising policy and politics in innovative ways, in particular encouraging inclusive intersectionality and participatory discourses and practices.
This chapter explains that gender is not simply a binary. It is also a hierarchy of masculinity over femininity. Within that hierarchy there are ‘nested’ hierarchies of some men over others. This chapter also distinguishes between domination and hegemony, which is domination by consent. And it explains that masculinity and femininity are asymmetrical. Men can stand for generic, de-gendered humanity. When they are gendered as overtly male, that representation is moralised as good. Moral badness is then displaced into a generic human nature. Women have only the overtly gendered option. Men thus accumulate power within hierarchies of domination and subordination by mutual consent.
This chapter establishes the original contribution of the book by addressing why this research is necessary, where it sits within the existing literature and how this research has been conducted. Firstly, this chapter illustrates the timeliness of the book with reference to women’s renewed activism against sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the film and television industries and in the trade union movement. Secondly, this chapter explains the rationale for its focus and establishes the three central themes which underpin the book’s analysis of the relationship between women and trade unions in the British film and television industries: the operation of a gendered union structure, women’s union activism, and the relationship between class and gender in the labour movement. Thirdly, this chapter surveys existing literature in the fields of Women’s Labour History, Industrial Relations Scholarship and Women’s Film and Television History. Fourthly, this chapter details the methodological approach of this project, which combines archival research with oral history. Finally, this chapter outlines the structure of the book.
There are multiple approaches to thinking through how scholars can conduct queer conflict research. Whether it is to queer conflict research—to disrupt and redefine existing methodological and epistemological frameworks of conflict research by drawing from queer theoretical propositions—or to engage with queer subjects during and after conflict as the focus of the research itself, the concept needs a degree of flexibility. As such, queering conflict research can extend beyond the study of LGBTIQ+ people’s experiences of political violence during conflict. Indeed, the difficulty behind this volume, as well as its strength, is the breadth of approaches that can be classified as ‘queer’. Rather than making a definitive claim about what queer conflict research is/is not, thus policing its boundaries, we aim to illuminate why queer conflict research matters. Queer scholars in this volume each take a stance on ‘the queer’ of their work and, in doing so, they ask how their positionality matters in queer conflict research. In this introduction, we detail how this volume brings together a series of different queer methodological approaches to address the epistemological (what), methodological (how), and ethical (why) issues of queer scholarship in studies on conflict and political violence.
It is now more than one hundred years since women gained the right to vote and stand as parliamentary candidates in the UK. Just as progress to reach that point was somewhat glacial, progress since that time has been almost as slow. While women became members of parliament quite soon after women’s suffrage, it would take six decades before a woman was elected prime minister for the first time. Throughout the subsequent century, the social and political lives of these women would change dramatically as a result of the political advocacy and activism of countless women (owman, 2010). Political discourse has also changed significantly over the same period because, as various legislation has been enacted to usher more and more citizens into the electorate, political parties have needed to appeal to an increasingly diverse and growing polity. The expansion of democracy placed new emphasis on the role of journalism and its ability to inform voters about politics and hold those in power to account (Temple, 2008). News media have, then, always been important in shaping what issues citizens ought to care about and whose voices are important in political debate. It is therefore crucial that news coverage of politics is inclusive and reflects the issues and concerns of all citizens.
Some twenty-five years ago (at the time of publication), Annabelle Sreberny and Karen Ross remarked that ‘work in political communication has tended to lack a gender dimension, while feminist work on the media has tended to focus on entertainment formats, rather than the “fact-based” genre of current affairs that address the viewer as a gendered citizen’ (Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ross, 1996: 103).
This article critically interrogates and evaluates the concept of political masculinities as part of enhancing dialogue between political science and critical studies on men and masculinities. It discusses what counts as masculinity, what counts as political and how they connect. The connections are all too clear in mainstream politics, not only in populist, authoritarian, ethno-nationalist and militaristic politics but also in democratic, socialist and various activist politics. The evaluation of the concept of political masculinities is conducted by asking three main questions: how does the concept add to, complement or contradict existing and established external concepts and theories? How is the concept constructed internally, and with what structure, elements and interrelations? And how can the application of the concept be possibly extended into fields beyond those usually recognized and labelled explicitly as specifically political fields, including the politics of the everyday and the politics of multiple global crises?
This chapter sets the scene for the book and introduces the book’s main research question; how are bodily fluids made to matter within the governance of international politics? The introduction then situates itself in relation to security studies, arguing in favour prioritizing terminology for queer and feminist literatures over binaries of secure/insecure. The chapter then outlines and defines the guiding research principle of a queerfeminist curiosity; the conjoining of a feminist curiosity with queer logics of both/and. The chapter then outlines how the book proceeds, and gives a brief description of the book’s methodology, which is discussed at greater length in Chapter 6.
