This essay explores gender scholarship about how state architectures affect women's politics. A rapidly growing literature addresses the effects of vertical and horizontal power divisions in federations. While just one in five states is a federation, federations govern 40% of the world's population (Watts 2008). Globalization and neoliberal ideology foster regionalization, devolution, and increased influence by international agencies, and so more people experience multilevel governance (MLG) in unitary states, too. Hence, feminist scholars now increasingly consider the impact of state architectures. The field's core idea is that while socioeconomic and ideological forces shape gender/power relations, governments and movements respond from within specific state architectures. Related debates involve how institutional designs shape opportunity structures, and how feminists respond to federal diversity.

Approximately one-fifth, or 21%, of the members of the American Political Science Association identify themselves as comparativists, according to data in 2004. Among those affiliated with the APSA Women and Politics Research Section, the corresponding figure is nearly one-third, or 31% (Tripp 2010, 192). While not a majority, these patterns suggest that gender and politics scholars have been attracted in greater proportions to this particular subfield. The reasons for this, Karen Beckwith (2010) has noted, are linked to features of comparative politics particularly conducive to work on gender: an interest in answering “real world” questions, a lack of a hegemonic research agenda making the subfield more open to new topics, an emphasis on methodological pluralism valuing the contributions of qualitative and case study analysis, and a stress on fieldwork as an important vehicle for data collection.

Questions about the quality of political representation are central to research on women and gender, and to political science in general. Given a certain set of interests, how well do political institutions and political actors address and advance those interests? Research about the quality of political representation relies a priori on the existence of fixed, stable, and measurable interests; we need to know what women want before we can assess how well politicians represent them. Perfect measures of the interests that all women share have proven elusive. The measures of women's interests that scholars commonly employ lend themselves reasonably well to research, but have unfortunate side effects: They essentialize gender norms, exclude certain groups of women, or define women's interests too narrowly. In this essay, I explore the political implications of the empirical measures of women's interests on which scholars have relied in research on women's political representation. I offer a way to measure women's interests that draws upon the United Nations Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). CEDAW provides a way to think about women's interests that is broad, inclusive, and sufficiently flexible to reflect changes over time. Furthermore, it enjoys the explicit approval of almost every nation in the world; 186 countries have ratified CEDAW since the UN General Assembly approved it in 1979.

As feminist international relations enters its third decade as a subdiscipline within IR, it is particularly fitting that we recognize and celebrate the stimulating and important new research that is being done in Feminist Security Studies. In the early days of feminist IR, feminists tended to stay away from security studies, at least as it is conventionally defined, a tendency that, fortunately, is no longer the case. The rich and varied research being done by contributors to this volume is evidence that the field has taken off and that its research agendas are flourishing.

My comments take the form of a brief rumination about the politics of “Feminist Security Studies”—as a field of knowledge and as a practice. I start by raising some questions about the meaning of the term itself and the politics of defining the field. Then, in light of these questions, I turn to the politics of the practice of Feminist Security Studies.

Federalism seems to play a widely varying role in maintaining or undermining gender hierarchies around the world. In 1869, for example, federalism allowed Wyoming—a new state in the United States—to enfranchise women before this happened at the national level. But in Switzerland, federalism let a recalcitrant canton disenfranchise women until the 1990s—20 years after women achieved the vote on the national level (Banaszak 1996). More generally, federal institutions are associated with widely varying policies on women's rights. Table 1 groups countries according to Lijphart's (1999, Chapter 10) three measures of federalism: a numerical summary measure (column 2), whether the country is centralized or decentralized (column 3), and a dichotomous measure of federal or unitary based on the country's constitution (column 4). No matter which measure is used, gender equality policies vary greatly within each type of system. The wide variation within each category suggests that standard approaches to federalism give us little purchase on gender politics.

I once mentioned to a prominent feminist scholar that I was using one of her books in my course on feminism and political theory. She looked at me blankly for a moment and then replied, “Feminism and political theory? I thought feminism is political theory.” She was right of course; in some sense, everything that is feminist theory is also political theory. Feminism illuminates gendered relations of power in politics and social life, after all, and it contributes (however indirectly) to the larger project of transforming them. Moreover, since the rise of “second wave” feminism in the 1970s, feminist theorists have significantly reshaped political theory as a discipline, moving crucial questions from the margins of the field to its center, questions about gender equity and justice, the constitution of the political subject, the demands of difference, the intersecting dynamics of domination, the differential effects of globalization, and the conditions of freedom, among other things. As a result, much of what we think of as “mainstream” political theory is now also feminist theory. This is often true even of work that does not make women or gender its sole subject matter, as the leading voices in the field increasingly are scholars whose work has been shaped by literatures central to feminism and who think about politics in ways that are informed by a critical consciousness of the gendered quality of power relations.

