Burch Noel Theory of Film Practice 1981

The State and Governance
Oxford Handbooks Online

Louise Chappell
The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics
Edited by Georgina Waylen, Karen Celis, Johanna Kantola, and S. Laurel Weldon
Print Publication Date: Mar 2013

Subject: Political Science, Comparative Politics, Public Administration
Online Publication Date: Aug 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199751457.013.0024
Abstract and Keywords
This article takes a look at the changes in feminist thinking. It outlines the competing
feminist theories, and studies the transition from a monolithic and patriarchal conception
of the state to a differentiated and gendered conception of the state. The article then
explains how gender functions within the state and how the state represents gender
relations within society. Finally, it also considers feminist engagement with the state,
which includes the venues, strategies, orientation, and results of the interaction.
Keywords: feminist thinking, feminist theories, patriarchal conception, gendered conception, gender relations,
feminist engagement
Is the state patriarchal? Does it produce and reproduce gender? If so, how? What are the
implications of gendered state and governance structures for those seeking to challenge
the gender status quo? These questions are at the heart of feminist research on the state
and governance. Scholars have provided vastly different and more highly sophisticated
responses to these questions. The aim of chapter is to explore developments in feminist
thinking on the state in three areas. It starts with an overview of competing feminist
theories in these areas and charts the shift from a monolithic and patriarchal conception
of the state to one that is differentiated and gendered. It then discusses how gender
operates within the state and how the state constitutes gender relations within society.
The final section addresses feminist engagement with the state, including the venues,
strategies, orientation, and the outcomes of this interaction. There is an extensive
literature in each of these three areas. While this chapter cannot cover the full breadth of
work in this area, it does offer a guide to the major debates and some of the key
contributors to the field.
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Feminist Theories of the State and Governance

Feminists have adopted very different approaches to the state. For many years the fault
lines in debate existed between those who adopted either a radical or socialist or liberal
position. More recently, scholars working within (p. 604) poststructuralist,
institutionalist, and postcolonial paradigms have critiqued these positions for being
overly deterministic or simplistic and have offered a more differentiated view of the state
where patriarchy is replaced by gender as defining the relations between and among men
and women (for another outline of these debates see Waylen 1998). As we shall see, these
recent interpretations have opened new avenues for exploring feminist engagement with
the state, and an alternative to the inevitable co-option trap that is often the end point of
radical and socialist feminist interpretations. The following discussion examines earlier
interpretations of the state before exploring the differentiated state positions and the link
between theories of the state and of governance.
The Monolithic State
Initial Western feminist theories of the state grew out of radical and socialist/Marxist and
liberal traditions. The first two positions share much in common, not the least of which is
that the state operates as a capitalist and a monolithic patriarchal structure that has a
universal effect on all women: it operates to keep all women everywhere oppressed. One
of the most important scholars using a radical feminist perspective is Catharine
MacKinnon, whose book Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (1989) still remains an
influential text. For MacKinnon the state is male in a feminist sense. That is, the law
(though which the liberal state is constituted) “sees and treats women the way men see
and treat women. The liberal state coercively and authoritatively constitutes the social
order in the interests of men as a gender—through its legitimating norms, forms, relation
to society, and substantive policies” (161–162).
MacKinnon (1989) argues the state has no capacity to function autonomously of male
interests. In her view, “However autonomous of class the liberal state may appear, it is
not autonomous of sex. Male power is systemic. Coercive, legitimated, and epistemic, it is
the regime” (170; for discussion, see Heath 1997, 50). When women engage with the
state, they are treated as liberal individuals, which, MacKinnon argues, means being
treated as men. Where women’s needs align with those of men, such as in employment,
then they can achieve a degree of formal equality, but where they don’t, such as in the
case reproductive rights or family violence, the state treats them differently (see
McDonagh 2009, 231). In the latter case, this means that the state either fails to take
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action or, when it does act, reinforces gender stereotypes, such the view that women are
weak and dependent, leaving them vulnerable to further discrimination and violence.
Some feminists working in non-Western contexts have also advanced a view of the state
and its laws as patriarchal. Indian scholars have suggested that in South Asia “the
outcome of trials and the unwillingness of the police to probe violence against women at
home and in society has led to a situation in which the law as a whole can easily be taken
to be an instrument of patriarchal oppression” (Gonsalves 1993, 126 in Kapur 2007).
(p. 605) Feminists operating within a Marxist and socialist tradition supplement this view
of a male state with one that envisions it as having a capitalist base and the “dual system”
of capitalism and patriarchy operate to achieve a similar effect: male domination and
female subordination (see, for example, Barrett 1980; for a discussion see Acker 1989;
Walby 2007). For both radical and socialist and Marxist feminists, male dominance is not
inherent within the state as such but exists outside it and has become embedded within
it. Family and capitalist relations, “the private sphere,” is the crucible for male
dominance and acts as the foundation upon which state operates (see Acker 1989).
These theories of the state have attracted criticism for various reasons. One problem is
that they “approac[h] a conspiracy theory. One is left searching for Patriarchal
Headquarters to explain what goes on” (Franzway, Connell, and Court 1989, 29). For
Joan Acker (1989), the problem is that the notion of patriarchy used in these approaches
leaves other social theories—such as class relations—untouched, treating them as
seemingly gender neutral (237). The universalist assumptions underpinning these
theories have also been roundly criticized, both by black feminists from within Western
liberal states (see Mirza 1997) who reject the view that women and men share a unified
set of interests and by non-Western feminist scholars who see it as having relevance only
in democratic and Western contexts not where there are significant variations in state
capacity and the use of state violence (see Rai 1996). Writing about the application of
patriarchal theories in India and Pakistan, Ratna Kapur (2007) argues these approaches
are problematic because they are “ahistorical, decontextualized and universalistic” and
also because they establish an “essentialist construction of women only as victims, rather
than as agents of resistance and change” (128). Feminists across a variety of contexts
also feel uncomfortable with the end point of such theories: that is, despite their efforts to
bring about significant legislative and policy reforms—in areas including reproductive
rights, equal pay, and protection from violence—activists are conceived as little more
than co-opted patriarchal pawns, suffering from false consciousness. A major limitation of
these theories is that they cannot account for challenges to and changes within the
gender order of the state over time, especially changes that benefit (some groups of)
women.
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In contrast to the radical and socialist interpretations of the state are those that treat it
as a neutral or even a positive entity for women. Liberal feminists working within a
pluralist paradigm—which sees state power as widely dispersed and where a wide
spectrum of interests are reflected within the state—tend toward the former position,
assuming that the state can be a neutral arbiter and that women can overcome male
domination by entering state institutions in significant numbers (see, for example, Kanter
1977). In the view of sociologists Mike Savage and Anne Witz (1992), such a position
assumes that “…power wipes out sex. In other words, once women have organizational
power, their gender pales into insignificance” (15, emphasis in original). Liberal feminists
along with those from radical and socialist positions view the state (p. 606) as a coherent
entity, albeit one that strives to protect individual liberties, rather than capitalist and
patriarchal interests. Critics reject this position both because it does not account for the
complexities of the state and because improving the nominal representation of women
does not address the state’s gender bias. Further, the liberal view presumes all women
are committed to a gender equality project, which clearly they are not (see Duerst-Lahti
2002, 375), and fails to account for the deeply embedded gender norms or the “masculine
logic” (Watson 1990, 9) upon which the state operates.
An even more positive interpretation of the state is reflected in some Nordic feminist
welfare state approaches (see Hernes 1988), which stem from a social democratic
tradition and see the state as a potentially “benign instrument for social change enabling
women to avoid dependence on individual men” (Waylen 2008a, 125). Here state social
policy is seen as a way to empower women and potentially institutionalize gender
equality (Kantola 2006, 10). However, even scholars working in this tradition
acknowledge the catch in their position: that the shift from women’s private dependence
on men to a public dependence on the welfare state can make the women the objects
rather than the subjects of policy making unless they have power within the apparatus of
the state (for a discussion see Kantola 2006, 10–11). This position is also critiqued for its
overemphasis on social rights, such as access to paid employment. This emphasis has
been seen to come at the expense of the protection of women’s civil rights, including
bodily integrity issues. According to Kantola, this orientation helps explain the slow
response to addressing violence against women in Nordic states (2006).
These various perspectives on the state cast the relationship between gender interests
and the state in either–or terms—that is, between those who see the state either as
patriarchal (or capitalist) and oppressive of women or as gender neutral or positive and
potentially enhancing women’s emancipation. In the first reading, patriarchy and the
state are fused and intertwined; in the second, they are only loosely related and easily
untangled. In recent years this binary thinking has been challenged by a number of
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alternative approaches to the state including poststructuralist/discursive, institutionalist,

