While explicit efforts at gender mainstreaming in foreign policy are relatively recent, a view of foreign policy through a feminist lens illustrates that foreign policy has always been gendered. Feminist scholarship in this area suggests that masculinity has historically shaped foreign policy in important ways, while the increased presence of women in national governments, government cabinets, and the diplomatic corps has produced some notable change in policy outcomes.
An examination of two key concepts related to policymaking and gender—securitization and gender mainstreaming—shows how gender issues have come to the forefront of national and international security agendas since 2000. In particular, the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda promulgated by the United Nations has obligated individual states to address gendered security issues, and dozens of countries have responded with their own National Action Plans. While these national efforts have led to some improvement in the status of women and related humanitarian outcomes, feminist scholars generally agree that the WPS agenda has stalled in its efforts to produce transformative change. As a way forward, feminist foreign policy stances promise to produce more comprehensive outcomes, though a backlash toward gender mainstreaming and the re-emergence of more traditional security threats has led to questions about the future of such efforts.
Article
Sonia Palmieri
While women have succeeded in promoting a feminist agenda in some parliaments, the international research shows that this is not always possible, and accordingly, not a realistic expectation for women. Parliaments, like any institution, have specific cultural norms and practices, some of which actively work against the advancement of gender equality. Understanding the conditions under which female—and male—parliamentarians might succeed in promoting gender equality outcomes has become an important avenue for research and development practice. The focus on gender-sensitive parliaments allows for a framework to identify, and encourage the development of, those conditions.
There are four key elements of a gender-sensitive parliament. First, it accepts that the responsibility to achieve gender equality, both as a policy outcome and as a process, rests with the parliament as a whole (its male and female members and staff) and with the organizations that drive substantial policy, procedural, and normative development (political parties). Second, a gender-sensitive parliament is guided by institutional policies and legal frameworks, which allow the parliament to monitor its achievements toward gender equality and allow follow-up and review. Third, a gender-sensitive parliament institutionalizes a gender mainstreaming approach through its representational, legislative, and oversight work to ensure that all the parliament’s outputs consider, and counteract, any potential discrimination against women or men, girls or boys. This element requires a reconsideration of the process and structures of the parliament, including the respective roles and capacities of members and parliamentary staff. Fourth, a gender-sensitive parliament constantly strives to eliminate institutional cultures that sanction and perpetuate discriminatory, prejudicial norms and attitudes in the workplace against women members and staff.
Article
Shannon Gilreath
Transgender people have a complicated history in U.S. law and policy. Once thought of as a symptom of homosexuality, gender nonconformity has long been the subject of social disapprobation and legal sanction, including criminalization. Beginning in the 1950s, an emergent interest by the medical community in individuals suffering from “gender dysphoria” precipitated an identity politics primarily organized around a goal of access to competent medical care and treatment for transsexual individuals. In ways both significant and ironic, this medicalization both promoted a binary ideology of gender, most obvious in concepts like male-to-female or female-to-male transsexualism, and created space for more transformative concepts of gender fluidity and transgender identity to emerge. Long conceptualized as a kind of subsidiary of the gay and lesbian rights movement in the United States, a status that entailed considerable turmoil, the transgender movement, especially since the 1990s, has emerged as a vocal and relatively effective rights lobby in its own right. The advent of the Trump administration presents a pivotal moment that will likely test not only the durability of recent policy gains but also whether those gains can be expanded in any significant measure.
Article
Camille Vallier and Djemila Carron
Transidentity raises numerous legal questions as it challenges the way the law fundamentally categorizes society in two different groups. The European legal landscape has evolved towards greater recognition of transgender people’s rights, notably in terms of legal gender recognition and non-discrimination, but many inequalities remain deeply rooted in the law.
