Gender: From an Account of Identity Formation to Analytic Category

Over the past three decades, the concept of gender has undergone a metamorphosis within feminist scholarship. Although originally a linguistic category denoting a system of subdivision within a grammatical class (Corbett 1991), the concept of gender was adopted by feminist scholars to distinguish culturally specific characteristics associated with masculinity and femininity from biological features associated with sex (male and female chromosomes, hormones, as well as internal and external sexual and reproductive organs). In early feminist works, gender was used to repudiate biological determinism by demonstrating the range of variation in cultural constructions of femininity and masculinity. In subsequent works, gender has been used to analyze the social organization of relationships between men and women (Barrett 1980; MacKinnon 1987; Rubin 1975), to investigate the reification of human differences (Hawkesworth 1990; Shanley and Pateman 1991; Vetterling-Braggin 1982), to conceptualize the semiotics of the body, sex, and sexuality (Doane 1987; de Lauretis 1984; Silverman 1988; Suleiman 1985), to explain the distribution of burdens and benefits in society (Boneparth and Stoper 1988; Connell 1987; Walby 1986), to illustrate the microtechniques of power (Bartky 1988; de Lauretis 1987; Sawicki 1991), to illuminate the structure of the psyche (Chodorow 1978), and to account for individual identity and aspiration (Butler 1990; Epperson 1988).

Interdisciplinary feminist scholars have used the concept of gender in markedly different ways. Gender has been analyzed as an attribute of individuals (Bem 1974, 1983), as an interpersonal relation (Spelman 1988), and as a mode of social organization (Eisenstein 1979; Firestone 1970). Gender has been defined in terms of status (Lopata and Thorne 1978), sex roles (Amundsen 1971; Epstein 1971; Janeway 1971), and sexual stereotypes (Anderson 1983; Friedan 1963). It has been conceived as a structure of consciousness (Rowbotham 1973), as triangulated psyche (Chodorow 1978); and as internalized ideology (Barrett 1980; Grant 1993). It has been discussed as a product of attribution (Kessler and McKenna 1978), socialization (Gilligan 1982; Ruddick 1980), disciplinary practices (Butler 1990; Singer 1993), and accustomed stance (Devor 1989). Gender has been depicted as an effect of language (Daly 1978; Spender 1980), a matter of behavioral conformity (Amundsen 1971; Epstein 1971), a structural feature of labor, power, and cathexis (Connell, 1987), and a mode of perception (Bem 1993; Kessler and McKenna 1978). Gender has been cast in terms of a binary opposition, variable and varying continua, and a layering of personality. It has been characterized as difference (Irigaray 1985a, 1985b) and as relations of power manifested in domination and subordination (Gordon 1988; MacKinnon, 1987). It has been construed in the passive mode of seriality (Young 1994), in the active mode as a process creating interdependence (Levi-Strauss 1969, 1971; Smith 1992), or as an instrument of segregation and exclusion. (Davis 1981; Collins 1990). Gender has been denounced as a prisonhouse (Cornell and Thurschwell 1986) and embraced as inherently liberating (Irigaray 1985b; Smith 1992). It has been identified as a universal phenomenon (Lerner 1986) and as an historically specific consequence of modernity's increasing sexualization of women (Laqueur 1990; Riley 1988).

As debates about the nature of gender as lived experience proliferated, several feminist scholars developed a new way of understanding gender—as an analytic category (Lakatos 1970). In an important and influential essay, Joan Scott defined gender as a concept involving two interrelated but analytically distinct parts: “Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power” (Scott 1986, 1067). In explicating gender as a constitutive element of social relationships, she emphasizes that gender operates in multiple fields, including culturally available symbols that evoke multiple representations, normative concepts that set forth interpretations of the meanings of symbols, social institutions and organizations, and subjective identity (1067–68). According to Scott, gender is a useful category of analysis because it “provides a way to decode meaning and to understand the complex connections among various forms of human interaction” (1070).

