In this essay, I consider whether or not the contestatory potential of rights politics turns on replacing identity claims with universalist ones, and why one might be inclined to urge such a move from “the ontological” to “the political.” While this argument has much to commend it, as it sheds light on the constitutive dimensions of identity-based rights and their depoliticizing tendencies, I remain unconvinced that a better form of rights necessarily requires detachment from identity per se. Engaging the work of Wendy Brown, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, and Judith Butler, I argue that an understanding of rights as political claims should include an appreciation of the importance of identity and injury, for rights can function as a discourse through which identity is contested and reconfigured rather than simply reified.This article has gone through many revisions and left me with a debt to generous readers too numerous to list here. But for their direct impact on this version and ongoing enthusiasm for the project, I must thank wholeheartedly Paul Apostolidis, Sam Chambers, Michaele Ferguson, Tim Kaufman-Osborn, Jill Locke, Patchen Markell, Laurie Naranch, and the anonymous reviewers at Politics & Gender.

A higher percentage of women consistently run as candidates and serve as the lieutenant governor when running on the same ticket with the governor than for any other state elective office. In this article, we provide the first examination of how running with a woman affects vote choice. We conclude that running-mate sex does influence vote choice in gubernatorial elections, even when we take into account a wide range of individual-level and electoral characteristics that are related to voter preference. Further, voter preference for tickets containing women running mates is not consistent, but rather depends upon certain electoral circumstances. Our findings have implications for assessing how voters respond to women candidates and how gender plays into strategic calculations in state-level politics.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2004 American Political Science Association Meeting. This research was funded by a grant from the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Union College. We thank Mark Anderson, Alla Abramov, Rhobie Langwig, and Nish Patel for assistance with data collection and Jeff Koch and the anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback on the project. Special thanks go to Bruce Connolly, Courtney Seymour, and David Gerhan of Schaffer Library, Union College, for locating data that was especially difficult to find.

Prostitution has been considered by feminists as, alternatively, a gendered relation, an issue of sexuality, and a kind of labor. In this article, I argue for an integrated feminist analysis of sex work that focuses on the first and third of these, leaving the second in the background. I argue that this reconstructed feminist analysis must reject the moralism and determinism of the gendered critique, and radicalize the economic critique. It must also, I suggest, orient itself toward consideration of prostitution as a symptom or function of various masculinities. In all cases, feminism has considered sex work as a question or problem of women's agency and sexuality. Reversing this standard feminist approach offers important new directions for empirical research, and denaturalizes prostitution as an inevitable feature of human life. This denaturalization radicalizes the otherwise traditional policy debate over prostitution by allowing for a more revolutionary critique of the relations of domination that both govern and constitute sex work as a stigmatized, hierarchical, and exploitative practice.I would like to thank Kate Baldwin, John Christman, Brandon Fogel, Traci Levy, William Roberts, Michael Zuckert, and four anonymous reviewers for Politics & Gender for their helpful criticism and insightful commentary on previous drafts of this article. Conversations with Terri Horning proved invaluable to its theoretical development.

We launch Politics & Gender with the conviction that the study of women and politics, and the gendered analysis of politics, benefit and strengthen political science. We hold the reverse conviction as well: the tools of political analysis advance and strengthen our understandings of women and of gender. Politics & Gender is the official journal of the Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association. This new journal is thus situated firmly within the discipline of political science. While we maintain extensive interdisciplinary commitments, our primary purpose is to publish research on women and politics and on politics and its gendered analysis. Gender cuts through every aspect of politics. In Politics & Gender, we seek to represent the full array of questions, issues, and approaches within the discipline. We envision each issue as a showcase of work across all the major subfields of political science, including (but not limited to) political theory, comparative politics, international relations, and U.S. politics. We invite studies that address fundamental questions in politics and political science concerning women and concerning gender, including those that interrogate and challenge standard analytical categories and conventional methodologies.