and postcolonialist approaches.
The Differentiated State
The poststructuralist/discursive approach has been articulated by scholars working in the

Australian context who were interested in developing theories that better reflected
feminist interactions with and in the state. In this view, states are not patriarchal as such,
but the different institutions of the state are “culturally marked as masculine” and
operate largely as the “institutionalisation of the power of men” (Franzway et al. 1989,
41). Critically important here is the notion of discourse and the ways the state is involved
in constructing and reproducing frameworks of meaning through dominant ideas and
language (Pringle and Watson 1990, 230). In Pringle and Watson’s view, “Power relations
(p. 607) are actively constituted in and through discourse: they do not reflect economic or
sexual power” (232). Unlike radical and socialist accounts of the state, this position
privileges gender over patriarchy, a set of relations constituted discursively through the
state. Instead of conceiving of the state as a coherent entity with a predictable effect, this
perspective emphasizes its incoherence, instability, and varying effects on both men’s
and women’s interests (230). Wendy Brown’s (1995) analysis of the state follows similar
lines. In her view, the state “is not a thing, system or subject, but a significantly
unbounded terrain of powers and techniques, and ensemble of discourses, rules and
practices, cohabitating…in contradictory relation to each other” (31). For Brown, male
power operates through the state, but it is neither predictable nor complete.
While this differentiated view of the state has had a significant impact on the field, some
view it as making the state seem overly complex (Hoffman 2001) or critique it for leaving
the notion of structures behind. An alternative to the discursive approach to the state can
be found in work that (re)introduces political institutions to explain state structures and
outcomes (Kantola 2006, 32). A burgeoning feminist institutionalist literature uses some
of the concepts to emerge from the poststructuralist approach to the state, such as an
emphasis on gender, including an understanding of hegemonic masculinity. At the same
time, some of the tools of “mainstream” institutionalism are adopted, including a focus on
formal and informal institutions—the rules of the game—and attention to institutional
change and stasis, but a critical gender dimension is added (for an introduction see
Kenney 1996; Lovenduski 1998; Mackay and Waylen 2009; Krook and Mackay 2011). The
value of this approach is that it highlights the way taken-for-granted masculine norms
have become embedded within state institutions through rules, processes, ideologies, and
discourses and in ways that shape their operation and outcomes (Duerst-Lahti 2002;
Mackay 2011). It then takes this critique further by seeking to identify openings and
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opportunities for challenging what appear to be locked-in features of the state—male-

dominated legislatures, gender-exclusionary constitutions, gendered policy making
processes, and so on. The feminist institutionalist approach to the state eschews the
usual normative debate about whether the state is “good” or “bad” for women’s equality
to consider what effect political institutions have on shaping gender relations and, in
turn, the extent to which these relations can be (re)gendered through new rules, policies,
and discourses to better reflect the differences and complexities of the lives of both men
and women.
Feminist institutionalists unpack the state so that it is treated as a variety of separate

