Where does gender express itself politically? What does gender mean, in political terms, for women? Is it possible to study gender expressed in and by individuals, across the aggregate, without dissecting the methodological and normative assumptions of (at least part of) our subfield?

In this Critical Perspectives section, Nancy Burns and Jane Junn speak to these questions from distinctly different but intersecting viewpoints. Both understand that the political meanings of gender are rooted in power and powerlessness, in “systematic disadvantage and advantage” (Burns, p. 104), and that our task as scholars is to explicate “when social and political contexts can make gender relevant” (p. 105). Both scholars speak primarily to gender in these essays, but also reflect on race as well.

Nancy Burns considers gender in the aggregate and in the individual, and maps how the relationship between the two might be explicated through their interaction with a theorized political context. She delineates a framework for understanding when and under what conditions “politics enables gender to shape individuals' political actions and public opinions” (p. 119). Using Burns's essay as a starting point, Jane Junn cautions us that such a project will face inherent difficulties that result from the conjunction of methodology and normative assumptions that underpin the kind of research Burns advocates. Conceptions about the individual and assumptions of “equality of agency among individuals” (p. 125), Junn argues, not only obscure political inequalities imbedded in gender but also produce unintended consequences.

Britain's use of state agencies to address gender relations has evolved significantly over the past 30 years and is currently entering a new phase, characterized by a commitment to a generic equalities, or “diversity,” approach in which multiple equality strands are to be addressed via a single equalities body, the Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR). The CEHR will replace three existing equality commissions that focus on gender, race, and disability, respectively. This shift appears to involve the demise of a singular focus on gender equality and with it the justification for separate women's policy agencies.

In the 10 years that I have conducted intersectional research, my views have changed significantly in terms of how I conceptualize the subspecialization. Originally I thought of intersectionality as a content-based specialization that emphasized the subjectivity of women who reside at the intersections of race-, gender-, class-, and sexual orientation–based marginalizations (and other categories of difference). Thinking of it in this way, with a focus on content, follows the logic of much groundbreaking work in women's studies and women and politics scholarship. The primary pursuit of this focus is inclusion – incorporating previously ignored and excluded populations into preexisting frameworks to broaden our knowledge base regarding traditional questions of political science. For example, examining gender differences in voting behavior, party identification, candidate recruitment, and social movements has contributed critical knowledge to the discipline of political science.

One might break research questions about gender and politics over time into two basic categories. On the one hand, there are questions that speak to processes unfolding, perhaps rather slowly, over time. In this long-haul category, we might find studies of such things as generational shifts in patterns of attitudes about gendered political roles (Jennings 2006) or of the development of gendered national identities with evolving constitutional interpretations (Ritter 2006). On the other hand, there are inquiries about the dynamics, or instability, of shorter-run patterns. These intellectual pursuits might include seeking to explain short-haul phenomena like changes in partisan gaps between men and women, perhaps even within the duration of a single campaign season (Sapiro and Conover 1997). Both categories, of course, are incredibly important realms of inquiry. My argument is for improvements in our studies of shorter-term dynamics and, ultimately, for the integration of studies of both short- and long-run processes, with improved measurement and modeling strategies as the crucial tools we need to get there.

On a hot 90-degree day during the summer of 2006, my six-year-old daughter looked at me and asked, “Why can boys run around without a shirt and I can't?” After I explained, or at least attempted to, society's rules and regulations, she quietly looked at me and said, “Oh! It's because I have a vagina. Well, that's not fair.” About a year earlier, as she was watching a popular children's show she asked me, “Why are there no little girls that look like me on the ‘WXY’ show?” I am still unsure as to how to answer her on her question on the omission of race. What my daughter is questioning is how does her gender and race, and their intersection, influence how she is treated in society. It is difficult to tell an impressionable child that because of factors beyond her control, her gender and her race, she will be treated differently than little boys—black or white and little girls—particularly white. My daughter is like so many other women of color and other marginalized groups who confront this issue of their omission from so many practices, structures, and institutions of society. Many theorists not only have sought ways of discussing the issues raised by my daughter but also have articulated strategies useful in addressing these “unfair” practices. Much of this theorizing has been given the name “intersectionality.”

The literature on gender and political action comes in two forms—one that is aggregate, sometimes institutional, and often centered historically, and one that is individual and largely focused on the here and now. We care about both, of course—about the social organization and deployment of gender and about what gender means in individual lives. In this essay, I argue that we should encourage these two kinds of analysis to engage each other more intimately. This engagement would give political scientists the tools to say more about when, for whom, and for which outcomes gender matters. The conversation would give us better ways to understand how context makes gender relevant.Kate Gallagher provided incredibly thoughtful research assistance for this essay. Support for her work was provided by the Center for Political Studies at Michigan and by the Miller Professorship. I want to thank Jane Junn for a fabulous conversation about how to improve the essay. Lisa Baldez, Karen Beckwith, and Christina Wolbrecht provided important, critical feedback. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences gave me the space in my life—and the amazing library staff—to finish the essay. Of course, all of the mistakes and omissions are mine.

Since the 1970s, institutions with the explicit purpose of advancing women's rights and status have been established in an overwhelming majority of countries. In political science research, these institutions usually are called “women's policy machineries,” “state feminist institutions,” or “gender equality agencies.” The people who work in them are often referred to as “state feminists.” This article offers a general overview of academic studies on state feminism, the majority of which were published in the last decade. Generally speaking and with few exceptions, social scientists researching state feminism in postindustrial countries tend to consider only academic work on other postindustrial countries and ignore scholarly analyses of developing countries and new democracies. Countries outside the postindustrial world have women's institutions, and there is no reason to disregard them.

