Scholars have debated the impact of open-list systems on women's representation. While some argue that open lists provide a unique opportunity for voters to overcome parties' bias against women, others argue that they create additional barriers. I examine several mechanisms that impact women's representation within Poland's open-list system. Results suggest that 1) voters shift women's original list placements positively across all parties over three elections; 2) these shifts are more pronounced when women's overall presence on the list and list placement are lower, regardless of party; and 3) positive shifts often result in the election of substantially more women than would have been expected. These findings add to our understanding of open-list systems by documenting variability in the effects of preferential voting across time and party in a postcommunist context. In addition, the unexpected positive effects of preferential voting in Poland add to a growing body of evidence that voters and parties on the center and right support female candidates at rates approaching or similar to parties on the left.

While significant attention has been dedicated to explaining women's election to office, fewer studies have assessed female politicians' access to positions of power within legislatures. This latter topic became particularly salient in the British House of Commons following the 2010 general election, when recently adopted reforms introduced intracameral elections for select committee members and chairs. This article outlines three hypotheses concerning the influence of candidate sex on election outcomes: a gender bias against female candidates, a gender advantage favoring female candidates, and gender-neutral outcomes. Drawing on two original data sets, the results not only fail to support the gender-bias hypothesis but also demonstrate that women were advantaged in the interparty elections for committee chairs. These findings offer new insights into both the position of female legislators in the UK Parliament and gender and the allocation of power within national assemblies more generally.

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, freedom was the dominant term used to describe the United States in national political discourse. It was articulated as sovereign power, unencumbered agency, and military triumph. “Freedom” eventually animated global violence, becoming a justification for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as for substantial increases in state surveillance. A significant body of feminist scholarship has interrogated the discourse of post-9/11 freedom, examining how the call to “free the women of Afghanistan and Iraq” legitimated the push for war (Bhattacharrya 2008; Marso 2007; Mohanty 2008). For these scholars, “freedom” transformed feminist concerns into tools of militarism and imperialism, while worsening living conditions of women across the globe. In this essay, I also examine the discourse of post-9/11 freedom from a feminist perspective, but I ask a different question: How can feminist political theory critique the discourse of American freedom and challenge its trajectory of sovereign and violent state power? In other words, I examine the discourse of Americans upholding their own freedom, rather than their quest to free others, and insist that feminist theoretical arguments are directly relevant to post-9/11 problematics.

My contention in this brief essay is that disability is a feminist issue with particular significance for freedom. There are two “models” for understanding disability. The “medical model of disability” has been the dominant view since the Enlightenment, when advances in science and medicine created the realization that humans can intervene in the body to overcome disease (Stiker 1999). In this model, disability is seen as an individual condition arising from a flawed body, which presents a “problem” that must be “fixed” or “cured.” The problem is intrinsic to the body, which must adapt to the preexisting environment. Disability is viewed as a loss, even a tragedy, that the person wants to escape, the appropriate response to which is pity; the less appropriate but more common response is repulsion.

For feminists interested in questions of freedom, the current era is as exciting as it is paradoxical. As we move into the second decade of the millennium, we find ourselves witnessing enhanced opportunities for women in many areas of life: More women than ever are earning college degrees and attending graduate and professional school, more women are now represented at the highest levels of government, and women continue to make major gains in the workplace (Rosin 2010a, 2010b). And while this progress is far from equal among the various populations of women, it is safe to say that within the United States, women today face fewer restrictions and have more options and opportunities to act in the world than ever before. Yet despite the increased presence of women and people of color within various elite circles, this is also a time of widening economic inequality. This condition of enhanced opportunity for an increasingly diverse elite alongside widespread and deepening inequality has important implications for the ways that feminists understand the dynamics of freedom today.

One of the most important contributions of feminist theory is the rethinking of core concepts, such as freedom and autonomy. While the inspiration for this rethinking is often the way traditional concepts fail women, the constructive project of reconstruction routinely goes beyond a focus on the particular significance for women—or gender or sexuality. For example, the canon failed to recognize not only the centrality of care work in women's lives but also the underlying issue of dependence as characteristic of human life (MacIntyre 1999). Integrating this dependence into conceptual reformulation has then led to the argument that theories of justice must include the distribution of care work (Kittay 1999) and to the rejection of independence as a key element of autonomy (Nedelsky 2011a). Of course, these reconceptualizations have important consequences for women's lives and for our collective understandings of gender and sexuality. But those important consequences are not the focus of every theoretical contribution.