What do we mean by “women's interests?” To consider interests requires us to consider the “real interests” of women, which “[rest] on empirically supportable and refutable hypotheses” and to examine women, “exercising choice under conditions of relative autonomy and, in particular, independently of [the constraining] power [of others] – e.g. through democratic participation” (Lukes 1984, 25, 33). Identification of interests is always a normative concern, resting on an appreciation of citizens' autonomy and deliberation—or lack thereof.

As Sapiro (1981) pointed out many years ago, recognizing that women's interests are interesting is the vital first step in establishing the significance of women's political representation (or the lack thereof)—both in the “real” world and in the scholarly world. Indeed, the assumption that women's interests exist, that women have political interests that can be defined and measured, is central to much of the subsequent research and discussion of women in politics. It is central to our own research on the relationship between women's descriptive and substantive representation (e.g., Reingold 2000; Swers 2002), and it is central to this symposium. Yet we come together in this symposium not simply because we share this assumption, but more tellingly because we all grapple with this assumption. Defining and measuring women's political interests pose a number of very difficult questions or dilemmas, which we elaborate in the following. We highlight these challenges not to dismiss such endeavors as futile or necessarily misguided. Rather, we argue that the very uncertainty surrounding women's interests is what makes them so interesting.

Feminist international relations is situated uneasily within a subfield of political science, on the one hand, and within an interdisciplinary literature on globalization, on the other. Emerging in the 1990s from a critique of the realist and rationalist IR canon, feminist IR research has diversified considerably, including different lines of theoretical and empirical inquiry and drawing on a range of methods. Different emphases emerge in three fields – feminist security studies, feminist international political economy, and feminist work on international governance.

This essay expresses my gratitude for the spirit of inclusiveness shown by the first generation of Feminist Security Studies (FSS) scholars. I would like to see FSS remain a large tent, for in constructing boundaries for FSS, we may unintentionally make it smaller than it really is. Indeed, I would like to explore the value of inclusiveness to FSS by undertaking a bit of autobiography. I was a poor candidate to wind up as part of this field; the story of how FSS insights upended my academic life may be instructive as we endeavor to help others in the academy see the connections between gender and security studies that we ourselves see.

Latin American countries display wide variation in gender equality and organized women's capacity to mobilize and influence policy outcomes. Yet there are also many similarities in the region's political systems and sociocultural contexts that affect women's politics and its impact. These include presidential systems that, in theory, divide power among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, but often concentrate power in the executive; deep social and regional inequalities; and the influence of organized religion. How these factors affect women's lives, however, is also shaped by vertical divisions of powers. Although only four Latin American states are federations (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela), most other countries undertook decentralization in the last two decades, transferring service delivery and program implementation (but not taxing authority) to regional or local levels. Because in some cases decentralization occurred under authoritarian regimes, or in newly democratizing states in the midst of fiscal crises, it has not ultimately deepened Latin American democracy.

Feminist Security Studies (FSS) is quickly becoming a recognized area of research. Recent articles in Security Studies (Sjoberg 2009) and International Security (Hudson et al. 2008/9) specifically address the contributions of FSS to the field of security studies, a network of scholars working in FSS is regularly represented at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, and the terminology has been used in many recent publications (e.g. Hansen 2009; Shepherd 2010; Sjoberg and Martin 2010; Wibben 2009, 2011). Given the proliferation of feminist security scholarship, which is based on a variety of feminisms, feminist scholars should begin to debate the content and scope of their research. Not only is there now enough material to do so, but there also are some real differences in feminist scholarship—and these differences matter.

Nearly 40 years ago, the women's movement—my own passionate engagement in it, my delighted, mystified questions about what the movement and feminism were doing not just to change women's rights but also to change women's and men's whole conception of women as political actors (questions I could later phrase in the language of political psychology, though I could not do so then)—drove me from biology to political science. Freshly armed with an undergraduate biology degree from Georgia Tech (the student body of which, at that time, was more than 99% male), working the graveyard shift as a medical technologist, and spending my days marching, rallying, and lobbying for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and many other feminist policy proposals in those heady days, I began to realize that the intellectual life I had always assumed I would pursue in biomedicine had departed from my imagination, to be replaced by an overmastering desire to study political science and, in particular, to study the political psychology of gender, as we came to define the inquiry.