institutions (Chappell 2002; Duerst-Lahiti 2002), each of which operates along its own
gender codes and provides different obstacles and opportunities for unsettling the
existing gender order. As Hester Eisenstein (1996, xvii) notes:
…To speak of “the state” is misleading. “The state” means the entire apparatus of
government, from parliaments, cabinets, and bureaucracies administering
programs for health, welfare, education, and commerce to the judicial system, the
army and the police…Each has a different relation to women.
(p. 608) Feminist institutionalists also pay attention to informal institutions—the less
codified but no less important rules and norms—that operate within and through the
state (see Mackay, Kenny, and Chappell 2010, Chappell and Waylen 2013). The
comparative scholarship emerging in the field of feminist institutionalism is sensitive to
differences between state institutions within and between polities and demonstrates the
ways different institutional configurations constrain, and at times enhance, attempts to
change to the existing gender order. Such comparative work has considered institutional
effects on feminist movements in Australia and Canada (Chappell 2002); on gender and
transitions to democracy in states such as Chile, South Africa, and Hungary (Waylen
2007); on female representation in parliaments and parties within Latin America and the
United Kingdom (Franceschet 2011; Kenny 2011); and on policy developments and
debates across Western liberal states (Weldon 2002; Kantola 2006; McBride and Mazur
2010). Demonstrating the importance of institutional legacies and new design features
can influence the operation of gender within the state is also a feature of this work; for
example, Fiona Mackay’s (2009) research demonstrates how the rules of the new Scottish
Parliament opened up opportunities for feminist engagement for a time, before old
practices and past gendered institutional legacies reasserted themselves and closed off
some of these different ways of doing politics.
Feminists working within a postcolonial paradigm have added another more complex
reading of the state. Drawing on experiences in postcolonial contexts in Asia, Africa, and
Latin America, this work challenges, if not the central preoccupation with the state found
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in Western feminist political thought, then at least the degree of influence attributed to it
(Manji 1999, 439; Goetz 2007). This work suggests that the state is closely bound up with
societal relations—especially those based on tribal, kin, and religious foundations—and
that these are at least as important as the state in regulating women’s lives
(Mukhopadhyay 2007). This work demonstrates how colonial rule often left family law
including rights around marriage and divorce, property, and custody of children in the
hands of nonstate actors such as religious institutions and tribal authorities, which meant
matters essential to women’s equality and citizenship were outside the purview of the
state. Through the period of decolonization and modern state building, which is
continuing in some parts of the world, many states maintain this dual legal system. As a
result, “despite the existence of equality clauses in constitutions, unequal treatment
sanctioned by custom, kinship and religious regulations continues to hold sway” (ibid.,
272). Of course, as feminist research has demonstrated, colonialism in practice varied
between states, and these variations have mattered greatly in terms of women’s access to
state (rather than religious or community sanctioned) legal arrangements (see Charrad
2001; Htun and Weldon 2011). As Charrad’s study on North Africa demonstrates, the
extent to which kin relations were enshrined in postcolonial state building made a
significant difference to women’s citizenship. For instance, (p. 609) in Morocco “women’s
citizenship rights were curtailed in favour of male-dominated patrilineages. By contrast,
in Tunisia, where kin-based formations exerted much less social and political influence in
the modern state, women gained significant individual rights, even though many aspects
of gender inequality persisted” (Charrad 2007). Kapur’s (2007) work on South Asia points
to similar outcomes and also highlights how women experienced different relations with
the state depending upon their community and religious ties—for example, between
Muslim and Hindu women in India. This work reinforces the view that women’s
relationship with the state cannot be understood in monolithic terms. Colonial legacies
matter greatly to women’s opportunities to engage with the state, but how they matter
differs with each context and between different groups of women.
Gender and Governance
The trend toward a more diffused notion of the state has led feminist scholars to turn
their attention to theories of governance. Governance has become a catchall phrase
under which many different concepts have been grouped. As pioneer feminist scholar in
this area Georgina Waylen (2008a, 118) contends, governance covers both an
understanding of the changing structures of government and market interactions and
changing processes of governing, including the place of society and markets as
alternatives to the state. Scholars working across the subfields of public administration,
international relations and international political economy, and comparative politics have
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applied the concept of governance but without any analysis of its gender dimensions
(ibid.). It is necessary to address each dimension of governance—including the market,
public–private relations, and networks—to assess how gender, as well as race and class
(see Rai 2008), operates and intersects with each of them (Waylen 2008a). Waylen argues
that the turn to governance does not mean that feminist conceptions of the state should
be left behind; indeed the reverse is the case (ibid., 125). The state remains a key aspect
of governance; its regulatory role in particular is more important than ever. As a result,
feminists need to interrogate the position and influence of the state within shifting state,
market, and society dynamics and consider the ways the gender dimensions of each
element of the governance framework is (re)shaped and (re)constituted through their
interaction.
A key analysis of developments in governance structures, and the place of the state
within these, is provided in Lee Ann Banazsak, Karen Beckwith, and Dieter Rucht’s
(2003) collection Women’s Movement Facing a Reconfigured State. The authors
demonstrate how changes wrought by globalization and other forces have led to a
restructuring of the state so that there has been a relocation of formal state power. State
authority has been relocated in three directions: (1) uploaded to regional and
international governance bodies (such as the (p. 610) European Union [EU] or United
Nations [UN] bodies or through free trade agreements); (2) downloaded to provincial
institutional structures including state and local governments; and (3) laterally loaded,
especially away from representative to quasi-governmental or nongovernmental (i.e.,
market-based) arenas (3–6).
In Banazsak, Beckwith and Rucht (2003), and in other recent scholarship, feminists have
examined the gender dimensions of these directional shifts (for further discussion of the
gendered implications of multilevel governance see the chapter by Bedford in this
volume). The effect downloading of state power on gender relations is discussed in an
emerging literature on multilevel governance and federalism including studies on
devolution in the United Kingdom (Mackay 2010) and a range of federations (see
Haussman, Sawer, and Vickers 2010; Vickers 2011). These studies show how divisions of
responsibilities between local-, meso-, and national-level governments are being
reconfigured in ways that directly impact policy areas related to women’s lives including
violence, reproduction, child-care, and welfare provisions. The lateral loading aspect has
also interested feminist researchers, who have sketched out the implications of the
marketization of traditional areas of state responsibility, especially core aspects of the
welfare state, on gender relations within the public and private realms (see, for example,
Brennan 2010).
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Understanding the implications of the uploading of governance arrangements on gender

