© 2004 European Consortium for Political Research

véronique mottier

In the preceding section, Amy Mazur outlined the main features and strengths of Feminist Comparative Policy. This new perspective provides a systematic way of analysing policies and their impact on gender relations, and thereby offers important contributions to the analysis of the state and to political science in general. However, feminist political science is far from a homogenous field. To paraphrase currently unfashionable past revolutionaries, a thousand methodological flowers blossom within feminist analysis as elsewhere in political science. This section intends to contribute to the ongoing dialogue between different perspectives, disciplines, and sub-fields within as well as outside of political science, as recommended by Birte Siim (2001) in an earlier contribution to EPS, by outlining key debates and methodological controversies within feminist political theory on the state. Particular attention will be given to the methodological contributions of discourse theory to feminist political theory as well as to empirical analysis of gendered state action and policies. Feminist discourse analysis combines linguistic and poststructuralist methodological tools, primarily of French origin, with more conventional political science methods, particularly in the areas of policy analysis and social movement studies. Feminist discourse analysis thus exemplifies the type of productive interdisciplinarity promoted by Siim. It also questions the universality of the overly restrictive view of political science culture which Philippe Schmitter decried in his thought-provoking article in EPS (2002). Within feminist theory, disagreements tend to operate along methodological rather than geographical boundaries.

FEMINIST ANALYSES OF THE STATE

For a long time, feminist political theory paid little attention to the role of the state in gender relations.[2] There are obvious historical reasons for this initial ‘state-blindness’ of gender analysis. At its inception in the 1970s, the new women’s movement was deeply suspicious of mainstream politics and the state, which were seen as fundamentally patriarchal in nature. Many feminists intended to avoid conventional strategies and power games in favour of anti-hierarchical action within new social movements outside of the formal political arena. At the level of practical political action, this critical stance was nevertheless often combined with an appeal to the state, in key areas of feminist struggles such as abortion, pornography, or anti-rape legislation (Randall, 1998; Petchesky, 1986). The analytical consequence of the movement’s distrust of mainstream politics was an under-theorisation of the role of the state.

Since the mid-1980s, there has been a revaluation of the central role of the state in the structuration and institutionalisation of relations between men and women, and in establishing and policing the frontiers between public and private spheres. It is somewhat paradoxical that, at a time when the importance of the state itself is being eroded by supranational processes, the state has been brought back into feminist theory.

Initially, as Waylen (1998) points out, feminist theorists tended to view the state in primarily negative terms. Socialist feminists in particular integrated the oppression of women within the Marxist perspective. They consequently saw the state as an instrument of domination in the hands of the ruling class, and emphasised the importance of the role of women in the reproduction of the workforce within the family for the development of capitalism. Like socialist feminists, radical feminists such as Catherine MacKinnon also conceptualised the liberal state as a monolithic entity which institutionalises the interests of dominant groups, particularly through the law; only this time the latter were not the bourgeois classes described by Marxist theorists but the category of male citizens. The liberal legal system, mainstream politics and the state were thus seen as instruments of the subordination of women to men, and of the legitimisation of male interests as the general interest. As MacKinnon states (1989: 237), ‘liberal legalism is thus a medium for making male dominance both invisible and legitimate by adopting the male point of view in law at the same time as it enforces that view on society’.

Within these approaches, the state was thus perceived above all as a patriarchal instrument which institutionalises and reproduces male domination. Since the late 1980s, such an understanding of the state has been challenged by a number of alternative perspectives, including Feminist Comparative Policy. These alternative perspectives question, firstly, whether the impact of the state on gender relations should be conceptualised in negative terms only; and secondly, whether the state is adequately theorised as a homogenous actor.

Concerning the first question, a number of analyses of the welfare state promote a far more positive vision of the state. Scandinavian authors such as Dahlerup (1987), Siim (1988), and Hernes (1987) in particular, argue that the welfare state has a positive effect on gender relations in that it makes for a lessening of the financial dependency of women on men. Liberal authors defend a similarly more benign view, in that they conceptualise the liberal state as a neutral arbiter between groups rather than an instrument of male domination (see also Waylen 1998).
Other analyses, developed particularly in the Australian, Dutch and Scandinavian contexts, argue that the state offers scope for the subversion and transformation of gendered power relations. They emphasise the possibilities of institutionalisation - and therefore of promotion - of women’s interests within the state, either through the action of ‘femocrats’ (feminist bureaucrats) working from within the state system to empower women, or when the state itself acts in a way to further women’s status (Stetson and Mazur 1995). In this context, an important policy tool has been gender mainstreaming, by which is meant the systematic incorporation of gender concerns into policies rather than as an ‘afterthought’ or, alternatively, the emphasis on gender issues in specific policies.