What can be learned from the broad sweep of history about gender and politics? Are there ways to study gender politics from a more historical perspective that differ from the methods and approaches typically taken by scholars focused on the contemporary political record? Finally, does attentiveness to gender politics over time challenge any of our basic understandings or presumptions about gender politics today, and does it lead us to new questions and research agendas? I begin by exploring the contribution that scholarship within the field of American political development (APD) can make to the study of gender politics over time. The essay then turns to conceptualizing gender, a concept that is defined in a wide variety of ways across the humanities and social sciences. The third section applies some of the conceptual approaches described in the first two parts of this essay to an analysis of three cases in American political history. Finally, I conclude with a call for the inclusion of gender more broadly in the study of politics.

Historical perspectives form the backdrop and the context for much work on gender in comparative politics scholarship, yet history itself has rarely been incorporated as the lens through which the theorizing of gender occurs. The current growth of interest in gender studies in American political development is strangely not reflected in contemporary trends of historical institutionalism within comparative politics (see Gretchen Ritter's essay in this issue). Although scholars of comparative politics working on gender or women almost always incorporate historical perspectives in their analyses, history is generally drawn on as background or to provide context. History itself is generally not the primary focus of their analysis and historical processes are not used to generate theory. It has been only recently that scholars, especially in the field of historical institutionalism (HI), have begun to think about new ways in which history could be used to develop theory and create new empirical knowledge in the field of comparative politics and gender.

In “Gender in the Aggregate, Gender in the Individual, Gender and Political Action,” Nancy Burns makes the compelling argument to integrate individual- and aggregate-level perspectives in the study of gendered political action. She issues a call for action for the two to assess similarities and differences in approaches, identify unique contributions and weaknesses, and move forward to better understand gender and political action. Beyond this general goal is an ambitious effort to build a theory of politicized context around gender in order to stake out a position for political science to contribute to our understanding of women in action. In this regard, her ambitions are to identify mechanisms that work to strengthen normative goals of enhancing equality and dignity in women's lives, and in politics more generally.For helpful comments, I thank Nadia Brown, Sue Carroll, Mary Hawkesworth, Hannah Holden, Anna Mitchell, Kira Sanbonmatsu, participants at the conference on Political Women and American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame in May 2006, and the editors of Politics & Gender.

Research interrogating the simultaneity of oppression in American politics is rare. Political scientists, as compared to scholars of other disciplines, have paid far less attention to the ways in which race and gender operate in tandem to produce and maintain the unequal distribution of power and privilege in the American political system. Far too often, political scientists have treated race and gender as separate, dichotomous variables in regression models that employ either/or versus both/and identity categorizations. That is to say, political science as a discipline historically has had limited relevance and prescriptive utility for individuals and groups that confront interlocking systems of oppression, as it has largely ignored the intersection (or interaction) of race, class, and gender in American politics. For example, political scientists have seldom studied those who struggle with dual identity—specifically, African-American women—with a critical eye attentive to the ways in which race, gender, and class shape their public opinion and political behavior, as well as election campaigns and legislative decisions. Feeling called upon to both articulate and translate the complexities of life for African-American women, scholars from Jewel Prestage and Mae King to Linda Williams and Shelby Lewis have played a critical role in bringing to the academic fore the study of intersecting patterns of discrimination, as they unveiled a “portrait of marginality” and provided the theoretical framework on which intersectionality research is based today. The recent publication of several books and articles on and by African-American women in political science clearly attests to this fact (see, for example, Berger 2004; Hancock 2004; Jordan-Zachery 2003; Simien 2006; Smooth 2006). These works, concentrating as they do on race and gender, are excellent examples of intersectionality research authored by political scientists.

The distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor has always been critical in the context of American poverty policy. Recent work by Martin Gilens (1999), Ange-Marie Hancock (2004), and Deborah Ward (2005) has demonstrated the ways in which this distinction has been racialized. Such work illustrates the promise of an intersectional approach for fields ranging from the study of public opinion to historical institutionalism and contemporary policy analysis. Indeed, at this point in our disciplinary history, it is difficult to imagine how research in any of these areas can be done in either an empirically satisfying or normatively responsible way without attention to intersectionality.

The Gender of Democracy: Citizenship and Gendered Subjectivity. By Maro Pantelidou Maloutas. London and New York: Routledge. 2006. 208 pp. $130.00.

In this theoretically provocative (and action-inspiring) study of the relationship between gender and democracy, Maro Pantelidou Maloutas makes an important contribution to both feminist theory and democratic theory. She emphasizes that democracy's emancipatory potential is substantially inhibited by the existing system of dichotomous gender relations. The requisite for us is to deconstruct rather than simply to modernize gender roles (whether through quotas or parity) which is tantamount to a “modernization of oppression” (p. 55).

For a series on comparative politics, Jane Bayes and her coauthors have written a text that is long overdue: the comparative history and politics of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, with women at the center, in the global neoliberal era. The book offers a deep critique both of economic neoliberalism (not the peculiar U.S. use of the term liberalism) and of traditional conceptions of democracy, which, they argue, should become “thicker” in women-inclusive, gender-mainstreamed ways. While the book focuses on secondary research rather than new, original research, it repackages the traditional ways that feminist researchers, especially Americanists, view the three nations of North America.

Feminist Inquiry: From Political Conviction to Methodological Innovation. By Mary Hawkesworth. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press. 2006. 286 pp. $25.95.

In this book, Mary Hawkesworth draws together into an integrated discussion an immense amount of the complex, interdisciplinary research on methods and epistemology accomplished in the past few decades by feminist scholars.