relations has also been an area where feminists have started to make a significant
impact. Collections by Mary Meyer and Elisabeth Prugl (1999) and Shirin Rai and
Georgina Waylen (2008) (see also the chapter by Bedford in this volume) demonstrate the
critical importance of including a gender perspective in any analysis of the operation of
institutions outside nation states including the UN, EU, World Bank, International
Monetary Fund, and International Criminal Court (ICC). These analyses are important for
a number of reasons. They show that gender norms operate equally within state and
extrastate institutions, and, as with states, there is a great deal of heterogeneity across
institutions of global governance in terms of how gender relations are configured (Waylen
2008b, 256). Variations are apparent between legal, economic, and bureaucratic arenas
as well as between old and new institutions of global governance.
In summary, feminist theorizing about the state has come a long way in the past three
decades. Few feminists still subscribe to a monolithic view of the state that operates
according only to male interests. Instead, due to the influence of poststructuralism, most
gender scholars now work with a differentiated view of the state. Some feminist scholars
do not go as far as others to conceive of the state only or even primarily as a discursive
arena but prefer to uphold the notion of the state as a single entity, albeit made up of a
complex array of institutional sites and structures and one that reflects its past.
Nevertheless, there is general agreement across the various approaches, influenced by
feminists operating outside a white, middle-class, and heterosexual framework, that
(p. 611) the state does not have a consistent impact on all women and men. Indeed, as
the following discussion shows, contemporary feminist state theory is more interested in
understanding the way the state and society are together involved in constituting gender
relations than in viewing them as predetermined. The governance literature, as it
becomes gendered, adds another important dimension to feminist understandings of the
state, highlighting the way the state operates within a complex set of relations and
processes—each of which has its own gender foundations. As this research illustrates, a
focus on the state takes us only so far in understanding regulation, power, and authority.
The impact of the state can only now be understood as operating in a web of relationships
that captures global and local arenas as well as market and other nonstate institutions.
The State and the Construction of Gender