The second issue, that of the homogenous nature of the state, is challenged by comparative as well as by poststructuralist research. Sainsbury (1994) and Lewis (1997), for example, both explore the gendered dimension of welfare states through comparison of different systems of social security. Such comparative analyses suggest that the impact of the state on gender relations varies greatly from one welfare regime to another, and importantly allows for the universalising of the experience of individual states to be avoided. In this sense, Sainsbury shares the scepticism of poststructuralists towards a vision of the state and its role in structuring gender relations that is too unilateral. Fraser’s comparative analysis of the impact of social-insurance welfare schemes versus public-assistance programmes in the US liberal welfare state, drawing explicitly on poststructuralist theory, also demonstrates clearly that gendered relations of power are institutionalised by different state arenas in different ways (Fraser and Gordon, 1994).

Shifting the emphasis to the ways in which gender relations are defined by historically specific policy discourses and practices, such work importantly recognises the many historical and spatial varieties of states. Feminists who draw on poststructuralist (especially Foucauldian) methodologies argue that it is problematic to consider the state as a homogenous, unitary entity which pursues specific interests. They consider the state as a plurality of arenas of struggle, rather than as a unified actor. Consequently, poststructuralist analyses of the state introduce less dichotomous perspectives which take into account the local, diverse and dispersed nature of sites of gender power (see, for example, Pringle and Watson 1992). They consider feminist attempts to define what ‘women’s interests’ might be, by authors such as Sapiro (1981) and Diamond and Hartsock (1981), as problematic, since these treat as pre-given both the state and the notion of interests. Drawing on poststructuralist theory, Pringle and Watson thus point out that the analytical focus needs to shift instead to the discursive practices which construct specific interests, including those by femocrats.

These diverse perspectives usefully challenge the a priori assumption that the state (always or necessarily) acts as an agent of male domination. It is important to recognise that relations between the state and gender are not intrinsically positive or negative. Feminist analyses of the state need to take into account its historical complexity, its variations within different political contexts such as liberal democracy, colonialism or state socialism, and its dynamic relationship to gendered power relations, as Waylen (1998: 7) points out.

Consequently, feminist analyses currently develop more sophisticated models which allow the complex, multidimensional and differentiated relations between the state and gender to be taken into account. Such models recognise that the state can be a positive as well as a negative resource for feminists, and emphasise the gendered nature of concepts such as the welfare state or citizenship, while also taking into account national variations. Influenced by poststructuralist and postmodern perspectives, current feminist analyses of the state increasingly turn away from the theorisation of relations between gender and the state in general terms, to focus instead on the construction of gender within specific state discourses and practices.

The discursive turn in feminist analysis

Feminist analysis thus increasingly focuses on the ways in which politics constructs gendered subjects, the ways in which gender constructs politics, and the ways in which gender issues such as ‘women’s inequality’ are constructed in policy debates and decision-making (see Bacchi, 1999). Methodologically, this recentering of feminist analyses of state action and policies on the reproduction and transformation of institutionalised relations of meaning and power within specific state areas, practices and discourses has led to a discursive turn in feminist analysis. Indeed, the increasing research focus on the multiplicity and multidimensionality of state arenas and their gendered impact on society has required precisely the type of methodological tools that discourse analysis can offer. The discursive turn within feminist analysis reflects the discursive turn within political science as a whole, which has been described in some detail by Terrell Carver, Jacob Torfing, Maarten Hajer and myself in the symposium on ‘Discourse Analysis and Political Science’ in a recent issue of EPS (2002).

This is a very recent development within feminist political science. Modern political theory has been dominated by universalistic liberalist thought, which claims indifference to gender or other identity differences and has therefore taken its time to open up to such concerns. Feminist empirical research within political science has, until recently, been dominated by mainstream, quantitative methodologies. This is no doubt not a coincidence. As Mazur points out in the preceding section, female political scientists have long been marginalised within our discipline, and those whose research centres on gender issues possibly particularly so. Moreover, political science itself is a relatively young discipline. It has therefore been particularly obsessed with demarcating itself from older sister disciplines such as sociology and psychology, especially. One of the ways of doing this has been by sanctifying a limited number of perspectives and methodologies and declaring everything else (including sometimes even political theory) as ‘not part of political science’ - an a priori rejection which younger generations of political scientists, often more open to alternative perspectives and paradigms, will no doubt recognise. Against this backdrop and with the need to overcome the barriers against female scientists and research on gender, feminist research has tended to establish itself by focusing on core issues such as political participation and representation, and by restricting itself to research methods whose scientific value was uncontroversial.[3]

