At the 2005 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Claudine Gay and Wendy Smooth organized a roundtable to reflect on the politics of studying gender. In my intervention there, I argued that pervasive ignorance of what gender is results in misrecognition of the work we do. Most people do not know what it means to study gender. When we say gender they think we mean women, sexuality, feminist theory, an epistemological position, or a political movement. Such misrecognition marginalizes our research, creating problems for publishing and promotion. How can we combat it? By arming ourselves intellectually.

In organizing this symposium, the editors of Politics & Gender are taking the right approach. We need more precisely to specify the gender concept and the research agenda that flows from it. In this article, I propose one interpretation of what gender is and what it implies for the way we should study gender and the state. Far from a marginal enterprise, gender is central to political science and the tools of our discipline are needed to understand it better.

Much confusion arises from uncertainty over whether gender is an identity or whether it is a set of social norms, practices, stereotypes, and/or institutions. Against a great deal of work in political science and across academic disciplines conforming to the first view of gender as an identity, I insist on the second: gender is better understood as a social position and attribute of social structures. This conceptualization offers better ways to imagine human subjectivity. It also focuses our attention on the systematic, and researchable, engines of gender in society and the state.

These arguments are not terribly original; they are largely spelled out in Toril Moi's 1999 essay “What Is a Woman?” and Iris Marion Young's response (2002). Moi shows that gender fails as a theory of human identity, while Young demonstrates how it is still useful as a lens to analyze society. I use their arguments to develop a theory conceptualizing gender not as an attribute of individuals but as a feature of social structures and institutions. I show that gender works along three dimensions: the sexual division of labor, normative heterosexuality, and war and militarism. These institutions, which position human subjects in unequal and hierarchical relations of power and meaning, are not just analytical constructs but concrete parts of our daily lives. They include laws on marriage, property, inheritance, and parenting; social welfare policies; criminal codes; the male-dominated military and other means through which the state monopolizes the legitimate means of coercion; the national security industry; and recognition of heterosexual coupling and the nuclear family as sites of rights and status. After reviewing the claims of Moi and Young, I describe the mechanisms of gender of interest to political scientists, particularly those working on gender and the state.

In “What Is a Woman?” Moi argues that the sex/gender distinction and its concept of gender have helped to combat biological determinism but cannot answer the question of what a woman or a man is. Rather than resort to the response supplied by identity politics (a “woman” is someone with a particular “gender identity”), we need to “stop thinking in terms of gender altogether” (Moi 1999, 112). When we imagine a woman as sex, or as gender, or as sex plus gender, we tend to reduce her to her sexual difference, which is “the antithesis of everything feminism ought to stand for” (35).

Moi recalls that the gender concept arose to contest the “pervasiveness of sex,” or the idea that social norms and arrangements arose naturally and inevitably from sex differences. By distinguishing between sex and gender, or biology and culture, feminists combated biologically deteminist notions of women's roles and succeeded in exposing the contingency of their oppression. Subsequently, poststructuralist feminism criticized the way these earlier perspectives that, by emphasizing the distinction between sex and gender, treated biology (sex) as a fixed essence while historicizing only gender. By contrast, Judith Butler has argued, sex (including the body) is not the source of gender but the effect of it. The discourse we know as gender constructs sex as binary, biological, and fixed in order to justify heterosexuality (Butler 1990).

Moi argues that these developments in gender theory replaced biologically essentialist understandings of women with gender essentialist ones. Proposing that the sexed body is discursively constructed is just as reductionist as the idea that having a certain body should determine one's character and lot in life. Both perspectives deny that “a woman is a concrete, embodied human being (of a certain age, nationality, race, class, and with a wholly unique store of experiences)” (Moi 1999, 111). The incompleteness of gender as a description of a woman cannot be remedied by adding new attributes, however, since from the side of the bearer, being a woman is not separable from being white, Catholic, handicapped, young, or poor.

There needs to be a way to bring the body back into our understanding of sexually-differentiated subjectivity without falling into the assumptions of biological determinism. To say that our body grounds our experience of the world does not need to mean that specific bodies need be associated only with certain types of experiences. We also need to acknowledge that much of our lives may have little to do with sex and/or gender differences. As Moi points out, “Women's bodies are human as well as female. Women have interests, capacities, and ambitions that reach far beyond the realm of sexual differences…. Any given woman will transcend the category of femininity, however it is defined” (1999, 8).