Gender identity has increasingly been recognized as a ground of discrimination by national and regional instances in Europe, and in 2002 the European Court of Human Rights acknowledged the existence of a right to legal gender recognition under Article 8 of the Convention, in the famous Goodwin v. UK case. Since then, the conditions deemed admissible or not in order to access legal gender recognition and name change have been under scrutiny, and the Court took an important step ahead in 2017, when it held that compulsory sterilization and mandatory medical interventions leading with a high probability to sterility were inadmissible conditions for accessing legal gender recognition (A.P., Garçon, and Nicot v. France). However, other criteria for legal gender recognition remain unclear. Additionally, even when European instance decisively set a principle, the difficulty lies in the implementation on the national level, as the rights of transgender people are far from respected in practice. Legal gender recognition and access to gender confirmation treatment entail particular obstacles for minors, since the debate of whether self-determination regarding legal gender change and access to gender confirmation treatment should prevail over other public and private interests is even more pressing when children are concerned.
Many further obstacles remain, notably in the domain of parenthood and employment, access to transition-related treatments, and their reimbursement by health insurance. Additionally, transphobic hate crimes are rarely identified as such by national criminal legislations, and very few states collect statistics on the matter.
It remains difficult to draw general conclusions on transgender policies in Europe, as domestic laws are diverse and do not always match with international law, and national practices do not always comply with domestic and international law—with transgender people often being caught in a labyrinth of incongruent rules and practices.
Article
Erika Forsberg and Louise Olsson
Prior research has found robust support for a relationship between gender inequality and civil war. These results all point in the same direction; countries that display lower levels of gender equality are more likely to become involved in civil conflict, and violence is likely to be even more severe, than in countries where women have a higher status. But what does gender inequality mean in this area of research? And how does research explain why we see this effect on civil war? Exploring this requires reviewing existing definitions and measurements of gender inequality, a concept that has several dimensions. Several clusters of explanations show how gender inequality could be related to civil war while more equal societies are better able to prevent violent conflict. It is clear that existing misconceptions that gender inequality primarily involves the role of women are clouding the fact that it clearly speaks to much broader societal developments which play central roles in civil war.
Article
Nicole M. Elias
Our understanding and treatment of gender in the United States has evolved significantly over the past four decades. Transgender individuals in the current U.S. context enjoy more rights and protections than they have in the past; yet, room for progress remains. Moving beyond the traditional male–female binary, an unprecedented number of people now identify as transgender and nonbinary. Transgender identities are at the forefront of gender policy, prompting responses from public agencies at the local, state, and federal levels. Because transgender individuals face increased rates of discrimination, violence, and physical and mental health challenges, compared to their cisgender counterparts, new gender policy often affords legal protections as well as identity-affirming practices such as legal name and gender marker changes on government documents. These rights come from legal decisions, legislation, and administrative agency policies. Despite these victories, recent government action targeting the transgender population threatens the progress that has been made. This underscores the importance of comprehensive policies and education about transgender identities to protect the rights of transgender people.
Article
Sharyn Graham Davies
The terms LGBT and Islam mentioned together in a sentence rarely evoke positive connotations. Rather, LGBT and Islam are often considered inherently incompatible. While there is little evidence on which an inherent incompatibility can be claimed, persecution of LGBT people across the globe is routinely carried out in the name of Islam. Yet at its heart, Islam can be a powerful force acknowledging sexual and gender diversity. Of all the world’s great religions, Islam is arguably the most sex positive of all.
Three main avenues provide understanding of sexuality and gender in Islam. First is the Qur’an, or the Islamic holy book. Second is hadith, which are the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. Third are fatwah, which are the rulings of religious leaders. Certainly, most of this literature positions sexuality as properly confined to heterosexual marriage between a gender normative woman and a gender normative man. However, it is often difficult to distill such an imperative from cultural aspects that inflect all readings of religious scripture. In other words, it is often not Islam per se that prohibits same-sex sexuality and gender diversity but rather cultural interpretations of religious aspects. Moreover, it is not uncommon for fatwah to contradict each other, and thus which fatwah are followed comes down to which imam or religious leader espouses it.