Sandra Harding also advanced an account of gender as an analytic category: “In virtually every culture, gender difference is a pivotal way in which humans identify themselves as persons, organize social relations, and symbolize meaningful natural and social events and processes” (Harding 1986, 18). Thus, she argues that feminists must theorize gender, conceiving it as “an analytic category within which humans think about and organize their social activity rather than as a natural consequence of sex difference, or even merely as a social variable assigned to individual people in different ways from culture to culture” (17). Recognizing that gender appears only in culturally specific forms, Harding, like Scott, emphasized that gender as an analytic category illuminates crucial cultural processes in need of further investigation:

According to Harding, feminist investigations of gender symbolism, gender structure, and individual gender could challenge the basic presuppositions of social science.

Gender as an Analytical Category in Political Science

Taking their cue from Scott and Harding, feminist scholars within political science have also deployed gender as an analytical category. In contrast to narrow understandings of gender as cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity, gender as an analytic category functions as a heuristic device that illuminates areas for inquiry, frames questions for investigation, identifies puzzles in need of exploration, and provides concepts, definitions, and hypotheses to guide research (Hawkesworth 1997). Within political science, feminist scholars have investigated the effects of gender on voting behavior, electoral politics, and the operations of particular institutions, such as political parties, legislatures, bureaucratic agencies, and the courts (Dodson and Carroll 1991; Duerst-Lahti and Kelly 1995; Flammang 1997; Freeman 2000; Rosenthal 2002; Swers 2002; Thomas 1994). They have also examined the effects of gender on policymaking and implementation (Mazur 2002).

Within the field of women and politics, for example, scholars seeking to discover whether there are differences between male and female legislators have demonstrated that women legislators not only give higher priority than male legislators to issues such as women's rights, education, health care, families and children, the environment, and gun control, but also are willing to devote considerable effort in committee and on the floor to securing passage of progressive legislation in these areas (e.g., Dodson and Carroll 1991; Dodson et al. 1995; Kathlene 1989; Rosenthal 2002; Swers 2002; Thomas 1994). Women and politics scholars have also investigated women's legislative and leadership styles, suggesting that women pursue cooperative legislative strategies while men prefer competitive, zero-sum tactics; and women are more oriented toward consensus, preferring less hierarchical, more participatory, and more collaborative approaches than their male counterparts (Jewell and Whicker 1994; Rosenthal 2000, Tamerius 1995; Thomas 1994). Several scholars have investigated the tensions that arise between the preferred legislative and leadership strategies of women and the institutional norms that conflate male behavioral preferences with “professionalism” and “political savvy” (Jeydel and Taylor 2003; Kathlene 1994; Kenney 1996; Rosenthal 2000). This scholarship has made it clear that neither legislative priorities nor the standard operating procedures of legislative institutions is gender inclusive or gender neutral.

Contesting notions that gender differences such as these are “natural” or “given,” feminist scholars have also sought to discover how these differences are produced, maintained, challenged, and reproduced. Drawing upon insights from critical race theorists and feminist theorists, feminist political scientists have sought to illuminate processes of racialization and gendering through which relations of power and forms of inequality are constructed, shaping the identities of individuals and the practices of institutions (Hawkesworth 2003a; Smooth 2001). By means of detailed studies of laws, norms, and organizational practices that enforced racial segregation and separate spheres for men and women, scholars have excavated the political processes through which hierarchies of difference have been produced and maintained. They have demonstrated that the imputed “natural” interests and abilities of women and men of various races are the result of state-prescribed limitations in education, occupation, immigration, citizenship, and officeholding (e.g., Connell 1987; Flammang 1997; Haney Lopez 1996; Siltanen 1994). Politics has produced race and gender not only by creating and maintaining raced and gendered divisions within the population but also by defining race and gender characteristics and according differential rights on the basis of those definitions (Yanow 2003). In White by Law, for example, Haney Lopez has demonstrated that through the direct control of human behavior and by shaping public understanding, “law translates ideas about race into material and societal conditions that entrench those ideas” (Haney Lopez 1996, 19). Thus, immigration and miscegenation laws have produced the physical appearance of the nation's population by constraining reproductive choices. Laws, court decisions, and census categories defining who is “white” and who is “nonwhite” have ascribed racialized meanings to physical features and ancestry (Haney Lopez 1996, 14–15; Yanow 2003). Law has also produced certain behaviors and attitudes associated with women of multiple races and men of color through exclusions from citizenship and officeholding, the legalization of unequal treatment, and differential access to social benefits (Abramovitz 1996; Fraser 1989; Haney Lopez 1996; Mink 1995).