In conducting interviews with female African American state legislators, I found that the great debates among women and politics scholars over the meaning of women's issues have not captured a major issue that surfaced time and again in the interviews. The African American women I interviewed affirmed that “women's issues” constituted a top priority on their legislative agendas and understood themselves as representatives of women's interests. But when they began to discuss the issues they championed on behalf of women, these issues were not the “usual suspects.” They often mentioned proposed legislation that I would have coded as a “children's issue” or, at times, a “race issue.” These legislators articulated a political agenda reflecting crosscutting issues that were not easily codified along a single issue axis. Instead, the legislators articulated their legislative priorities as complex and multifaceted. They saw their legislative priorities affecting constituents across their districts, but they also keenly expressed the impact of these issues on the lives and well-being of women in particular.

The starting point of this essay is that the emerging literature on gender politics and state architecture needs to take seriously the insights from devolving multilevel states, as well as from formal federations and classic unitary states. The formal components of state architecture, and the dynamics of scale, are important—but hitherto neglected—features to consider in any gendered analysis of politics. We argue, however, that it is impossible to read off in any straightforward manner whether a particular form of state architecture provides a “gendered advantage.” Instead, we argue that the practice and interplay of state architecture and political actors is as important as formal features.

What makes Feminist Security Studies such an exciting field for me is the depth and diversity of feminists grappling with key issues of the politics of war, peace, and security who are also concerned with sovereignty and autonomy, the meaning and nature of violence, and the connections among violence, subjectivity, and embodiment. Feminists across the disciplines have done much to render problematic the equation of bodies and subjects for their own political purposes, a political/theoretical move that has enormous implications for the way in which we think about the practices of security. In thinking through and even beyond “gender,” feminists in security studies are poised to ask the question of how we might rethink not only how security practices are gendered, but also how the very nature of “security” has lent itself to particular conceptions of “the body” (Butler 2004).

New and reconfigured structures of policymaking and governance present fresh challenges to gender equality seekers, especially in federal systems. In a world in which policy functions are increasingly being “uploaded” to international or supranational levels, “downloaded” to meso-level units, or “offloaded” to civil society and private enterprises (Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht 2003), the links among institutional design, policy activism, and policy outcomes provide fruitful opportunities for empirical research and theory building. This essay asks what impact state architectures have on women's political mobilization around child care. How might we theorize the effects of different types of federation and multilevel governance on child-care activists' political opportunities and achievement of policy outcomes? How adequate are existing frameworks for explaining links among policy actors, state institutions, civil society, and international business? We sketch some preliminary answers and show how recognizing the significance of the multiple scales and layers involved in contemporary governance can expand feminist research agendas and promote gender-sensitive policymaking. Child care is increasingly understood as an essential component of contemporary welfare states (Michel and Mahon 2002). Well-designed child-care programs help time-pressed earner parents reconcile work and family life and make it possible for lone parents to improve their economic situation through paid work. Universal early childhood education and care (ECEC) also lays the foundations for lifelong learning, indispensable for success in knowledge-based, postindustrial economies. Adequate public support for ECEC systems generates good postindustrial jobs for early childhood educators who work in publicly financed, regulated settings instead of in low-paid, informal, caregiving situations (Esping-Andersen 1999). Developing high-quality, universal ECEC in federal systems with divided jurisdictional responsibility, however, faces particular challenges. Most comparative social policy and welfare regime literature ignores state architectures by assuming that unitary state forms are the norm and focusing purely on nation-state governments and policymaking (Esping-Andersen 1999). Advocacy and policy initiatives on international or meso-level scales typically are ignored or underexplored.

Do women share interests? Seeking interests that women share is theoretically problematic and politically undesirable for feminists. Efforts to redefine interests as subjective, contingent and/or context sensitive are unsatisfying for those who want to link women's representation to the fact of their oppression, exploitation, and discrimination. Fortunately, we need not posit shared interests to make strong claims about the importance of women's representation. Nor do we need such a concept to explain why women work together across significant institutional barriers and social differences. Overlapping, entwined sets of global and local social structures define “women” as a social collectivity. Women in diverse organizational, social, and national contexts organize to alter this complex configuration, forging relations of solidarity and shared identities in the process. But this is not reducible to shared interests. Moreover, focusing on things that women have in common de-emphasizes issues that mainly confront marginalized groups of women and/or that are group or context specific but critical to achieving gender justice. Fortunately, feminist theorists have identified bases for political representation and mobilization that offer more useful accounts of social group politics (e.g., Mansbridge 1995; Mohanty 2003; Young 1997, 2000;). The idea of social perspective is one such concept.