A further difficulty with discussing sexuality and gender vis-à-vis Islam, or indeed any religion, is that terms such as sexuality and gender are inherently modern and were developed long after understandings of religion were culturally and politically enshrined. As such, particular understandings of the categories of woman and man within scripture exist in a state where interrogation is not possible. If Muhammad were alive today, he would have linguistic tools available to him to talk about sexuality and gender in a much more nuanced way. To thus discuss LGBT subject positions within Islam, given that Islam was largely developed before words like gender and sexuality were invented, is difficult. Nevertheless, such discussion is warranted and fruitful and shows that while many interpretations of Islam seek to vilify LGBT, many aspects of Islam and its practice are inclusive of sexual and gender diversity.
Article
Sofia Calsy and Maria J. D'Agostino
In the public and private sectors, women continue to address multiple hurdles despite diversity and equity initiatives. Women have made tremendous strides in the workforce but are still a minority in leadership positions worldwide in multiple sectors, including nonprofit, corporate, government, medicine, education, military, and religion. In the United States women represent 60% of bachelor’s degrees earned at universities and outpace men in master’s and doctoral programs. However, a significant body of research illustrates that women’s upward mobility has been concentrated in middle management positions. Women hold 52% of all management and professional roles in the U.S. job market, including physicians and attorneys. Yet women fall behind in representation in senior level positions. In the legal profession, for example, women represent 45% of associates but only 22.7% are partners. In medicine, women represent 40% of all physicians and surgeons but only 16% are permanent medical school deans. In academia, women surpass men in doctorates but only 32% are full professors. Furthermore, only 5% of chief executive officers (CEOs) in Fortune 500 companies and 19% of the board members in companies included in Standard & Poor’s (S&P) Composite 1500 Index are women. Progress is even more elusive for women of color despite making up 38.3% of the female civilian labor force. Only two women of color are Fortune 500 CEOs and only 4.7% of women are executive or senior level official managers in S&P 1500 companies.
There are more women in leadership positions in the public sector than in the private sector. In 2014, 43.5% of women between the ages of 23 and 34 were managers at public companies, compared to 26% in similar positions in the private sector. In 2018, 127 women were elected to the U.S. Congress and 47 of those serving in 2018 were women of color. In addition, the first Native American woman, first Muslim woman, and Congress’s youngest woman were elected in that year. However, there is still progress to be made to close the gap, especially in senior-level positions. The significance of these statistics is staggering and confirms the need for attention. The percentage of women holding leadership positions in the public and private sectors, especially in business and education, has grown steadily in the past decade. However, subtle barriers like bias and stereotypes unfavorably encumber women’s career progression and are often used to explain the lack of women in leadership positions.
Article
Susan Haire and Laura P. Moyer
Increased diversity among participants in the justice system, particularly judges, has fueled debates about the values and perspectives that women bring to the law. Difference theories advanced by social psychologists and feminist scholars argue for the premise that men and women in the legal system approach questions of justice differently. By contrast, empirical scholarship offers only limited support for the expectation that the sex of the judge is related to behavioral outcomes. Although most research has not uncovered differences in voting between men and women judges, one area in which consistent differences has been found is in sex discrimination cases.
Recent studies suggest, however, that individual differences between men and women judges may emerge if the focus shifts to the litigation process. In one study of trial courts, cases assigned to women judges were more likely to be settled. In another study of appellate courts, women judges were more likely to pen majority opinions that adopted a compromise position. These findings suggest the promise of shifting the analytical focus away from behavioral outcomes to consider whether, and how, women and men in the legal system shape litigation processes. Doing so will require additional data and triangulated approaches that employ both quantitative and qualitative methods.
Additional research is also needed to explore how shifts in the gender composition of the bench affect organizational norms and practices in the legal system at the federal, state, and local levels. Some work suggests that gender diversity affects deliberations on small appellate panels and consensual norms on larger courts. As the number of women and minorities appointed by recent Democratic and Republican presidents has increased, scholars are also now well positioned to conduct empirical research with larger numbers to investigate how women of color on the bench differ from white women and minority men.