Scholars have argued that the feminization of industrial work in developing countries since World War II is primarily a result of women being the cheapest source of labor in the global economy. I argue that scholarship on feminization underestimates the power of gender in labor markets by framing it primarily as an issue of lower wages. This article shows how gendered discourses of work—ideas and practices about men and women providing distinct forms of labor—play a critical role in the feminization process. While agreeing with feminization theorists that competitiveness in export sectors forces employers to reduce production costs, I show that firms and sectors facing similar competitive constraints deploy varied gender divisions of labor in production. Gendered discourses of work not only illuminate processes of job allocation and reallocation at the firm level but also provide a means of connecting shop-floor gender divisions of labor with broader gendered patterns of industrialization and help to explain puzzling empirical patterns. They are as important as, and in some cases more important than, wages. By tracing the processes through which work is gendered and regendered, the analysis opens the black box of feminization and shows how changes in industrialization policy set in motion gendered transformations that ultimately resulted in the feminization of manufacturing work in Indonesia.I would like to thank the editors of Politics & Gender and the anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this article.

Feminist criticisms of the Bush Administration distinguish its feminized security rhetoric, which claims to support women's rights in Iraq and Afghanistan, from its actions at home and abroad, which undermine hard-won gains for women. This distinction between words and deeds obscures, on the one hand, the tremendous progress that feminists have made in framing women's rights as an issue that ought to be taken seriously and, on the other hand, the way that this rhetoric is itself a significant form of political action: It aims to influence how Americans will conceptualize the struggle for women's rights. I correct for these problems by developing a political theory of what I call the “framing effect” of rhetoric—its power to shape our worldview. Frames, I suggest, are related to one another dialogically: They build on one another by transposing old rhetorical frames into new contexts. The Bush Administration draws on existing feminist rhetoric, but transforms it by combining it with two other kinds of discourse: a rhetoric of chivalrous respect and a rhetoric of democratic peace. I show that in both rhetorical frames, the Bush Administration bases its concern with women's rights abroad upon the presumption that the women's movement in the United States successfully achieved its goals long ago. My analysis of how current security rhetoric frames women's rights can help us to understand both how the Bush Administration is able to use feminist ideas in new and nonfeminist ways and how we in turn might redeploy the Bush rhetoric so as to challenge the presumption that women at home already enjoy their full rights.The author would like to thank Karen Zivi, Jill Frank, Alison Jaggar, Iris Young, the editors and anonymous reviewers from Politics & Gender, as well as fellow panelists and audience members at the Midwest Political Science Association, the Association for Political Theory, and the Center for Values and Social Policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder for their comments. She would also like to thank Steve Chan for his encouragement. This project was funded, in part, by the University of Colorado at Boulder Graduate School CRCW Small Grant.

This article examines the Cuban record concerning gender equality in political decision making. I begin with a brief overview of Cuba's system of government. I then examine the gender composition of the country's legislative structures, discuss efforts to strengthen women's political participation, and compare the inclusion of women into key state and party decision-making bodies. The article is guided by three main arguments: First, in Cuba's legislative structures, women have a greater presence at the national than at the local level, contrary to the experience of the United States and Western Europe. Second, despite the official position denying the existence of gender quotas, Cuba does implement measures of positive discrimination in order to strengthen women's presence in politics. Finally, Cuban women face a glass ceiling as they move up to positions of greater decision-making power, a reality faced by women all over the world. The excellent gender composition of Cuba's parliament is an apparent exception that confirms the following rule: The state of gender equality in Cuba's decision-making structures reveals an inverse relationship between the actual decision-making power of a particular institution and the presence of women. That is, the higher we get in the institutional decision-making hierarchy, the fewer women we find. The evidence presented in this article demonstrates that Cuba has not made as much progress in achieving gender equality in political decision making as some of the official data would indicate, and that women continue to be largely excluded from the most important decision-making bodies.The article is based on a report commissioned by the European Commission. The views expressed herein are those of the author and can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.The author gratefully acknowledges the excellent advice given by two anonymous reviewers and the editors for revising this manuscript.