To develop an account of what it means to be a woman (or a man), Moi resuscitates the notion of the “lived body” from Simone de Beauvoir and existential phenomenology. In Beauvoir's thinking, the male or female body is a situation: it is the ground of our lived experience and subjectivity. It is “our grasp on the world and a sketch of our projects” (Moi, 1999, 62), “our general medium for having a world” (63), and the “radiation of a subjectivity” (77). Being a woman implies having a female body, but “the meaning of a woman's body is bound up with the way she uses her freedom…. Greater freedom will produce new ways of being a woman, new ways of experiencing the possibilities of a woman's body” (65–66). Being a woman is thus a historical phenomenon, the interaction of our subjective projects and the external circumstances we encounter in their realization.

Why cannot these ideas be captured by the contemporary term “identity”? Moi claims that Beauvoir never discusses identity “because she thinks of the individual's subjectivity as interwoven with the conditions in which she lives…. [T]here can be no ‘identity’ divorced from the world the subject is experiencing” (Moi 1999, 81). Lived experience is always situated, but also contains “an inner dimension of freedom” that shapes the meaning of what it is to be a woman in unique ways. Rather than offer a coherent theory of subjectivity, “gender identity” thus imposes “a reifying or objectifying closure on our steadily changing and fluctuating experience of ourselves in the world” (81–82).

If we are convinced by Moi that the gender concept cannot help us understand what it is to be a woman or a man, does this mean it should be discarded? No, responds Iris Young (2002). She agrees that the concept of the lived body has several advantages: in particular, it avoids the “additive character that identities appear to have” when we use general categories like gender, race, ethnicity, and so forth to describe individuals, leaving a “mystery both about how persons are individualized, and how these different group identities combine in the person” (2002, 417). The lived body concept, by contrast, sees each person as distinctive, with “specific features, capacities, and desires” (417). It therefore works better than gender as an account of subjectivity and experience.

We still need gender, however, to theorize structural processes that position individual subjects in unequal relations of power. Most men and women encounter asymmetrical opportunities and constraints. In much of the world, women are more likely to be poor, be disenfranchised, suffer from violence and discrimination, and be subjected to disparaging cultural stereotypes. As feminists have long argued, these conditions of oppression owe not to nature but to macrolevel social structures, including institutions, rules, and norms or what Beauvoir and Moi refer to as “myths.”

The concept of gender is indispensable for analyzing such institutionalized asymmetries. Young's major claim is that gender is “an attribute of social structures more than of persons” (2002, 422). It is “a particular form of the social positioning of lived bodies in relation to one another” (422). Women and men are each “passively grouped” by gendered structures regardless of their individual features and choices.

Going further, she proposes that gender works along three irreducible axes:

1. The sexual division of labor, or the allocation of productive and reproductive activities by sex. In most modern societies, for example, the work of childrearing, caring for the sick and elderly, and maintaining the household is performed by women for no pay in the relative privacy of the household or family compound. Men, by contrast, are held responsible for earning money in the public sphere, running governments, and managing relations with other families.
2. Normative heterosexuality, or the presumption that affective partnerships and family units are based on the sexual bond between a woman and a man. This requires the dichotomization of the human species into two opposite sexes with associated feminine and masculine characteristics.
3. Hierarchies of power, by which Young means “an institutionalized valuation of particular associations of maleness or masculinity” (2005, 425), notably in systems of organized violence. I prefer to name this third axis “war and militarism” to refer to the specific ways in which interstate warfare, which requires conscripting an army, cultivating martial values, and fortifying defenses, ascribes masculine virtues to fighters and their leaders while imputing feminine features to those who stay behind and are protected.

The sexual division of labor, normative heterosexuality, and war and militarism are the three major, though not the only, institutions where gender resides. They vary across societies and likely affect different men and women in different ways.

Rather than an attribute of individuals, gender characterizes these large-scale social structures and processes. Studying gender means analyzing how they work, the role of the state in sustaining them, the revealing claims of those who contest their oppressions, and gender's specific products and effects, such as women's lower wages, sex segregation in employment, and male dominance of political life. The study of gender is not the study of individual women or men and their civic organizations. It is not synonymous with feminist theory, the status of women in the professions, nonpositivist epistemology, or the claims of feminism as an emancipatory movement. In particular, the study of gender and politics is not equivalent to the study of women in politics (though studying women and their organizations may reveal something about gender). Women are often affected by gender, but they are neither its cause nor its limit.