Article
Miki Caul Kittilson
The burgeoning field of gender and political behavior shows that the way in which ordinary citizens connect to the democratic process is gendered. Gender differences in voting behavior and participation rates persist across democracies. At the same time, countries vary substantially in the size of these gender gaps. In contemporary elections, women tend to support leftist parties more than men in many countries. Although men and women vote at similar rates today, women still trail men in important participatory attitudes and activities such as political interest and discussion. Inequalities in political involvement undermine the quality of deliberation, representation, and legitimacy in the democratic process. A confluence of several interrelated factors (resources, economy, socialization, political context) work together to account for these differences. Today, scholars more carefully consider the socially constructed nature of gender and the ways in which it interacts with other identities. Recent research on gender and political behavior suggests that political context affects different kinds of women in different ways, and future research should continue to investigate these important interactions.
Article
Colleen M. Carpinella and Kerri L. Johnson
The facial appearance of political candidates provides information to voters that can be vital to the impression-formation process. Traditionally, psychological research in the field of appearance-based politics has concentrated on investigating whether politicians’ physical appearance impacts perceptions of them. Recently, the focus has shifted from examining whether facial cues matter for impression formation to determining (1) which facial cues matter for voters’ perceptions of politicians and (2) how such visual cues are utilized within the political decision-making process. This shift in research focus has ushered in an appreciation of facial competence and physical attractiveness, and it has been marked by a renewed interest in studying how gender stereotypes impact the influence of politician appearance on perceptions of male and female politicians. In addition, this renewed interest in studying underlying mechanisms in appearance-based politics has spurred on research that includes a broader range of downstream consequences such as evaluations of leadership potential, voting behavior, and even basic political party affiliation categorizations.
Article
Christina Fiig
The European Union (EU) has been characterized as a “gender regime” with its distinctive patterns of gender (in)equalities and path dependencies. Gender equality policies have developed as a genuine policy field over the past decades from a single treaty article to a comprehensive legal and political framework dealing with multiple sources of discrimination. Besides, gender equality policies are frequently linked to other political projects and policy goals.
Gender equality is often presented as a foundational value of the EU with reference to the Treaties of Amsterdam and Lisbon. Research has pointed out that it is an important aspect of the foundational myth of the EU. The development of gender equality policies has been characterized by alternations between progress and stagnation. These policies are also met by resistance. However, a general conclusion is that EU institutions have been important catalysts in shaping women’s economic, political, and social equality in Europe and in putting equality rights into effect. Historical, political, and sociological interpretations of the EU’s gender equality policies illustrate these dynamics.
Gender equality policies are described in terms of the following phases: the 1970s (associated with women’s civil and economic rights and equal treatment), the 1980s (equal opportunities, positive action), and the 1990s (gender mainstreaming in the whole union and for all policy areas). Since the 2000s, a fourth phase of new policies against multiple discrimination has been developing. These different stages of EU gender policy continue to coexist. When the Treaty of Amsterdam entered into force in 1999, the EU committed to a new approach to work for gender equality through mainstreaming. Gender equality and nondiscrimination became guiding legal principles of the union. The Treaty of Lisbon reflects core vaues of the EU such as democracy, human rights and gender equality.
One can approach gender equality policies as situated between concerns for gender equality and multiple discrimination on the one hand and priorities of economy and finance on the other. Critical voices in the literature have pointed out that these priorities have outperformed ideas about gender equality. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, EU austerity policies represent a “critical juncture” that could undo the long-term progress achieved in gender equality in Europe. Besides, gender equality policies suffer from a gap between institutionalization on the one hand and a lack of consistency and full political commitment on the other. In a context of a more permanent crisis scenario in the EU, gender equality policies are undergoing transformations and they are subject to change to the worse.
A key point is that dynamic gender relations, multiple discrimination, and women’s various roles in society matter for understanding the EU and European integration. This raises questions about the EU’s role as a driving force for gender equality and against multiple discrimination. What happened to gender equality policies and to gendered effects of other policies as a result of the various crises in the EU?