This is not in any way intended as a critique of mainstream political science research and methodology, nor of more conventional types of feminist research within our discipline. There would be little gain in replacing the fundamentalist rejection of discursive, interpretive, postmodern, poststructuralist or other new perspectives within political science with a similarly fundamentalist defence of these as ‘the’ best methodologies for our discipline. The very idea that there could be such a thing as a ‘best method’ for our discipline is both naïve and methodologically uninformed, as surely the selection of research method should depend on the type of research questions that we wish to explore. It is precisely from this angle that past methodological fundamentalism may have harmed our discipline in general as well as more specifically the study of issues around gender and sexuality (see Carver and Mottier, 1998). In rejecting the scientific value of a number of new perspectives, political science has eliminated from its analytical field a whole range of new research questions and deprived itself of the means to reconsider old ones in innovative ways. A better understanding of the ways in which politics shapes gender identities and gender shapes politics is crucial for feminist political research. The current expansion of the study of gender inequalities within politics by various strands of feminist discourse analysis is therefore an important new development, both within the field of gender research and within the field of political science as a whole.

references

Bacchi, C. (1999), Women, Policy and Politics. The Construction of Policy Problems, London, Sage.

Carver, T. and V. Mottier (eds) (1998), Politics of Sexuality: Identity, Gender, Citizenship, London, Routledge.

Carver, T., J. Torfing, V. Mottier and M. Hajer (2002), ‘Discourse Analysis and Political Science’, European Political Science, 2:1, 48-67.

Dahlerup, D. (1987), ‘Confusing Concepts-Confusing Reality: A Theoretical Discussion of the Patriarchal State’ in A. Shawstack Sassoon (ed.), Women and the State, London, Routledge.

Diamond, I. and N. Hartsock (1981), ‘Beyond Interests in Politics: A Comment on Virginia Sapiro’s “When Are Interests Interesting? The Problem of Political Representation of Women”‘. American Political Science Review, 75:3, 717-721.

Fraser, N. and L. Gordon (1994), ‘A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the US Welfare State’, Signs 19:2, 309-336.

Hernes, H. (1987), Welfare State and Woman Power, Oslo, Norwegian University Press.

Lewis, J. (1997), ‘Gender and Welfare Regimes: Further Thoughts’, Social Politics, 4:20, 160-77.

MacKinnon, C. (1989), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Mottier, V., L. Sgier and T.H. Ballmer-Cao (2000), ‘Les rapports entre le genre et la politique’ in T. H. Ballmer-Cao, V. Mottier and L. Sgier. (eds), Genre et Politique. Débats et perspectives, Paris, Gallimard.

Mottier, V. (forthcoming), ‘Gender Theory and the State’ in G. Gaus and C. Kukathas (eds), Handbook of Political Theory, London, Sage.

Petchesky, R. (1986), Abortion and Woman’s Choice. The State, Sexuality and Reproductive Freedom, London, Verso.

Pringle, R. and S. Watson. (1992), ‘“Women’s Interests” and the Poststructuralist State’ in M. Barrett and A. Phillips (eds), Destabilising Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, Cambridge, Polity Press.

Randall, V. (1998), ‘Gender and Power. Women Engage The State’ in V. Randall and G. Waylen (eds). Gender, Politics and the State, London, Routledge.

Sainsbury, D. (ed.) (1994), Gendering Welfare States, London, Sage.

Sapiro, V. (1981), ‘When are Women’s Interests Interesting? The Problem of Political Representation of Women’, American Political Science Review 75:3, 701-716.

Schmitter, P. (2002) ‘Seven Disputable Theses’, European Political Science, 1:2, 23-40.

Siim, B. (1988), ‘Towards a Feminist Rethinking of the Welfare State’, in K. Jones and A. Jonasdottir (eds), The Political Interests of Gender, London, Sage.

Siim, B. (2001), ‘For an Interdisciplinary, Inclusive and Contextual Political Science’, European Political Science, 1:1, 65.

Stetson and A. Mazur (eds) (1995), Comparative State Feminism, London, Sage.

Waylen, G. (1998), ‘Gender, Feminism and the State: An Overview’, in V. Randall and G. Waylen (eds), Gender, Politics and the State, London, Routledge.

notes

1. Thanks are due to Judith Squires and Max Bergman for helpful suggestions, and to Charlotte O’Brien for linguistic improvements to this text.
2. For a more extensive discussion of feminist political theory and the state, see my chapter on ‘Gender Theory and the State’ in G. Gaus and C. Kukathas’s Handbook of Political Theory (Sage, forthcoming).
3. Interestingly, much the same could be said of another newcomer within political science: new social movements research, which has experienced a similar methodological shift from mainstream, mostly quantitative methods in its early years, towards its current interest in discursive frames of meaning.