Past research has identified several factors that help explain what happened to civic engagement after World War II, but it has not adequately explained how these factors mattered to particular groups of citizens defined by gender, race, or class. This essay reexamines the dominant account of postwar civic decline by highlighting the relational nature of political change and the processes through which social groups transform. It explores the development of three women's associations: the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC), National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC), and Woman's Division of Christian Service (WDCS) (predecessor of the United Methodist Women). A variety of postwar changes—in the realities of women's lives, the appearance of new social movement organizations, and the formation of the United Nations, for example—pressured the GFWC, NACWC, and WDCS to adopt new organizational methods that blurred civic–political distinctions. Postwar women's associations experimented with the structures, strategies, and identities now common to modern-day interest groups, providing a critical foundation for a new politics of gender that would emerge in the 1960s. If these reinvented and ascendant organizations were more attuned to emerging political opportunities, however, they also translated into less active and less inclusive forms of participation.The author would like to thank Kristi Andersen, Elisabeth Clemens, McGee Young, Kathleen Laughlin, and the editors and anonymous reviewers from Politics & Gender for their thoughtful contributions to this manuscript. Draft sections of this essay were presented at 2004 annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, the Journal of Policy History, and the Social Science History Association.

Existing studies of political ambition tell two different stories, male and female. Most research on political ambition focuses on the desire of men and women to hold political office at the state or national level and examines the ambitions of those already employed in the labor force. Scholarly inattention to ambition among activists at the local, neighborhood level may lead us to erroneous conclusions about people's motivations for engaging in politics, particularly along racial lines. A focus on those already in the workforce may distort our understanding of the factors that drive the political ambitions of women in particular. This study confirms that men and women have distinct paths of family socialization, qualifications, high school and college socialization, and life situations on the trail to ambition. It also shows that the local context changes the explanations for ambition. In particular, race, combined with the holding of conservative religious beliefs, varies in its impact upon white and minority women's expressions of ambition for future public office. In addition, the experience of sex discrimination has the countersocialization effect of increasing women's ambition.Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2003 meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois and the 2005 meetings of the Southern Political Science Association, New Orleans, Louisiana. I would like to thank William G. Jacoby, Marcia Moore, the editors and anonymous reviewers for their generous comments in the preparation of this manuscript. Also thanks to Kay Lehman Schlozman and David Campbell for their comments and redirection on a much earlier version of this work.

Although it is well known that “when women run, they win as often as men,” the literature on women and campaigns suggests that we should see significant differences in races involving male and female incumbents. Do female incumbents face the same competitive environment as their male counterparts in elections for the U.S. House of Representatives? Using the existing literature on the role of stereotypes and gender traits in campaigns, we formulate two hypotheses to explain the relationship between gender and incumbency. The Competition Hypothesis asserts that compared to male incumbents, women running for reelection will face more competition in retaining their seats. The Gender Effect Hypothesis predicts that female incumbents will induce other women to enter the race. On the basis of an analysis of House elections from 1956 to 2002, we find considerable support for both hypotheses. In House elections, female incumbents have a “hidden influence”: Not only do they face more competition but they also increase the participation of female candidates in their own party as well as the opposition party. Although female incumbents win at the same rates as male incumbents, they face a much more competitive environment.

The emergence of the feminist network Magín in Cuba in the mid-1990s challenged the monopoly of the official women's organization over issues related to women. Magín came into being as a result of encounters with feminists in international meetings, and it grew and developed through transnational support. Yet the organization did not extend beyond a small group of professional women and eventually the state closed it down. This article probes the question of why autonomous feminist organizing did not succeed in Cuba, particularly given a window of opportunity presented by the collapse of the Soviet Union. I suggest that the nature of transnational networks, combined with the political hegemony of the Cuban government, limited the scope of Magín as an independent women's organization. Although transnational advocacy networks helped Cuban feminists to create new spaces for dialogue, they also encouraged tendencies of specialization and professionalization that led the women to forgo the possibility of building a broad-based autonomous movement. An analysis of feminist networks in Cuba can contribute to our knowledge of the pitfalls and promises of transnationalism, particularly in nonliberal democratic contexts.This research was made possible by support from the Social Sciences Research Council, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University. I am grateful to the women of Magín who gave generously of their time to share their experiences and ideas. In particular, I would like to thank Norma Guillard for providing materials and carrying out investigations for me long distance. Thanks to Mervyn Bain, Matt Cleary, Elisabeth Friedman, Kathryn Hochstetler, Catherine Murphy, Hairong Yan, and anonymous reviewers and editors of Politics & Gender for crucial feedback and/or enlightening conversations. An earlier version of this article was presented at the American Political Science Association meetings in Chicago, September 2004.