Article
Kristen P. Williams
The traditional/mainstream international relations (IR) study of foreign policy has primarily focused on state behavior in the international system, examining factors such as the influence of decision-makers’ attitudes and beliefs, regime type, domestic political actors, civil society, norms, culture, and so forth on foreign policy. Much of this research has neglected to address women and gender in the context of studying foreign policy actors, decisions, and outcomes. Given that women are increasingly gaining access to the political process in terms of both formal government positions and informal political activism, and recognition by the international community of women’s roles in peace and war, feminist international relations (IR) scholars have challenged the assumptions and research focus of mainstream IR, including the study of foreign policy. Feminist international relations (IR) scholars have shown that countries with greater gender equality have foreign policies that are less belligerent. How do we account for foreign policies that are explicitly focused on women’s empowerment and gender equality? The main questions motivating the research on feminism in foreign policy are as follows. Is there a gender gap between men and women in terms of foreign policy? If so, what explains the gender gap? Research shows that the evidence is mixed—for example, men and women often agree on foreign policy goals and objectives, but sometimes differ on what actions to take to achieve those goals, primarily whether to use force.
In considering where the women are in foreign policy, scholars examine women’s representation and participation in government, as gender equality is related to women’s representation and participation. While an increasing number of women have entered formal politics, whether as heads of state/government, cabinet and ministerial positions, and ambassadorships, for example, women remain underrepresented. The question also arises as to whether and how women’s participation and representation (descriptive and substantive representation) impact foreign policy. Does increased women’s participation and representation lead to a foreign policy focused on “women’s issues” and gender equality? Is a critical mass of women necessary for policies that promote gender equality and women’s empowerment? Finally, what does it mean to have a feminist foreign policy?
Article
Matthew Waites
The Commonwealth is the international governmental organization of states that emerged from the British empire, and since 2000 it has emerged as a focus for contestation relating to the regulation of same-sex sexualities, gender diversity, and diverse sex characteristics. Following colonial criminalizations focused on same-sex sexual acts, and later formal decolonizations, there have appeared many national movements for decriminalization and human rights in relation to sexuality and gender. The Commonwealth has emerged as a site of politics for some significant actors claiming human rights in relation to sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics. This has been led by specific organizations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, increasingly with intersex people and allies, but it is also important to consider this in relation to queer people, understood more broadly here as people in all cultures experiencing forms of sexualities, biological sex and genders outside the social structure of heterosexuality, and its associated sex and gender binaries. A range of forms of activist and non-governmental organization (NGO) engagement have occurred, leading to shifts in Commonwealth civil society and among some state governments. This has required researchers to develop analyses across various scales, from local and national to international and transnational, to interpret institutions and movements.
The British Empire criminalized same-sex sexual acts between males, and to a lesser extent between females, across its territories. In certain instances there were also forms of gender regulation, constraining life outside a gender binary. Such criminalization influenced some of those claiming LGBT human rights to engage the Commonwealth. Research shows that a majority of Commonwealth states continue to criminalize some adult consensual same-sex sexual activity. Yet the history of struggles for decriminalization and human rights within states in the Commonwealth has led up to such recent important decriminalizations as in India and Trinidad and Tobago in 2018.
LGBT and queer activist engagements of the Commonwealth itself commenced in 2007 when Sexual Minorities Uganda and African allies demanded entry to the Commonwealth People’s Space during a Heads of Government meeting in Kampala. Activism has often focused on the biannual Heads of Government meetings that are accompanied by civil society forums. A particularly significant phenomenon has been the emergence of a “new London-based transnational politics of LGBT human rights,” evident in the creation from 2011 of new NGOs working internationally from the United Kingdom. Among these organizations was the Kaleidoscope Trust, which shaped the subsequent formation of The Commonwealth Equality Network as an international network of NGOs that became formally recognized by the Commonwealth. Significant developments occurred at the London Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in April 2018; Prime Minister Theresa May expressed “regret” for past imperial criminalizations while announcing funding for Kaleidoscope Trust and other UK-based groups to use in international law reform work. These developments exemplify a wider problematic for both activists and analysts, concerning how LGBT and queer movements should engage in contexts that are still structured by imperial legacies and power relations associated with colonialism, persisting in the present.