What does this conceptualization imply for political science?

In the first place, we should be relieved. The notion of gender as a social position and attribute of social structures puts us on familiar terrain. We are better trained to study structures and institutions than human identities and subjectivities. And the gendered nature of these institutions is not visible only with a special methodology or interdisciplinary approach. It is rather simple to comprehend. Look at the cabinet ministers picked by President Vicente Fox of Mexico, for example: 18 of 19 are men. What other evidence do we need that the executive is gendered? We do not need a “gender perspective” to notice this for it is right there in front of our eyes!

What is more, do any of these ministers—male or female—have small children who accompany them to work or whose dependence is evident in their public lives? Not if they want to keep their jobs and avoid public ridicule. Most professional adults are involved in complex relations of care and dependency whose existence is almost always publicly invisible. Since the requirements for career success were not designed with caregiving in mind, those who choose (or are pressured into) it—generally women—often forsake public pursuits. And the normative feminization of care work makes men reluctant to embrace it. This is the work of the sexual division of labor, a resilient pillar of the gender system.

Many people do not recognize how obvious gender is because they think it means women: if women are not there it is not gendered. In this view, we need to “add a gender perspective” to explain where the women are, notice their hidden activities, and denounce the injustice of their exclusion. On the contrary, I propose that it is ontologically impossible not to have a gender perspective: It is implicit in all domains of academic inquiry. The more interesting question then becomes: what research agendas and hypotheses will lead us toward a better understanding of gender?

Disaggregating gender into three axes helps bring a research agenda into focus and offers a framework to classify existing work. In the rest of this article, I identify specific topics that could be analyzed by those political scientists who, like me, are primarily concerned with the state and its affiliated political institutions—the legislature, the courts, and political parties. Through its laws and policies, symbolic power, the statements and behavior of officials, and subtle patterning of society, the state upholds the sexual division of labor, normative heterosexuality, and war and militarism. Studying gender and the state means analyzing how, why, and where.

Consider the various ways the state props up the sexual division of labor. Perhaps the most obvious mechanism is through family law. For centuries until the egalitarian turns of the 1960s and 1970s, family laws entrenched male authority and women's subordinate position. These laws explicitly named men as the head of household and chief decision maker while precluding women from exercising a profession, testifying in court, enrolling children in school, and the like without his permission (Charrad 2001; Glendon 1989; Htun 2003). Grounds for divorce, criteria to establish adultery, rules on custody, and the like were similarly asymmetrical: they were premised on, and reinforced, men's freedom and married women's submission. Even after old laws changed, the cultural norms they forged lived on: witness the honor defense used throughout the 1990s in Brazil to absolve husbands of murdering their adulterous wives (Linhares Barsted and Hermann 1995).

The entire apparatus of laws on reproduction, abortion, and contraception have had a similar effect. Restrictions on reproductive freedom—in place in most countries of the world—legitimize biologically deterministic views of women's appropriate activities and lot in life. Underlying the battle over abortion, for example, are two competing views of motherhood: the pro-choice position, which sees it as elective, and the pro-life one, which insists that motherhood is compulsory (Luker 1985). By criminalizing abortion—and limiting its availability—the state tells women that pregnancy—and the caregiving it entails—must take precedence over their other choices. It neglects to impose the same responsibility on men.

Social welfare policies, even the most egalitarian ones, have perpetuated, rather than relieved, the allocation of work by sex. Few welfare states are based on the old model of the male breadwinner, and most seek either to relieve women of caregiving (so that they may work for pay) or compensate them for it (to reduce dependence on men). Yet no place has succeeded in elevating the status of care work so that men, too, are attracted to it. On the contrary, liberal welfare states have tended to delegate this activity to low-wage workers and illegal immigrants. Social democratic welfare states, by paying for day care, housing subsidies, and maternity and sick leave, have transferred women's dependency on the family and the market to the state. A division of labor persists: men are still the agents holding positions of power, while women are “clients without having gained the status of citizens” and, notably, those who run public caregiving bureaucracies (Fraser 1996; Hernes 1988; Skjele and Siim 2000).

