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A Chamber of One's Own: Institutional Claim-Making on Gender Equality and the Symbolic Role of Parliaments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 August 2020

Tània Verge Open the ORCID record for Tània Verge [Opens in a new window]
Tània Verge*
Affiliation:
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
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Abstract

This article investigates how legislatures may re-present themselves through claim-making on behalf of the institution. Focusing on claims about gender equality, attention is paid to the Women's Parliament organized by the Parliament of Catalonia, an all-women event through which female members of Parliament and social activists came together to put forth a feminist political agenda. Drawing on a constructivist approach, I disentangle the intentions of the institution, examine the discursive construction and performative enactment of the representative claim, and assess its reception by different audiences. I also reflect on how the symbolic activity undertaken within and by parliaments can recast ideas and practices of representation to promote more radical and inclusive politics. Overall, the article evinces that symbolic representation can be studied as a dimension in its own right and that, rather than being a mere by-product, it does co-constitute descriptive and substantive representation.

Keywords

Symbolic representationrepresentative claim-makingparliamentsfeminismgender equalitywomen's movement
Type
Research Article
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 95 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

As a feminist activist and academic, I owe a debt of gratitude to Montse Pineda Lorenzo, Marina Garcia Soler, and Marta Espasa Macias for their hard work and enthusiasm in the organization of the Women's Parliament and for the time they have dedicated to me in both formal interviews and informal conversations about what it means to gender political institutions. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to professor Cristina Leston-Bandeira and to the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their constructive comments that encouraged me to strengthen this article.

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