Some of the most interesting and important work on freedom in recent years has been produced by feminist theorists (e.g., Friedman 2003; Hirschmann 2003; Nedelsky 2011; Zerilli 2005; and see Anker, forthcoming). Feminist theory has also generated important insights about the character and conditions of human agency, the intersectional nature of human identities, and the dynamics of political action that richly enhance our understanding of freedom (Ackerly and Attanasi 2009; Alcoff 2006; Anzaldua 2007; Bartky 1990; Beltrán 2010; Benhabib 1992; Brown 1995; Butler 2004, 2006; Crenshaw 1989; Hill-Collins 2005; Love 2007; Mohanty 2003; Young 2005). Yet feminist perspectives on freedom—like others in political theory today (e.g., Berlin 1990; Pettit 2000; Villa 2008)—are limited by their tendency to conceive freedom in a monistic way. Whether freedom means the exercise of personal choice (Hirschmann 2003), or inaugural acts of world making (Arendt 1958; Zerilli 2005), or noninterference (Berlin 1990), or nondomination (Pettit 2000), or something else, theorists generally describe freedom as being just one thing. Yet the experiences that we have of freedom come in different forms, and sometimes the different kinds of freedom that we have, or that we seek, conflict with one another. Nor is it obvious that these conflicts could ever be fully reconciled, even under ideal conditions. Our freedom today is complex: We are at once free and unfree, in ways that are multiple and often conflicting.

Throughout the past decade, governments across Latin America have experienced an unprecedented swing to the left. In this essay, I ask: Does the rise of the Left promote women's equality? Or in contrast, could women's continued subordination be an important factor promoting the rise of the Left? Using the case of El Salvador, I demonstrate how the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) deradicalized its public image—away from “guerrilla insurgents” and toward a viable political party—at least in part by converting its 1980s support for reproductive rights into present-day support for one of the most restrictive abortion policies in the world. I conclude that reversing the causal question about gender and left-leaning political parties may not only extend our understanding of the complicated relationship between gender and the Left but also improve our understanding of the factors moving Latin America from right to left, and from “red” to “pink.”

Upon entering office in 2007, socialist Rafael Correa launched his Citizen Revolution in Ecuador, with the aim of establishing a postneoliberal order. His antineoliberal political discourse called for a “living well” (i.e., buen vivir in spanish; sumaq kawsay in Quichua) development model that favored solidarity over competition and sustainability over economic growth. It also called for increased political inclusivity and a form of redistribution that reaches a broader range of citizens. In line with other Latin American populist-socialist leaders, such as Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia, Correa claimed that his revolution “has a woman's face.” Yet personally, Correa is a devout Catholic and trained economist who opposes abortion and homosexuality and favors a traditional familial model—one that reinforces a notion of “modern economic man” that is both Eurocentric and heteronormative.

The center-left Concertación held the presidency in Chile from the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990 until 2010. The coalition's loss of the office provides a unique opportunity to evaluate its performance. I focus in this essay on the government of socialist Michelle Bachelet, Chile's first woman president, who held the office from 2006 to 2010. I am interested in the contradictions in the evaluations of her presidency by feminists (including feminist scholars) and Mapuche activists (and scholars of Mapuche politics). While both groups shared a mix of hope and skepticism at the beginning of her government, one of the things that most struck me in field visits to Chile as her term progressed was growing enthusiasm on the part of Chilean feminist acquaintances and growing bitterness on the part of Mapuche ones. I am particularly concerned with what this means for indigenous women who find themselves at the intersection of these two identifications, and suggest that their positionality and experiences represent a long-standing and still unanswered challenge to feminist methods and praxis.

The final round of Peru's 2011 presidential campaign featured two dramatically different candidates. Ollanta Humala was a leftist nationalist who sought to increase redistribution to the poorest and most marginalized. Keiko Fujmori was a right-wing proponent of the free market and the torchbearer of her father's presidential legacy of overcoming economic crisis and terrorism in the 1990s. According to the extant scholarship on the relationship between left parties and gender equality, we should have expected the leftist candidate to support gender equality policies more strongly.