European Journal of Politics and Gender's Most Read Articles

Read the European Journal of Politics and Gender's top 5 most downloaded articles published in 2024. All of these articles are Open Access.

European Journal of Politics and Gender Most Read Articles

You are looking at 1 - 5 of 5 items

Author:

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?

Open access
Author:

This article presents an investigation into the lives and lived experiences of women who joined politics through quotas. In particular, it explores the transformative potential of a quota policy through the ‘subject position’ of women politicians in Nepal, especially those who had no prior background in politics before being elected to their first political positions. Using Bourdieu’s theory of capital, I reveal how political quotas have strengthened women’s overall capital, allowing them to improve their position in both their families and society. Quotas have created new roles for women. The power and prestige attached to these new roles have not only offered some immediate changes to these women’s lives, but also led to changing perceptions of women in politics, shifting the discourse from a view of women’s participation in politics as an exception to one of it as an entitlement. This article is based on a qualitative study carried out with women politicians in Nepal.

Open access
Authors: and

In recent years, feminist scholarship has contributed gender perspectives to examine extremist narratives, motivations and recruitment, as well as gender-responsive strategies to counter extremism. A systematic framework for analysing how gender operates at multiple levels to promote or counter extremisms, however, does not exist. To address this need, we offer a typology with three dimensions drawn from feminist theory: gendered identity, referring to the concept of a person’s gender; gendered ideology, referring to the role gender plays in the mobilising myths of states and non-state organisations; and gendered power dynamics, referring to the hierarchical order of femininities and masculinities structuring the environments in which extremism takes root. The article applies the gender typology to far-right, Buddhist and Islamist extremisms, illustrating the analytical power of gender to explain and interpret diverse extremisms while highlighting patterns and relationships across them in broader global politics. We argue that it is vital to study the intersecting dynamics of gender in order to both understand and challenge extremisms that are increasingly prevalent globally.

Open access

Celis and Childs have called for a ‘second generation’ of feminist scholarship on representation that foregrounds intersectional heterogeneity and emphasises responsiveness to representatives beyond parliaments. We build on these important contributions, arguing that second-generation feminist scholarship and democratic design can make the greatest gains by operationalising intersectionality in close alignment with its origins in Black feminism and critical race theory. First, to foreground intersectional heterogeneity, we posit that feminist scholarship on representation must shift away from the overarching category ‘women’, exemplified in the popular operationalisation of intersectionality as ‘diversity among women’. We instead propose a margins-to-centre approach that centres the intersections of race, gender and other power structures. Second, we exemplify what this shift looks like in practice. We show how centring racially minoritised women and the intersecting structures that position them within political institutions transforms strategies to improve responsiveness to this intersectionally marginalised group.

Open access

The year 2025 will mark 50 years since the prohibition of gender discrimination in employment in Europe. Feminist narratives of this time have often been ones of progress, despite Black feminist critique of how such legislation effaced racially minoritised women’s experiences. Why was gender equality legislation designed to mainly benefit white privileged women? What discourses were involved? Meanwhile, while the term ‘white feminism’ has recently been popularised, there has been relatively little investigation of what it comprises in politics in Europe. Drawing on cross-disciplinary empirical research on UK gender equality legislation involving analysis of parliamentary debate, archival research and oral history, this article contributes to theorisation of the tenets of white feminism, namely, as a political ideology wherein gender is constructed as the most important marker of social inequality and, specifically, as being more important than racial inequality. Ultimately, such specification aims to make white feminism in politics impossible to render neutral.

Open access