Dominant psychoanalytic paradigms locate the breast or penis/phallus as the touchstone for gender/sex/sexual development. This essay offers a critique of these accounts and an alternative theory of sexed forms of being: pregnancy envy and the kinship rules that result from this. The essay also provides an intellectual history of how previous efforts to theorize pregnancy envy, especially work by Ida Macalpine, were suppressed.This article has benefited from audiences at the Yale University Feminist Lesbian and Gay Workshop, the City University Lesbian and Gay Studies Workshop, and the University of Southern California Center on Feminist Research, as well as from comments by Marianne Constable, Lisa Ellis, Laura Green, James Martel, Hanna Pitkin, and Michael Rogin. Many thanks especially to the reviewers and editors for their extremely helpful suggestions, including the reference to Bruno Bettelheim (1962).

The institution of the family has changed, but U.S. public institutions and policies generally have not kept pace. In response, a number of feminist theorists have argued that we should recognize and support more diverse family forms. They argue that equality, respect for personal autonomy, recognition of diversity, and facilitating relationships of care demand such a move. Building on their work, I explicitly situate the necessity of redefining “family” within a public ethic of care and offer a comprehensive working definition of family that focuses on recognizing relationships that combine intimacy and care. In so doing, I address how to handle biological ties without excluding or marginalizing other bases upon which people form families.The author would like to thank the following individuals for sharing their expertise and comments on earlier versions of this manuscript: Eileen Botting, Fred Dallmayr, Daniel Engster, Neve Gordon, Jyl Josephson, Michael Kirsch, Victor Levy, Hugh Wilson, Christina Wolbrecht, Catherine Zuckert, the editors of Politics & Gender, and the anonymous reviewers. An earlier draft of this piece was presented in Chicago at the 2002 National Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association.

This essay explores the controversy spawned by the release, in April, 2004, of the photographs taken by U.S. military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Its particular concern is with photographs that depict American servicewomen engaged in various forms of abusive conduct against Iraqi prisoners. In its opening half, the essay examines and criticizes the responses to these photographs offered, first, by right-wing commentators and, second, by American feminists, most notably Barbara Ehrenreich. All read these photographs as a referendum on feminism and, more particularly, its commitment to the cause of gender equality; and all do so, I argue, on the basis of a naive understanding of gender. In its latter half, accordingly, the essay offers a more adequate understanding of gender, one loosely grounded in the work of Judith Butler and the concept of performativity. Referencing various official interrogation manuals, as well as the investigative reports released in the wake of this scandal, the essay employs this concept in offering a more adequate account of the gendered import of the deeds depicted in the Abu Ghraib photographs. It concludes by arguing that what is important about these photographs is neither whether the perpetrators of the exploitation they depict are male or female, nor whether the deeds they portray somehow compromise the feminist quest for gender equality. Rather, what is important are the multiple ways in which specifically gendered practices, which can be detached from the bodies they conventionally regulate, are deployed as elements within a more comprehensive network of technologies aimed at disciplining prisoners and so confirming their status as abject subjects of U.S. military power.This essay has its origins in a roundtable titled “Gender Relations in the Age of Neo-Liberalism,” which was conducted in conjunction with the 2005 meeting of the Western Political Science Association. I wish to thank the other participations on that roundtable, Jane Bayes, Mary Hawkesworth, and Judith Hicks Stiehm, as well as Paul Apostolidis, Renee Heberle, Jinee Lokaneeta, Jeannie Morefield, Aaron Perrine, Kari Tupper, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of the essay.

Although gender plays an enormous role in structuring personal relationships, society, politics, and culture, we know relatively little about when people's gender ideologies will influence their opinions on issues that do not trade directly on matters of gender. This article presents a theory of “group implication,” which defines the conditions under which elite political discourse can lead citizens to perceive and evaluate issues in terms of their gender schemas—their cognitive representations of gender beliefs. I apply this framework to an analysis of the 1993–94 U.S. health care reform effort, and demonstrate how elite frames structured the issue in a way consistent with the gender schema. This structuring was subtle and symbolic, and served to associate people's gender ideology with their thinking about health care reform. The article concludes with consideration of the implication of these findings for our understanding of the political impact of gendered rhetoric, and for our conceptual understanding of the relationship between gender and public opinion.

