Feminist and Gendered Approaches

Taking women and gender seriously fundamentally transforms how we understand and approach the study of politics. Feminist approaches are both corrective – in that they have sought to rectify the gendered ‘blinkers and biases’ of mainstream political science – and transformative – in that they aim not only to expose gender power inequalities, but also to change them (Lovenduski, 1998; Hawkesworth, 2005). In this chapter, we evaluate the implications of a feminist perspective for political analysis, focusing in particular on empirically based political science, rather than the prescriptive or normative side of the discipline (see Randall, 2010 and Disch and Hawkesworth, 2016). We begin with a brief overview of feminism, before moving on to assess what it means to argue that political science is a historically ‘gendered’ discipline. We then evaluate two main trends in feminist approaches to political analysis: first, foundational and ongoing work on ‘women in politics’; and, second, the growing body of work on ‘gender and politics’, which has raised crucial questions about the gendered nature of political institutions and power dynamics. We conclude by discussing some of the dilemmas and challenges that remain in the field, evaluating the overall impact of feminism on political science, and looking towards the future.