Liberalism—the normative tradition underlying modern Western states and their democratic polities—has long offered justification for policies that uphold the sexual division of labor. (At the same time, however, its notions of individual rights and equality give grounds to contest sex oppression). As a philosophy that circumscribes the limits of state power, liberalism rests on the division of life into public and private domains. Gender was not incidental to this demarcation but constitutive of it. As Joan Landes has shown, for example, the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere in revolutionary France was premised on the exclusion of women (Landes 1988). Nor is the public–private dichotomy without consequence for gendered rights: liberal reluctance to intervene in the family and hold it to a public standard of justice, for example, allows domestic abuse and inequity to continue with impunity (Okin 1989; Olsen 1985).

To be sure, liberal states are not the only ones guilty of allocating rights, privileges, and differential status valuations by sex. The disparity in living conditions and formal rights between men and women is greatest where governments make little effort to respect liberal principles and deny equality even rhetorically, for example, in much of the Middle East (Saudi Arabia being the most egregious example). Fascist regimes and military dictatorships have elevated motherhood, but not fatherhood, to a national ideology. Even those socialist states that attempted to crush the sexual division of labor—at least in rhetoric—failed miserably. Rather than promote women's emancipation, socialist regimes left a legacy of their enduring subservience to men. At least liberalism offers women avenues to contest gender structures. Socialism's proscription of unofficial political activity left few avenues to contest it (Htun forthcoming; Molyneux 1985).

In addition to enforcing the sexual division of labor, states uphold gender by privileging heterosexual coupling and partnerships. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted a fundamental constitutional right to marry, almost every state in the nation denies it to couples of the same sex (Gerstmann 2003). This posture, which isolates the United States from the growing Western trend toward recognition of same-sex unions, withholds the basic social status and privileges routinely granted to heterosexual partners. What is more, before Lawrence v. Texas, antisodomy laws, though rarely enforced, officially stigmatized any deviations from the heterosexual norm. The state's approach legitimizes homophobic attitudes and creates a climate precluding openness about sexual orientation. These moral and ideological agendas, moreover, interfere in the optimal regulation of sexual behavior (Posner 1992).

By conferring privileges on married couples (regardless of their sex), the state upholds marriage as the basis of rights. Some advocates of gay rights therefore reject the demand for same-sex partnerships. Why entrench the importance of marriage, which just ends up discriminating against nonmarried persons? Why not reject marriage altogether and the regulation of sexuality it implies (Butler 2002; Warner 2002)? States have historically been invested in the control of sexuality, not least in order to ensure orderly procreation and the transmission of property, title, and power across generations. What oppressions and incentives for social control has this generated? What is more, official regulation of kinship has assumed that it is inherently heterosexual. But is it? Texts from classical anthropology provide us with examples of alternative forms of social organization in which procreative lineages and sexual relationships are distinct. The movement for equal marriage rights and its attendant philosophical debate is forcing us to consider these deeper questions.

The third dimension of the gendered state is its sponsorship of war and militarism. Almost every fighting force throughout history has consisted of men (Goldstein 2001). Women have been conspicuously absent—and excluded—from armies in every society. The dichotomy between masculine men who fight and feminine women who need protection defines public life. Not only are military leaders male and masculine, but so too the politicians best able to lead a country to war and insure its adequate defense. Virtues of femininity—tears, compassion, deliberation—are considered ill suited for managing the modern state.

Why is war gendered? One explanation offered by Joshua Goldstein starts from the observation that war is hell (2001). Soldiers do not want to fight but must be cajoled into it by tropes of manliness. Being a man requires suppressing the human impulse to retreat and surrender. Cultures thus develop norms of masculinity to maintain and enforce discipline in a standing army.

Could it be, however, that masculinity is a mere excuse to preserve male dominance of such a prestigious and lucrative enterprise as war? In her critique of Goldstein, Elizabeth Kier (2003) suggests that rather than having any operational purpose, militarized masculinity serves just to preclude women from entering the armed forces' elite male club. Sex discrimination, rather than combating effectiveness, explains the gendering of war. Buying into the masculinity theory merely fortifies the obstacles to full equality in the military that women face.

These are just some examples of relationship between gender and the state. They highlight questions to ask and avenues to probe. Above all, they show that understanding gender does not require a theory of gender identity. Gender's effects—seen in the differences in rights, opportunities, and living situations between most women and most men—are determined by the institutions described here. Yet gender does not define us nor account fully for our subjective experiences. As Moi points out, each individual is much more than the sum of her gender position and her sexed body. We need to investigate those social and political institutions—the state foremost among them—in which gender is embedded and transmitted over time. These institutions—not our individual attributes—engender our lives.