Article
Helena Stensöta Olofsdotter and Lena Wängnerud
It is widely recognized that corruption, or the act of using public power for private ends, is a major destructive force for humans and human societies. Research has shown that corruption is one of the most detrimental factors currently afflicting the economies of developing countries. It further undercuts various dimensions of human well-being such as health, access to clean water, and education, and it negatively affects subjective dimensions of life such as self-reported well-being and happiness.
It was against the backdrop of corruption as a major destructive force that researchers at the World Bank in the late 1990s started to explore new directions in research such as the relevance of the gender perspective. In their groundbreaking study, “Are Women Really the Fairer Sex? Corruption and Women in Government,” Dollar and colleagues demonstrated that higher rates of female participation in government are associated with lower national levels of corruption. They measured corruption using data from the International Country Risk Guide, and they included a broad range of variables in their analysis to control for various underlying institutional characteristics that could be responsible for a spurious correlation. In a follow-up study, Swamy, in 2001, presented a more comprehensive empirical analysis, but most importantly, also a more elaborated theoretical framework. Swamy and colleagues suggested that women may follow laws to a greater extent than men because they feel protected by them. Further, girls may be brought up to have higher levels of self-control than boys, which may prevent them from engaging in criminal acts. For women in power, the most important argument for why an increased number in government would affect corruption was that women might lower corruption levels not only by being less involved in corrupt behavior themselves but also by initiating policies to fight corruption or to recruit staff who are less corrupt.
The initial studies spurred a heated debate on the direction of causality—what effects what—and after more than a decade of research on gender and corruption, it is clear that the link between the two factors is complex: For example, the relationship between levels of women in government and levels of corruption appears in democracies but not in authoritarian states. Moreover, the expected pattern that a high share of women is related to low levels of corruption appears in analysis focusing on the proportion of women in elected assemblies, such as national parliaments, but not in analysis focusing on the proportion of women in the bureaucracy—that is in positions related to the implementation of policies. There is also considerable subnational variation both in levels of corruption and in the share of women in elected assemblies. Studies elaborating on the gender perspective also show the need for reconsidering the definitions of corruption; women are particularly vulnerable in transactions including sexual “services.”
Article
Gabrielle S. Bardall
This article presents a conceptual orientation to the intersection of gender, politics, and violence. The first part of the article will introduce the subject by reviewing the primary conceptual framework and empirical knowledge on the topic to date and discussing the theoretical heritage of the concept. Establishing a key distinction between gender-motivated and gender differentiated violence, this article will discuss the gender dimensions of political violence and the political dimensions of gender-based violence. The latter half of the article reviews a number of the key questions driving research and dialogue in the field in the 21st century.
Article
Katelyn E. Stauffer and Diana Z. O'Brien
Quantitative methods are among the most useful, but also historically contentious, tools in feminist research. Despite the controversy that sometimes surrounds these methods, feminist scholars in political science have often drawn on them to examine questions related to gender and politics. Researchers have used quantitative methods to explore gender in political behavior, institutions, and policy, as well as gender bias in the discipline. Just as quantitative methods have aided the advancement of feminist political science, a feminist perspective likewise has implications for data production, measurement, and analysis. Yet, the continued underrepresentation of women in the methods community needs to be addressed, and greater dialogue between feminist researchers and quantitative methodologists is required.