Developing a “theory of gendered institutions,” feminist scholars have begun to map the manifold ways in which gender power and disadvantage are created and maintained not only through law but also through institutional processes, practices, images, ideologies, and distributional mechanisms (Acker 1989, 1992; Kenney 1996; Steinberg 1992). They have shown how organizational practices play a central role in recreating and entrenching gender hierarchies, gender symbols, and gendered identities (Duerst-Lahti and Kelly 1995). The theory of gendered institutions has been important in drawing attention to the structuring practices, standard operating procedures, rules, and regulations that disadvantage women within contemporary organizations. It has also helped to shape a concept of “gender power.”

Feminist scholars working across a range of subfields, including political theory, political economy, international relations, comparative politics, and American politics, have helped to forge a conception of gender power as a set of asymmetrical relations between men and women that permeates international regimes, state systems, financial and economic processes, development policies, institutional structures, symbol systems, and interpersonal relations (Brooks, forthcoming; Enloe 1990, 1993, 2000; Kabeer 2003; Kelly et al. 2001; Peterson 1992, 2003; Peterson and Runyan 1999; Tickner 2001). Gender power generates and sustains practices of inequality that advantage men and disadvantage women. Embedded in organizational rules, routines, and policies, gender power normalizes male dominance and renders women, along with their needs and interests, invisible. Operating independently of individual volition or intention, gender power sustains prohibitions, exclusions, denigrations, and obstructions that circumscribe women's lives.

Gender as an analytic category illuminates gender power and gendered institutions and delineates a research agenda that quite literally did not exist 30 years ago. The scholarship that has emerged in conjunction with this research agenda calls into question many received views within the discipline of political science. To demonstrate how research using gender as an analytic category contests some of the foundational assumptions of political science and identifies new questions for research, the final section of this essay will provide a brief overview of feminist engagements with four competing conceptions of power.

Critiques of Gendered Conceptions of Power

According to Jeffrey Isaac, “The concept of power is at the heart of political enquiry. Indeed, it is probably the central concept of both descriptive and normative analysis” (Isaac 2003, 54). Like many core concepts, however, there is little agreement about how power should be defined, and less about how it should be operationalized for empirical investigations. Isaac (1987, 2003) has provided a helpful taxonomy of power that distinguishes voluntarist, hermeneutic, structural, and poststructural conceptions. Borrowing his conceptual framework to map a variety of approaches to the study of power in political science, I will show how feminist deployments of gender as an analytic category raise important questions about the adequacy of some of these conceptualizations of power, while creatively appropriating other conceptions to illuminate dimensions of political life that remain invisible within dominant disciplinary paradigms.

Rooted in social contract theory and the methodological individualism that informs behavioralist and rational choice approaches to the study of politics, the “voluntarist” conception of power might be characterized as a staple of modernity. Initially conceived by Hobbes, the voluntarist conception ties power to the voluntary intentions and strategies of individuals who seek to promote their interests. Within this frame, power is nothing other than “the present means to some future apparent good” (Leviathan, Part I, Chap. 10, p. 150). Situated in a world of conflicting wills and scarce resources, the Hobbesian individual often uses power to eliminate obstacles to the satisfaction of desire. And since the obstacles to be overcome frequently include the wills of other individuals, the voluntarist conception of power has been construed within political science as the capacity to get others to do what they would not otherwise do (Dahl 1957; Lasswell 1950). Thus, the individual's means to attain desired ends slides easily into coercion: power as the force to accomplish one's objectives, or perhaps less brutally, power as the capacity to secure compliance by manipulation of rewards and punishments.

Despite its individualist premises, the Hobbesian voluntarist conception of power has also been adapted by “realists” and “neorealists” within international relations to provide an account of the fundamental operations of the international system. Taking Hobbes's depiction of the “war of all against all” as a paradigm for international relations, realists posit “anarchy” as the inevitable condition of the relation between sovereign states. Arguing that the rational response of states to anarchy is to maximize power, realists conflate “national interest” with the pursuit of power and define international politics as an unceasing struggle for power in a realm devoid of an absolute sovereign capable of enforcing agreements.

Feminist scholars have developed detailed critiques of the voluntarist conception of power, demonstrating that it depends upon a defective and markedly androcentric conception of human nature; it equates individual action and international affairs with a particular model of “abstract masculinity”; it legitimates immoral and amoral action on the part of individuals and states; and it remains oblivious to the social conventions that structure human relationships and the relations among states (Di Stefano 1991; Pateman 1988; Steans 1998; Tickner 1991, 1992).