The development of more complex theories of the state has also changed and refined the
way feminists understand the operation of gender relations within it. Feminists see the
state as gendered but also as reproducing gender (Randall and Waylen 1998). Moreover,
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as a range of scholars has pointed out, the gender hierarchies constituted through the
state are not the only ones that count. The intersection between gender and other
structures of power including race, class, and sexuality is critical to understanding the
lived realities of women and men’s lives (see also the chapters by Hawkesworth and Hill
Collins and Chepp in this volume).
What do we mean when we say the state is gendered? First, it infers that the state is
inhabited by men in (often vastly) greater numbers than women: this is what Savage and
Witz (1992) define as the state’s nominal gender dimension. The historic absence of
women within state institutions raises issues about the nature of democratic citizenship,
equality, and justice. Women’s absence from positions of power in the state has also had
a further gendering effect: without women’s input, laws and policy decisions made at the
highest level have tended to disregard the unequal political, economic, and social position
of the two sexes as well as reinforce stereotypical assumptions about male and female
behavior (see Acker 1992, 567).
Although the most obvious, the nominal gender dimension of the state is a relatively weak
expression of gender relations and is largely overcome by the entry into the state of
women, and particularly feminists, who work to challenge gender stereotypes and
assumptions. But state institutions also have a more deeply embedded substantive gender
dimension (Savage and Witz 1992). (p. 612) That is, they operate on a logic of
appropriateness based on masculine norms, expectations, and practices (Chappell
2006b). As Lovenduski (1998, 339) notes:
…The public world was designed to accommodate activity according to the codes
of masculinity. The value cluster found in the masculine code inscribes the most
influential vision of what it means to “act in public.” In human terms the vision is
incomplete, ruling out intimacy, emotion and affection from public institutions.
Masculine codes shape both the behavior of individuals within state institutions
(regardless of their sex) and institutional outcomes, such as laws, policies, ideas, and
discourses.
This identification of the substantive gender dimensions of the state has shifted attention
away from individuals within the state and toward the practices and process of the state
that produce and reproduce relations between men and women as well as between
groups of men and groups of women. As Htun (2005) notes, studying gender and the
state is not about studying the behavior of individual men or women. Rather, it requires
us to explore how “through its laws and policies, symbolic power, the statements and
behavior of officials, and subtle patterning of society,” the state upholds the large-scale
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social structures and processes, including the sexual division of labor, normative
heterosexuality, and war and militarism (162).
Through her gender regimes theory, Raewyn Connell (2005) makes an important
contribution to understanding gender as a structure. In Connell’s view, every institution
has its own gender regime, reflecting the patterning of, and interaction between, each
dimension of gender relations. These dimensions include the gender relations of power;
the gender division of labor; the gender dimension of emotion and human relations; and
the gender dimension of culture and symbolism (7). Although analytically distinct, in
practice these dimensions of the gender structure “are found interwoven in actual
relationships and transactions” (ibid.). This regime operates within the institutions of the
state, but not in predictable or stable patterns. Rather, the state and gender are dynamic
because there exist “crisis tendencies” within the gender regime that, when triggered,
enable new political possibilities (1990, 532, for more on the notion of gender see the
chapter by Hawkesworth in this volume).
In her work, Connell (2002) also challenges the dominant dichotomous reading of gender
that sees it as “the cultural difference of women from men, based on the biological
difference of male and female” (8)—an account that can see gender only where it exists
between men and women. Although Connell agrees gender operates between men and
women, she is equally interested in identifying the gender dimensions that exist among
women and among men. This includes the operation of gender relations between
heterosexual and homosexual women or between working-class and middle-class men.
Here her concept of hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1995) is useful for exploring the
various ways masculinity is constructed between different groups of men, for instance
between those who act in violent and nonviolent ways (also see Carver 1998 on
masculinity).
(p. 613) Connell (1987) suggests that there are hierarchies within the gender order of the
state, with various forms of hegemonic masculinity at work across different state
institutions. This masculinity is demonstrated in different ways in different parts of the
state and includes, for instance, “the physical aggression of front line troops or police,
the authoritative masculinity of commanders and the calculative rationality of
bureaucrats” (128–129). These forms of hegemonic masculinity have been shown to be
both heterosexual and racist, with nonwhite men either feminized or treated as
uncivilized through discursive practices (Hooper 2001, 56). In this reading of the state,
different displays of femininity are also evident across the different state arenas—the
caring nurse, the competent secretary, and the domineering school headmistress. As
social constructions, gender norms do not determine that women will act in a feminine
way or men the reverse. However, political actors, traditionally men, have acted as if sex
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and gender are mapped onto each other (Carver 1998). Men, operating within a
hegemonic normative code, have been thought to possess the appropriate skills,
knowledge, and temperament to design and maintain the institutions of the state, while
most women—assumed to be irrational, fragile, and dependent—have tended to be
relegated to supporting roles (Lovenduski 2005; for a further discussion on masculinities
also see Hooper 2001, ch. 3).
Not only does gender involve the personal characteristics of women and men, but, more
vitally, it also is “a matter of the social relations within which individuals and groups
act” (Connell 2002, 9). With such a perspective we are able to think about gender as
operating through institutions, including different areas of the state, such as the
bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the legislature without linking it to specific individuals.
Along with Htun (2005) and Connell (1990), Karen Beckwith (2005) also shifts the
emphasis from individuals to the ways gender operates as a process within institutions.
For Beckwith, this process operates at two levels: “1) as the differential effects of
structures and policies upon women and men, and 2) as the means by which masculine
and feminine actors (often men and women, but not perfectly congruent, and often
individuals but also structures) actively work to produce favorable gendered
outcomes” (132). Very often, as Beckwith and others have pointed out, gender processes
appear as gender neutral but in fact have distinct impact on women and men’s lives (132;
see also Duerst-Lahti 2002; Stivers 1993). These seemingly gender-neutral processes are
not the outcome of a conscious strategy on behalf of all men to dominate all women.
Rather, they have arisen because male privilege has been normalized within the state,
through organizational rules, routines, and policies and through masculinist ideology
(Duerst-Lahti, 373) and discourses such that they have rendered “women, along with
their needs and interests, invisible” (Hawkesworth 2005, 147).
Feminist scholars have exposed the gendered foundations of seemingly neutral practices
across an array of institutions. This includes the recruitment practices of political parties
(Kenny 2011); bureaucratic norms in Westminster systems that privilege full-time
workers and expect them to be supported by stay-at-home wives (Chappell 2002); legal
and constitutional arrangements that (p. 614) protect male perpetrators of violence and
leave women vulnerable and without access to legal avenues (MacKinnon 1989; Kenney
2010; Dobrowolsky and Hart, 2004; Kapur 2007); and welfare state provisions which
maintain women’s dependence if not on male breadwinners, then on the state (Orloff
1996), just to name a few. What these diverse studies show is that, although gender
processes operate across the state, their influence differs. Building on the differentiated
notion of the state, key feminist scholars such as Joni Lovenduski (1998) pay careful
attention to the “distinctively gendered cultures” across state institutions and identify
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and account for the various kinds of “masculinities and femininities that are
performed” (348).
Gender does not merely exist in the state, but it is also reproduced through it. The
products of institutions—laws, policies, and rules—are imbued with these internal values
and come to shape societal norms and expectations, which are then reflected onto
institutions; in this sense gender and institutional outcomes can be seen as coconstitutive
and mutually reinforcing. Eileen McDonagh (2009) provides an analysis of how this
process operates in the United States in her engaging book The Motherless State. Here
McDonagh suggests the identity of public policies in the United States have been
masculine in nature, both in terms of the emphasis on militarism and on individualism,
which treats men as the norm. What is not reflected in these public policies are women’s
duties as mothers and carers, in other words, a maternalist discourse. In comparable
states, welfare policies, gender quotas, and, in some cases, the operation of a heredity
monarchy where women can assume leadership provide a strong maternalist foundation
to the state (51). Without such policies and institutions, the U.S. state reflects onto
society the view that women are not suitable political leaders. McDonagh concludes that
addressing gender inequalities and opening the state to women requires a hybrid state—
capable of embracing liberal individualism (where women are treated the same as men)
with maternalism (which recognizes women’s differences to men) (55).
Two criticisms are often mounted against much of the existing research on the
production and reproduction of gender and the state. The first is that gender is often
taken as a synonym for studying women and the ways state practices shape women’s
relations with men, but not the reverse. With some exceptions (see, for example, Connell
1995; Carver 1999; Beckwith 2001), the emphasis on gender research is overly focused
on the ways women are disadvantaged by existing gender hierarchies but not the way
men are privileged (and some men are disadvantaged) or the myriad ways seeming
neutral processes and norms operate to uphold or naturalize certain forms of masculinity.
A second critique focuses on the limited extent to which scholars have identified linkages
between gender processes and other power relations, especially those related to race,
class, sexuality, and religious background. This critique first emerged in the work of
African American feminists, who argued that the unique experiences of black women
could not be added onto white women’s analyses of gender oppression (see hooks 1981;
Collins 1990). Similarly, (p. 615) lesbians, disabled women, and poor women have also
been critical of the ways gender research has focused on the experiences of middle-class,
white, heterosexual, able-bodied women and has not considered how class and sexuality
are also produced through the state in ways that impact men’s and women’s lives as
equally as gender does (see, for example, Johnson 2003). As noted earlier, feminist
Page 13 of 28