Article
Georgina Waylen
Many institutionalist scholars—historical institutionalists in particular—have recognized for some time that our understanding of institutional change needs to be improved. Taking this premise as a starting point, this article develops it by arguing that we not only need to understand institutional change better but that we also need to improve our understanding of how it is gendered. The chapter combines key elements from institutional analysis with recent gender and politics scholarship. This combination will form an analytical framework that can be used to examine how different instances of institutional change are gendered, highlighting, for example, the importance of some key concepts such as informal institutions and their role in either promoting or stymieing attempts to promote institutional change. After exploring the gaps in many current gender and politics analyses such as their capacity to explain many instances of institutional change, the paper charts the development of key insights on institutional change from both historical institutionalism and feminist institutionalism. It delineates different forms of institutional change and develops some key themes for each one that might enable us to better understand, not only how each is gendered, but also how far each form might be used by change actors as a gender equity strategy.
Article
Jaimee A. Swift
Afro-Brazilian lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) women are often neglected in political and academic discourses on state-sanctioned violence. Despite global imagery and nationalist narratives that portray Brazil as racially democratic and sexually inclusive of its LGBTQ+ communities, Afro-Brazilian LGBTQ+ women disproportionately endure state-sponsored terror and violence in communities compounded by structural anti-LGBTQ+ and antiblack subalternity. Brazil houses the largest Afro-descendant populous in the world outside the African continent. Yet, law enforcement routinely targets and murders Afro-Brazilians in what is considered by many black Brazilian activists to be a “black genocide.” The country also has one of the highest rates of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes and murders in the world, which heavily impacts its robust Afro-descendant LGBTQ+ community.
As victims and survivors of police terror, community violence, and antiblack and gendered structural inequities, Afro-Brazilian LGBTQ+ women and their activism against repressive machinations of state violence, anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes, and socioeconomic and political injustices is rarely discussed in scholarship on transnational, black political movement building. The chronic undertheorization of Afro-Brazilian LGBTQ+ women’s voices, lives, and scholarship has omitted their saliency as sociopolitical and intellectual agents of change in the field of black politics and influential articulators of the black radical tradition in Brazil. In examining the politics of gender, sexuality, race, violence, citizenship, and political resistance in Brazil, it is imperative to center Afro-Brazilian LGBTQ+ women’s political significance in Latin America and beyond.
Article
Candice Ortbals and Lori Poloni-Staudinger
Gender influences political violence, which includes, for example, terrorism, genocide, and war. Gender uncovers how women, men, and nonbinary persons act according to feminine, masculine, or fluid expectations of men and women. A gendered interpretation of political violence recognizes that politics and states project masculine power and privilege, with the result that men occupy the dominant social position in politics and women and marginalized men are subordinate. As such, men (associated with masculinity) are typically understood as perpetrators of political violence with power and agency and women (associated with femininity) are seen as passive and as victims of violence. For example, women killed by drone attacks in the U.S. War on Terrorism are seen as the innocent, who, along with children, are collateral damage. Many historical and current examples, however, demonstrate that women have agency, namely that they are active in social groups and state institutions responding to and initiating political violence. Women are victims of political violence in many instances, yet some are also political and social actors who fight for change.
Gendercide, which can occur alongside genocide, targets a specific gender, with the result that men, women, or those who identify with a non-heteronormative sexuality are subject to discriminatory killing. Rape in wartime situations is also gendered; often it is an expression of men’s power over women and over men who are feminized and marginalized. Because war is typically seen as a masculine domain, wartime violence is not associated with women, who are viewed as life givers and not life takers. Similarly, few expect women to be terrorists, and when they are, women’s motivations often are assumed to be different from those of men. Whereas some scholars argue that women pursue terrorism for personal (and feminine) reasons, for example to redeem themselves from the reputation of rape or for the loss of a male loved one, other scholars maintain that women act on account of political or religious motivations. Although many cases of women’s involvement in war and terrorism can be documented throughout history, wartime leadership and prominent social positions following political violence have been reserved for men. Leaders with feminine traits seem undesirable during and after political violence, because military leadership and negotiations to end military conflict are associated with men and masculinity. Nevertheless, women’s groups and individual women respond to situations of violence by protesting against violence, testifying at tribunals and truth commissions, and constructing the political memory of violence.