Feminist scholars have also pointed out that the voluntarist conception of power arbitrarily restricts the research agenda of political scientists, preventing certain political questions from being perceived and empirically investigated. For example, although according to the Interparliamentary Union, 85% of the seats in national legislatures and more than 99% of the offices of president, prime minister, and foreign secretary are currently in the hands of men, the absence of women from national and international decisionmaking is a “nonquestion,” according to the voluntarist model of power. For it is assumed that the answer is already known: individual choice mediated by the contest of conflicting wills is the explanation for the distribution of decision-making power. Over the past 30 years, feminist scholars have proven that “individual choice” explanations for women's underrepresentation in elective and appointive offices are woefully inadequate and only serve to mask the potent operations of gender power and gender structure (Chappell 2002; Flammang 1997; Mazur 2002; McDonagh 2002; Peterson and Runyan 1999; Rule and Zimmerman 1994). These detailed studies illuminate an additional failing of the voluntarist conception of power: it cannot explain how or why agents are able to exercise the power that they do exercise. It is oblivious to forces that shape individual “preferences” or “determine” the will. It is oblivious to institutional contexts that enable and constrain individual action. It is oblivious to structural forces that ensure that individuals are not equally unfettered subjects. It masks recurrent patterns of constraint upon individual choice linked to race, gender, class, nationality, and sexuality.

As an alternative to the voluntarist model of power, the “hermeneutic” conception developed within the tradition of German phenomenology “conceives power as constituted in the shared meanings of given communities” (Isaac 2003, 58). Attuned to the varying symbolic and normative constructs that shape the practical rationalities of situated social agents, the hermeneutic model of power is keenly aware of the intersubjective conventions that make action, in general, and the use of power, in particular, possible and intelligible.

Some feminist scholars have appropriated the hermeneutic conception of power to investigate the political effects of gender symbolism, that is, the coding of certain forms of human conduct as inherently masculine or feminine. They have suggested that gender symbolism generates a logic of appropriate behavior that shapes individuals' self-understandings and aspirations, thereby structuring social and political opportunities. When rationality, competence, and leadership are coded as inherently masculine characteristics, for example, male power is naturalized and legitimated. When the nation is symbolized as a woman and men are exhorted to risk their lives to defend and protect “her,” norms of citizenship and soldiering are masculinized. When nationalist narratives privilege the roles of men as “founding fathers,” women's contributions to nation building are erased. When these invented pasts are institutionalized within founding myths, notions of the “national family” reinscribe fathers' rule and mothers' obedience as natural, even as they create and legitimate new race and gender hierarchies. When “national security” is promoted by increasing militarization, the growing physical insecurity of women in areas adjacent to military bases and in areas of conflict is eclipsed, driving a wedge between the interests of states and the physical well-being of women (Enloe 1990, 1993, 2000; McClintock 1995; Peterson and Runyan 1999). Advancing cogent accounts of subtle processes through which male dominance is naturalized, feminist scholars demonstrate how gender power is embedded in intersubjective value systems and structures of belief, which constitute the identities and aspirations of gendered political agents, thereby constraining the possibilities for individual choice and action.

Other feminist scholars have attempted to link gendered asymmetries of power in beliefs and values to structural features of social and political life. They draw insights from a structural model of power, which emphasizes that practices of inequality become embedded in institutions and structures in ways that enable male advantage to operate independently of the will of particular agents. Developing concepts of gender structure and gendered institutions, feminist scholars have sought to demonstrate how male dominance in political institutions of the nation-state and in the international arena has been converted into rules, routines, practices, and policies that serve and promote men's interests, normalize a male monopoly of power, and create political opportunity structures that favor men.

Studies of political parties in South Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Latin America, and the United States, for example, have demonstrated that male-dominant party elites have been remarkably resourceful in shifting the locus of power from formal to informal mechanisms when women have gained access to formal decision-making sites (Alvarez 1990; Basu 1995; Chappell 2002; Freeman 2000; Jaquette 1989; Jaquette and Wolchik 1998; Kelly et al., 2001). Parties that differ from one another in ideological commitments and policy objectives have been remarkably similar and consistent in allowing male gatekeepers to structure candidate selection processes to prevent women from being chosen for open, safe, or winnable seats in legislative races. Patronage practices within political parties also manifest pervasive gender bias.