scholars in postcolonial contexts have also mounted a strong and convincing critique
along these lines. Scholars and activists from these various positions have not argued for
these other identities to be added to dominant feminists analyses of gender so that
women from nonmainstream backgrounds are seen as carrying a double or triple burden.
Rather, they have called for a reconceptualization of the intersection between different
social structures where “every social position is defined by an interaction between…
hierarchical systems” (Weldon 2008, 195; also see Hawkesworth 2003; Walby 2007; for a
detailed discussion see the chapter by Hill Collins and Chepp in this volume).
As with feminist efforts to denaturalize male privilege in the state, the intersectional
approach brings to light hidden class, race, and other social structures and demonstrates
how these structures combine to situate certain groups of women and men in positions of
advantage and disadvantage. As Laurel Weldon (2008), a leading scholar in this area,
notes, intersectionality is not a concept that applies only to marginalized groups. It “is an
aspect of social organization that shapes all of our lives: gender structures shape the lives
of both women and men, and everyone has a race/gender identity….” (195). Mary
Hawkesworth’s (2003) study of black women in the U.S. Congress is an excellent example
of these hierarchical relationships and shows how race and gender operate as a
compound to silence, stereotype and challenge their authority compared with other men
and women in this specific political institution.
The state is gendered in terms of its personnel but more importantly in its structures and
processes. This situates both men and women in particular positions in relation to the
state, toward each other, and between each other. As intersectionality theorists remind
us, the state is also raced, classed, and heterosexist. Unlike earlier approaches to the
state that treated these attributes as permanent, most recent approaches to gender and
the state consider its gender power base to have a normative foundation or view it as a
regime that is prone to crises and change. Contemporary feminist theorizing that
conceptualizes the state as differentiated and gender as an unstable regime or dynamic
process has had a significant impact on the way feminist scholars and activists now think
about engaging with the state. Over time they have shifted their focus from normative
questions about whether feminists should engage with the state—radical and socialist
feminists arguing no and liberals arguing yes—to empirical questions about the how,
when, and where gender equality seekers can work in and through the state to bring
about structural, policy, and discursive changes that challenge gendered power relations.
In the final section, we consider the range of venues, strategies, and actors involved in
regendering the state.
Page 14 of 28

(p. 616) Feminist Engagement with the State

Current feminist thinking about engagement with the state is influenced in part by a
recognition that the state is unavoidable if changes to the gender order are to occur.
Moreover, more recent theorizing also shows that feminists also need to look beyond the
state to governance structures above and below it to disrupt these relations of power. No
feminist would argue that bringing about changes in these arenas is a straightforward or
simple process due to the embedded masculinist (and racist and classist) logics of the
state and governance as well as the contested and often conflicting goals of different
groups of feminist actors operating in different institutional environments. However, the
critical point is that these logics are open to challenge: because the state is
differentiated, complex, and unstable, there are opportunities for feminist activists to
unsettle the gender order. As Beckwith (2005) puts it, state institutions and politics are
not only gendered but also can be gendered: “that is, that activist feminists…can work to
instate practices and rules that recast the gendered nature of the political” (132–133).
Such a position takes contemporary feminist understandings of engagement with the
state much further than earlier interpretations that saw it as leading inevitably to co-
option and any perceived progress representing a false consciousness on the part of
activists.
In investigating feminist engagement with the state, electoral and bureaucratic arenas
have attracted particular attention. Electoral institutions research has investigated how
legislatures, electoral rules, and political parties are gendered such that they preclude or
limit women (and feminists) participation in these institutions as well as the masculine
nature of the laws and norms to emerge from these institutions (see the chapter by Krook
and Schwindt-Bayer in this volume). This research has, however, also demonstrated how
women have been able to work within and outside the state to open up new opportunities
for advancing women’s presence in the state.
In terms of the administrative arm of the state, the entry of women’s activists to work as
femocrats in the state has been given significant attention. This research first arose in
the Australia context (Franzway et al. 1989; Sawer 1990; Eisenstein 1996; Chappell 2002)
but has become a focus of study across Western liberal states and in non-Western
settings (McBride and Mazur 2010 Rai 2002; Weldon 2002; Tripp et al. 2009). Research
on what has come to be known as state feminism and the relationship between feminist
movements and WPAs have been scrutinized in detail through the RNGS network and by
others (see the chapter by McBride and Mazur in this volume; also Outshoorn and
Kantola 2007; Tripp et al. 2009). Other important work in this area includes Lee Ann
Banaszak’s (2010) study, that investigates the opportunities and constraints for feminist
Page 15 of 28

activists working outside designated women’s agencies in the U.S. bureaucracy. Her
work demonstrates the importance of looking across all areas of the bureaucracy to get a
complete picture of feminist engagement (p. 617) and influence in the state. Comparative
research on state feminism has drawn attention to the importance of the specific features
of the institutional environment to the success or failure of this form of engagement. For
instance, work in the Latin American context has emphasized significant role powerful
executives have played in frustrating or furthering the work of feminist policy makers
(Franceschet 2011).
In each of these venues, feminists have employed a range of strategies with varying
degrees of success. The use of gender quotas (Tripp and Kang 2008; Krook 2009) to
increase the number of women in the parliamentary arena—based on the expectation that
women’s presence will influence gender equality outcomes—has been a widespread
strategy. The push by women’s groups to secure reserved seats for women in India and
Pakistan and to introduce quotas in many other parts of the world, with some outstanding
success, such as in Rwanda, are cases in point (see Krook 2009; Tripp et al. 2009),
However, as Htun and Jones (2002) demonstrate, in the Latin American context such
reforms alone often do not overcome normative or substantive gender discrimination.
Another internationally popular strategy has been to encourage states and governance
bodies such as the UN, EU, and ICC to adopt gender mainstreaming practices in their law
and policy development and implementation processes (see True and Mintrom 2001; Rai
and Waylen 2008). Research has shown that the success of both gender specific and
gender mainstreaming policy initiatives require the presence of strong political
commitment and other power and financial resources. These resources are often difficult
to amass—especially in developing states (see Goetz and Hassim 2002 on Uganda and
South Africa)—but are even more difficult to hold onto over time (Outshoorn and Kantola
2007).
Other forms of feminist engagement with the state have also been evaluated. Feminist
efforts in the constitutional and judicial realm for example is a growing area of study for
political scientists interested in evaluating the role of feminist judges, prosecutors, and
legal advocates to the development of legal institutions and jurisprudence as well as
feminist activists influence on constitutional creation and reform (see the chapter by
Cichowski in this volume; also Kenney 2010; Dobrowolsky and Hart 2004). One successful
legal strategy is discussed by Eturk (2006, 96), who describes how women successfully
challenged the Turkish Supreme Court’s use of the notion of respectability to determine a
sentence in a rape case against a prostitute. The increasing importance of governance
structures and processes has highlighted new venues through which feminist
engagement takes place. While feminist action within local- and meso-levels of
government has always been evident, the pressures on this level of government have
Page 16 of 28

