Pressure to make policy issues gender neutral, as in the cases of policy debates concerning child care and anti-violence against women, had initially been put onto public policy agendas by feminist advocates. The broader influence of neoliberalism and post-neoliberalism (also known as the social-investment perspective) in Canada has amplified this trend. Global trends toward neoliberalism encouraged less state involvement and reduced public spending on the welfare state from the 1980s into the 1990s, with detrimental effects on women's policy. Moreover, feminist women's groups and women's issues were increasingly labeled “special interests”; advocacy claims toward the state were routinely delegitimized by successive provincial and federal governments, although this trend was less pronounced under left-wing regimes than right-wing ones (Collier 2006; 2009). As Canada entered the new millennium, many social-policy researchers identified a renewed state interest in reinvestment in social programs to position the state better in a competitive global marketplace. This newer shift toward the “social-investment perspective” is alleged to have consciously erased gender from social policy debates, particularly in the child-care arena (see Jenson 2009).

As global society has observed the rise of women's rights and their development in a context of globalization, much research has focused on the conditions under which women's rights are acquired (e.g., Fallon 2003; Ferree 2006; Viterna and Fallon 2008). These include domestic conditions, such as democratization, economic development, and women's representation in national politics, as well as transnational conditions, such as neoliberal restructuring and transnational women's movements. Most studies, however, focus merely on one dimension of women's rights or explore one case in depth. Few studies compare cases of women's rights cross-nationally or longitudinally. This limitation can create much confusion in determining the factors that are influential or negligible for women's rights. By replicating and extending a recently published article focusing on women's social rights (Yoo 2011), I seek to distinguish the factors that are more and less influential in explaining women's political, economic, and social rights globally.

The aim of this article is to provide new insights into theorizing on “critical mass” and “critical acts,” a widely studied topic within feminist political science. From a more comprehensive viewpoint, these concepts are linked to the descriptive and substantive representation of women (hereafter referred to, in short, as DRW and SRW). The aim is to apply and test a key element—the recruitment hypothesis—with empirical data from Finnish parliamentary standing-committee hearings. The project simultaneously serves to pinpoint theoretical and methodological problems in the way we conceive and study DRW and its potential effects regarding SRW. The overall implications of the study represent a profound challenge to theorists and empiricists alike: Perhaps we should reconsider some of our beliefs concerning the accumulation of knowledge in this field from the perspective of “strong objectivity” and start reviewing fundamental assumptions that underpin our concepts of “critical” mass and acts.

Intersectionality has long been a cornerstone of feminist discussion and scholarship around the world (McClintock 1995; Rao 2012). But the concept itself—intersectionality—continues to demand additional explication, interrogation, and development. In 2005, Politics & Gender published a Critical Perspectives on intersectionality that generated a great deal of interest and debate. A recent mini symposium in Political Research Quarterly coedited by Evelyn Simien and Ange-Marie Hancock (2011) further extended this discussion, providing contributions from across subfields in political science to enrich the theoretical arguments and empirical explorations of topics that intersect and combine issues of sexual orientation, race, gender, class, and national origin across the world. This Critical Perspectives seeks to build on these foundations by contributing additional empirical and theoretical attention to the ways in which intersectional analysis can render certain experiences of oppression invisible or seemingly out of the bounds of politics.

“What does queer theory teach us about x?” ask Berlant and Warner (1995). “As difficult as it would be to spell out programmatic content for an answer, this simple question still has the power to wrench frames” (p. 348). This challenge comes from an early essay published to circumvent queer theory's appropriation. Its power “to wrench frames” is what I am posing to intersectional research, not only to reflect on what intersectionality has allowed feminists to accomplish but also to identify some existing shortcomings in the scope and domain of its employment. Because there is little disputing intersectionality's theoretical contribution to feminist research in the past decades—one scholar calls it “the most important theoretical contribution that women's studies . . . has made so far” (McCall 2005, 1771)—it is important for us to take stock of the sorts of political problems that intersectional scholarship has addressed and the ones to which it has often been inattentive.

“Here Come the (Stylish) Grooms,” declared the headline, which was accompanied by a 9 1/2-inch-high photograph of two smiling, dancing, and, yes, stylish grooms. The article appeared on the front page of the Thursday Styles section of the October 20, 2011 edition of the New York Times. Alluding to the New York State law passed in June of that year that gave legal recognition to same-sex marriage, it began, “As they walk down the aisle, gay couples are making new rules while keeping some old ones.”

Disability is the new gender. I make this claim with trepidation and a sense of irony. Certainly, disability studies today is like women's studies was in the 1970s and 1980s, when feminist scholars had to convince colleagues in “mainstream” political science that gender was something worth attending to, that it was a serious enterprise, and that it should be part of the mainstream. The fields of history and English have been somewhat more welcoming of disability as a valid topic of study, just as these fields preceded political science in realizing that gender was an important category of study. But political science has been slow to catch on.

In my recent explorations of black women as subjects in research-length articles that employ intersectionality, I discovered that black women are rarely, if at all, the sole subjects of such research projects (Jordan-Zachery 2011). This analysis focused on articles published, between 1996 and 2010, in two political science journals that are often ranked at the top—American Political Science Review and Journal of Politics (see Garand and Giles, 2003, on the issue of journal ranking). Also included were two political science journals whose central focus is women and politics, generally defined—Journal of Women Politics and Policy and Women & Politics. My analysis was limited to research-length articles with a U.S.-based emphasis. The data suggest the following trends: Research on intersectionality tended to treat black women in a monolithic manner; only a certain group of black women served as research subjects (elected officials dominated the research); and research tended to focus on structural and political intersectionality while ignoring representational intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991).

At the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, I presented the harrowing story of Judge Edward Aaron. In 1957, Aaron was tortured and castrated at the hands of several members of the Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy in an attempt to send a threatening message to black Civil Rights activists. At the conclusion of the panel, a male audience member asked, “Was he [Judge Aaron] raped?” I was stunned by this question; to me, it seemed obvious that Aaron had been sexually violated, at the very least, and my answer relayed my sense of the events as a sexual crime. It was clear, however, that this man, like many others, read the violation of Aaron, and many other black men, as being some other class of crime. In the absence of penetrative sex, he could not frame Aaron's assault as a sexual crime. In part, this is because in the absence of penetration, we do not generally read the male body as vulnerable and open to sexual abuse in the same way as the female body. For obvious reasons, lynching is bound up with sex. The narrative of the “black male rapist” is quite pervasive. Nevertheless, we tend to default to an almost exclusively racial lens when viewing lynching. This essay does not aim to displace this idea but to make a critical intervention in the conversation by suggesting that lynching can be understood as a type of racialized, sexual violence that uniquely harms black men.

“Intersectional analysis,” or “intersectionality,” is a concept that is widely used in various academic disciplines to explain and articulate the oppressions faced by the “multiply minoritized” (Vidal-Ortiz 2006), those marginalized by their sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, and national identities. We are concerned that “sexuality” as an identity used in intersectional analysis is perhaps overly reductive, sometimes telling nothing more than whether someone is “straight” or “gay,” rather than leaving room to interrogate the complicated, diverse landscape that is at the intersection of gender, sex, and sexuality. In this essay, we apply a queer-theory critique of intersectionality to demonstrate how human-trafficking policy, particularly as it relates to sex trafficking, is productive of what Valentine (2007) calls culturally constructed and deployed identity categories, resulting in inclusion of some and exclusion of others. We aim to show how social science research that relies on normative identity categories can lead to incomplete intersectional analyses.