Feminist studies of national parliaments and legislatures have revealed the operation of powerful gender norms. The standard operating procedures of parliaments in Britain, Canada, and Australia, for example, feature loud, aggressive, and combative behavior, such as screaming, shouting, and sneering that can create “no-win” situations for women members. For women who adopt this combative style are ridiculed and patronized by their male counterparts, while women who opt for a more demure, consultative, and collaborative style are labeled “weak” or “unfit” for the job. Indeed, Chappell (2002) has documented patterns of gender harassment in parliamentary systems as women who rise to speak are greeted with increased heckling, coughing, hissing, kiss blowing, and mimicry in falsetto voices. Within in the U.S., women legislators who refuse to adopt coercive negotiating strategies are often characterized by their male counterparts as failing to understand the rules of the game (Rosenthal 2000). Women chairing legislative committees confront forms of opposition in hearings—challenges to their authority, refusal to respect their rulings—that men in comparable positions of authority do not confront (Kathlene 1994). Male legislators often perceive women legislators in terms of raced and gendered stereotypes incompatible with the men's conceptions of “power players” (Rosenthal 2000; Smooth 2001; Thomas 1994).

In documenting the operation of gender power within the official institutions of state, feminist scholars have provided powerful evidence that there are political dynamics at work within these institutions that have not been recognized by mainstream approaches. They have also demonstrated that the raced and gendered hierarchies created, maintained, and reproduced within the institutions of state have palpable effects on policymaking and on domestic and foreign policies. To advance an account of political life that omits these raced and gendered dynamics, then, does not foster objective or value-neutral inquiry. On the contrary, when political scientists ignore the operations of gender power documented by feminist scholars, their omissions accredit and perpetuate distorted accounts of the political world.

The relation of political scientists to the political world they seek to describe and explain has been the subject of recurrent debate (Gunnell 1998; Moon 1975). Poststructuralists inspired by the insights of Michel Foucault have suggested that every scientific discourse is productive, generating power-knowledge constellations that create a world in its own image. Feminist scholars working within a poststructuralist frame have suggested that political science itself is a constitutive discourse (Hawkesworth 2003b). The conceptual apparatus of the discipline contributes to the production of the political subject, understood simultaneously as one who is subjected and one who resists subjugation. Disciplinary accounts of politics, law, tradition, and war produce gendered political subjects who both conform and resist gendered divisions of power and opportunity. Failure to recognize the discipline's own relation to the twinned operations of gendered subjugation and resistance can leave political scientists at a loss to explain some of the most profound transformations of political life. For example, mainstream political scientists are ill-equipped to explain the sustained mobilizations of Brazilian women who comprised 80% of the activists who ousted military rule in Brazil (Alvarez 1990) or the collective struggles of Korean women against state violence and economic exploitation that helped break down military rule in South Korea in the 1980s. Minimally, the replication of gender bias in political science impedes the discipline's ability to explain the political world. More alarmingly, the perpetuation of definitions of politics, power, and international relations that privilege the intellectual investigation of masculinist practices in male-dominant sites as the protected preserve of political science reproduces and legitimates male power and gender injustice.

While the failure of political science to engage feminist scholarship might be dismissed as just another example of the discipline's conservatism, I want to press a stronger claim. By refusing to read and engage feminist scholarship that challenges basic presuppositions of the discipline, political scientists violate norms of objectivity and systematicity that support the characterization of their own research as “scientific.” By refusing to countenance feminist refutations of received views and insulating their own hypotheses from counterevidence advanced by feminist scholars, political scientists violate the logic of science developed by Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos, which is routinely presented in “Scope and Methods” classes to vindicate the scientific study of politics (Popper 1972a, 1972b). In failing to live up to the criteria of scientific inquiry that they themselves espouse, mainstream political scientists help to reproduce a world of male dominance even as they deploy conceptions of neutral observation, detached inquiry, and objective analysis to disguise and conceal their productive roles. If political scientists wish to avoid the unwitting replication of male dominance, they ought to begin to engage seriously feminist scholarship and to learn to deploy gender as an analytic category in their own research.