In this study, we seek to describe and explain changes in mass abortion attitudes in Poland and the United States. Both countries exhibit modest, but significant, declines in support for legal abortion during the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century. When compositional, structural, and period effects are estimated separately, both countries exhibit strong pro-life period effects beginning in the late 1990s. In Poland, compositional effects exert pro-choice pressure but are counteracted by strong pro-life structural effects. By contrast, compositional effects in the United States are rather weak, but strong pro-choice structural effects are offset by pro-life period effects. The latter result is attributed to strategic framing of the abortion issue by pro-life elites.A version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September 2004. Thanks are due David Damore, Kenneth Fernandez, Sheila Lambert, Jonathan Strand, Matthew Wetstein, and Melanie Young for valuable comments and assistance.

In their essay “Defending Modernity” (Politics & Gender 1 (March), 2005), Julia Adams and Ann Shola Orloff took gender and politics scholars to task for the ways in which they (we) engage gender and “high politics.” They call for a “more serious analytical engagement between gendered and mainstream students of politics,” with particular attention to “the relationship between gendered representations of war and actual military campaigns” (p. 179). Ultimately, they argue, scholars must consider that logics of masculine protection and domination “arise out of properly political sources that need to be better understood and incorporated into gender studies” (p. 179).

This roundtable was originally presented as a panel at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the APSA in Philadelphia that was sponsored by the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession. It was the sense of members of that committee that far too much of the time and energy of many political scientists—especially within the hallowed halls of convention centers—has focused on methodological debates and conflicts, while far too little attention has been directed to issues of social change and/or to contemporary issues of public policy. Nevertheless, it was also our sense that the focus on method to the exclusion—or, at least, the devaluation—of substance has been less true for feminist scholars and others who have been on the margins of the discipline or of the society than it has been for members of the profession at large. Indeed, many of the women and minority scholars, in particular, who entered the field of political science in the past 20 to 30 years did so precisely because they wanted to make a difference in the world, and to learn how to use the tools of the profession to improve the situation of less empowered members of society, whether in the United States or abroad. Hence, the decision to sponsor this roundtable, to highlight some of those women and their contributions, and to reflect on what we have achieved and what significant questions and tasks remain to be addressed.

Increasing the number of women in positions of political power is top priority for women's movements and for governments around the world. Activists, international institutions, and national governments have come to see gender quota laws as the best way to achieve this goal. In the past 15 years, more than 40 countries have adopted measures that require a certain number of those running for or holding legislative office to be women. Political science research on this topic has hewn closely to empirical questions about this phenomenon: Under what conditions do countries adopt gender quota laws? What impact do they have on the percentage of women elected to office? What difference do “quota women” make once elected? This debate, by contrast, focuses on normative questions about gender quota laws. Are quotas a good idea? Should more countries adopt them? Should the United States consider them? We have invited leading scholars to step back from the more cautious findings of their research to tell us what they really think.

Research on women and representation has argued that women who serve in “skewed” legislatures—that is, legislatures in which women make up less than 15% of the membership—avoid addressing women's interests and are marginalized by other legislators. I argue that women in such legislatures may actually be encouraged to develop legislative agendas that are distinct from those of their male colleagues, and that they may be as successful as their male counterparts. Analyzing data from three state legislatures in four years, I find that even in extremely skewed state legislatures, women are generally more active than men in sponsoring legislation that focuses on women's interests; indeed, in two of the three states, gender differences narrow as the legislature becomes more gender balanced. Second, I find that women are generally as successful as men in passing the legislation that they sponsor, and that in very homogeneous settings, they are sometimes more successful than men. Moreover, little evidence exists that they are less likely to be appointed to leadership positions. Finally, I find that increasing gender diversity within a legislature is accompanied by a greater overall focus on women's issues. I conclude that a “critical mass” is not necessary for substantive representation on the part of individual female state legislators, but that increased diversity may indeed bring about changes in policy outputs that reflect the interests of women.