been reinforced in recent years, making them an essential site for those seeking gender
equality (Mackay 2010; Vickers 2011). The importance and success of feminist
engagements at the state and provincial levels of government has been examined in
recent comparative studies across North and South America, Africa, and Australia (see
Haussman et al. 2010; Molyneux (p. 618) 2007; Chappell and Vickers 2011) and
demonstrates the importance of sympathetic political parties, in combination with
multilevel government, to bring about policy advancements for women.
International institutions, especially regional bodies such as the EU and Asia Pacific
Economic Cooperation (APEC) that directly influence state policies, have also become
targets for gender-equality seekers (see Rai and Waylen 2008). Arguments about the
need for gender justice, including women’s access to political power and the recognition
of the private realm, have had some impact internationally, such as through Convention
on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Beijing Platform, and
the Rome Statute to the ICC. Such international developments offer important tools to
gender actors within nation states to challenge government’s to implement their
commitments and reflect international norms (see Keck and Sikkink 1998; Ferree and
Tripp 2006). However, they do not automatically result in states removing discriminatory
laws from their books, introducing new law and changing policies in areas related to
women’s citizenships rights. Achieving such commitments are always easier said than
done, especially in the area of family law (Weldon and Htun 2011). Nonetheless, the
“uploading” of particular issues, especially related to human rights, has paved the way
for new global debates and a shared language that is especially important to actors in
non-Western states where women’s rights are often poorly protected (see, for instance,
Paidar 2002, 246 on the importance of CEDAW in Iran; Eturk 2006 on Turkey).
Initially, these strategies were construed in dichotomous insider–outsider terms with

feminists seen to either enter the state to become insiders (and at high risk of co-option)
or remain outside the state in activist, advocate, and service delivery positions within the
women’s movement. In her important book on gender equality activists’ entry into the
U.S. military and Catholic Church Mary Katzenstein (1998) makes an important
contribution to rethinking this relationship. Rejecting the long-standing insider–outsider
dichotomy, Katzenstein encourages scholars to think about activism as operating along a
continuum. In her view, different actors will see themselves more or less as insiders or
outsiders depending upon their accountability to an institution in a financial,
organizational, and discursive sense (39–40). The more actors see themselves as
accountable to an institution along each of these axes, the stronger their insider status
will be. A common situation for women’s activists who enter political institutions is that
they feel financially and organizationally accountable to the institution but continue to
identify themselves with, and seek to be accountable to, external women’s organizations
Page 17 of 28

and ideals. The term outsiders within, coined by African American feminist scholar
Patricia Hill Collins, nicely sums up the position of women who have multiple
accountabilities within a particular institutional setting (Collins 1998 in Roth 2006, 158).
Katzenstein’s (1998, 40) analysis highlights the limitation of the insider–outsider

dichotomy for understanding not only the position of insiders but also outsiders’
relationship to the state. Often, outsiders are able to maintain their (p. 619)
organizational and discursive autonomy but rely upon the state for financial assistance
and thus enter into an accountability relationship with it. The rules that condition the
financial ties between institutions and external groups can vary significantly; the extent
of the financial accountability will determine on which end of the insider–outside
continuum external actors sit. Women’s health, refuge, child-care, prochoice, and other
organizations have each had to grapple with the dilemma of wanting to maintain their
independence yet also needing state financial resources to provide services for their
members. In her work on women’s activists inside the United States, Banaszak (2010, 85–
89) also makes an important contribution to rethinking the insider–outsider distinction by
reversing the arrow; she demonstrates that feminist engagement with the state doesn’t
always work from the outside in, but in her study she shows how many women converted
to feminism while in bureaucratic jobs within the state and then left to take up activist
jobs in the feminist movement. Identifying insiders and outsiders is further complicated
when governance structures are taken into account. The downloading, uploading, and
marketization of traditional state functions and lines of authority blurs any distinction
that might ever have existed about feminists’ insider or outsider status in relation to the
state. For example, the contracting out of welfare services entangles feminists in new
relationships with the state as well as with the market.
The scholarship on feminist engagement with the state indicates mixed results in terms of
activists’ ability to challenge its gender foundations. Studies have shown that feminist
efforts to recast the underlying norms, discourses, processes, and policies of state
institutions are often met with marginalization, trivialization, and outright hostility (see
Katzenstein 1998, 9; Hawkesworth 2003; Roth 2006). Feminists have also had trouble
institutionalizing changes within the state. As work on WPAs has demonstrated, even
when it looks like gender policy analysis has become an integral activity of the state,
unsympathetic governments can swiftly dismantle these agencies and drastically devalue
femocrats skills (Kantola and Outshoorn 2007; Teghtsoonian and Chappell 2008). Given
the hazardous terrain (Katzenstein 1998, 9) feminist state activists are operating on, such
outcomes are hardly surprising, but nor are they the whole story.
A vast body of empirical research now demonstrates that, acting on their own, feminist
activists are not able to challenge the gender status quo within the state. However, it
Page 18 of 28

does show that important changes to the gender order can be achieved when institutional
and political factors are in alignment, such as when a sympathetic government is in
office; a feminist judge is on the bench; porous policy processes are open to new actors;
or new institutions are created (see Lovenduski 1998; Kantola 2006; Eturk 2006; McBride
and Mazur 2010). Institution building that occurs in the aftermath of conflict or a major
upheaval, such as in the situations of Rwanda and South Africa (Goetz and Hassim 2002)
or in other periods of transition, can, as Waylen (2007) reminds us, provide opportunities
for positive gender outcomes. Changes can sometimes be dramatic, such as the creation
of a new constitution that recognizes women (p. 620) or new political parties,
legislatures, or gender policy machinery, or subtle, such as a shift in the framing of a
policy, but the changes are nonetheless real and (very often) cumulative.
Recent research has also demonstrated that such shifts are possible not only within
nation-states but also within global institutions. Recent work on transnational feminist
activism has clearly demonstrated that while these actors must contend with counter
movements and are never guaranteed success (Chappell 2006a), they have been able to
recast gender assumptions, norms, and practices at the international level—such as in
relation to the recognition of women’s civil, political, and economic rights including their
specific experiences violence, education, and health-care needs. Moreover, once these
shifts are recognized internationally, the potential exists for them to be diffused back to
states in ways that alter local gender practices (see Keck and Sikkink 1998; Friedman
2003; Zwingel 2005).
Accepting the dynamism of state institutions and the ability for activists to “reinscribe”
their gender foundations is not to suggest that will always be successful or are on an
unswerving trajectory toward progress (however that may be interpreted). As activists
know only too well, such alignments are not only rare but are also rarely permanent. The
election of a different government or changes in personnel in the public sector can lead
to a retreat back to an earlier logic of appropriateness or to the creation of a new but
equally restrictive one from the point of view of relaxing gender codes. A major
contribution made by feminist scholars of the state is to better identify when, where, and
how such political opportunities arise and the sorts of strategies that best take advantage
of them. A priority for future research is to identify how best to preserve the hard-won
gains once they are in place.
Page 19 of 28

Conclusion
Feminist conceptions of the state have evolved markedly in the past three decades. An
important shift has been from a patriarchal to a gendered view of the state. This has
involved a rejection of the view of the state as male to one that sees the state as a
complex array of gendered institutions and discourses. Increasingly, it is also conceived
as operating within a wider set of processes and relations, understood as the system of
governance. Rather than seeing the state in patriarchal terms, it is now understood as a
constellation of gender relations that are constituted through it. Identifying the gender
dimensions of the state and governance has been a critical contribution of feminist
scholarship; it has exposed as politically constructed and gender biased seemingly
natural and neutral norms and processes. Moreover, this scholarship has shown that such
norms and processes—which are reflected in state laws, policies, and (p. 621) discourses
—have differential effects on men and women and between different groups of men and
women. A complex account of the state, and an understanding of the constitutive nature
of gender relations have led to a reconceptualization of feminist engagement with the
state. No longer conceived as an arena either to be entirely avoided or wholeheartedly
embraced, the state is seen as unavoidable but also as alterable. While recasting state
practices and policies is not easy, feminist scholarship has demonstrated that under the
right conditions it is possible.
The feminist project in relation to the state is nowhere near complete. The development
of an intersectionality approach to understanding the state requires more detailed
comparative work to be undertaken within and between states to better understand how
gender relates to other structures of power and how these might be simultaneously
unsettled to bring about greater equality between men and women and among groups of
men and women. Further, related to this point is the need to continue to explore how
different sorts of states and institutions operate in different contexts. Much work to date
has focused on democratic states in the West, but as the emerging feminist postcolonial
literature suggests we also need to further explore the operation of gender in different
types of states, not only to understand the operation of these states but also to better
reflect on the assumptions and biases inherent in the dominant work in the field (on this
point see Tripp 2006).
One thing that has remained constant over the course of the past three decades has been
the feminist lament that their contribution to understanding the state has not been taken
seriously by the ‘mainstream.’ The importance of gender and other relations of power to
the operation of the state has been documented empirically and defended theoretically,
but very little of it is reflected in nonfeminist work. This is frustrating for scholars
Page 20 of 28

working in this field, but it also provides an important insight into an ongoing weakness
in the discipline. As Mary Hawkesworth (2005, 152) argues, “When political scientists
ignore the operations of gender power documented by feminist scholars, their
omissions…perpetuate distorted accounts of the political world.” The challenge remains
to have standard conceptions of the state, which remain focused on force and power,
acknowledge its gender and relational power dimensions.
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The State and Governance

Oxford Handbooks Online

Print Publication Date: Mar 2013

Abstract and Keywords

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 10 November 2016

Feminist Theories of the State and Governance

The Monolithic State

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 10 November 2016

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alternative approaches to the state including poststructuralist/discursive, institutionalist,

The Differentiated State

The poststructuralist/discursive approach has been articulated by scholars working in the

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 10 November 2016

opportunities for challenging what appear to be locked-in features of the state—male-

Feminist institutionalists unpack the state so that it is treated as a variety of separate

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Gender and Governance

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Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 10 November 2016

Understanding the implications of the uploading of governance arrangements on gender

The State and the Construction of Gender

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Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 10 November 2016

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 10 November 2016

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 10 November 2016

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(p. 616) Feminist Engagement with the State

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 10 November 2016

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 10 November 2016

Initially, these strategies were construed in dichotomous insider–outsider terms with

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 10 November 2016

Katzenstein’s (1998, 40) analysis highlights the limitation of the insider–outsider

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 10 November 2016

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Beckwith, Karen. 2001. “Gender frames and collective action: Configurations of

Brennan, Deborah. 2010. “Federalism, childcare and multi-level governance in Australia.”

Carver, Terrell. 1998. “A political theory of gender: perspectives on the ‘universal

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 10 November 2016

Chappell, Louise. 2006b. “Contesting women’s rights: Charting the emergence of a

Connell, Raewyn. 1995. Masculinities. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Connell, Raewyn. 2002. Gender. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Connell, Raewyn. 2005. “Advancing gender reform in large-scale organisations: A new

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 10 November 2016

Franceschet, Susan. 2011. “Gendered institutions and women’s substantive

Hawkesworth, Mary. 2003. “Congressional enactments of race-gender: Toward a theory

Hawkesworth, Mary. 2005. “Engendering political science: An immodest proposal.”

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 10 November 2016

Hooper, C. 2001. Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations and Gender

Johnson, Carol. 2003. “Heteronormative citizenship: The Howard Government’s views on

Kenney, Sally J. 1996. “New research on gendered political institutions.” Political

Kenny, Meryl. 2011. “Gender and institutions of political recruitment: Candidate

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 10 November 2016

Lovenduski, Joni. 1998. “Gendering research in political science.” Annual Review of

Lovenduski, J. 2005. Feminizing Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Mackay, Fiona. 2009. “Institutionalising “new politics” in post devolution Scotland:

Mackay, Fiona, and Georgina Waylen. 2009. “Critical perspectives on feminist

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 10 November 2016