Contemporary discourse on sexual(ized) violence in armed conflicts represents a powerful source for legitimization of highly controversial military interventions. Recent gender-responsive security studies have called for enhanced protection of women and girls from widespread and systematic sexual(ized) violence. Yet military operations reproduce the Western masculine hegemony rather than providing inclusive and apolitical assistance to victims of sexual assault. The article aims to critically assess discourse on sexual violence in a case of military intervention in Libya initiated under the rubric of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). The case study indicates a set of discursive strategies exercised by Western political representatives and nongovernmental organizations and even more expressively by the media to legitimize the military campaign. Typically, sexual(ized) violence is presented as a weapon of war, used by one of the conflicting parties without an adequate response of the state. This is followed by urgent calls for international action, willingly carried out by Western powers. The simplified narrative of civilized protectors versus savage aggressors must be challenged as it exploits the problem of sexual(ized) violence in order to legitimize politically motivated actions.

In recent decades, scholars have begun to analyze the role of the first lady in American society. Though the relationship between gender ideologies and this identity has been analyzed, little attention has been paid to how other aspects of the first ladies’ identities could shape the way the public and the first ladies themselves view their role. In this article, we offer an intersectional analysis that considers historical notions of hegemonic femininity in relation to race. We assert that the role of the first lady is a raced-gendered institution that produces a controlling image of white womanhood that simultaneously privileges white femininity and subordinates black womanhood. We conduct an analysis of the autobiographies of six first ladies: Edith Wilson, Eleanor Roosevelt, “Lady Bird” Johnson, Rosalynn Carter, Hillary Clinton, and Michelle Obama.

Do political gender stereotypes exist in egalitarian settings in which all parties nominate women? Do they matter for candidate selection in systems of proportional representation with multiparty competition and preferential voting? To date, these questions remain unanswered because related research is limited to the U.S. case. Our pioneering study examines political stereotypes in one of the “least likely” cases, Finland—a global forerunner in gender equality. We find, first, that stereotypes persist even in egalitarian paradises. Second, when testing across settings of candidate choice, we find that the effect varies greatly: political gender stereotypes are powerful in hypothetical choices, but they work neither in favor of nor against female candidates when many “real,” viable, experienced, and incumbent female candidates are competing. Although in open-list systems with preferential voting, gender stereotypes can directly affect female candidates’ electoral success, in Finland, their actual impact in real legislative elections appears marginal.

Few democratic countries have lower rates of female political representation than Japan, making it an excellent place to seek clues for female underrepresentation. We were surprised to find, based on three experimental surveys, that Japanese voters do not harbor particularly negative attitudes toward female politicians. The problem instead appears to be that women are reluctant to run for office because of socially mandated family roles. An implication of our study is that gender equality in political representation will likely founder in countries with electoral systems that require around-the-clock constituency service and legislative work, at least until citizens no longer have gendered expectations about time-consuming family obligations.

The article examines whether female political candidates are disfavored in terms of persuasiveness potential based on their expertise and trustworthiness. Using a Bayesian argumentation paradigm in which candidates endorse policies, this study shows that male voters regard female candidates as less persuasive than male candidates. A controlled between-subjects experiment among 202 potential voters in the United States suggests that female election candidates are subject to sex biases in two central ways. First, despite agreeing on their trustworthiness and expertise, male voters find highly credible female candidates less persuasive than identical male candidates. Second, female candidates are affected more adversely if they are perceived as lacking in trustworthiness. Male candidates, on the other hand, are affected more negatively if they are perceived as lacking in expertise. Whereas perceived lack of expertise is relatively easy to repair, trustworthiness may be difficult to regain once it is lost. In a political environment in which attack ads are prevalent, this may carry a greater negative impact for female candidates.

This article presents an analysis of how activists, politicians, and the media framed youth involvement in the sex trade during the 1970s, the 1990s, and the 2000s in the United States. Across these periods of public concern about the issue, similar framing has recurred that has drawn upon gendered and racialized notions of victimization and perpetration. This frame has successfully brought attention to this issue by exploiting public anxieties at historical moments when social change was threatening white male dominance. Using intersectional feminist theory, I argue that mainstream rhetoric opposing the youth sex trade worked largely within neoliberal logics, ignoring histories of dispossession and structural violence and reinforcing individualistic notions of personhood and normative ideas about subjectivity and agency. As part of the ongoing project of racial and gender formation in US society, this discourse has shored up neoliberal governance, particularly the build-up of the prison industrial complex, and it has obscured the state's failure to address the myriad social problems that make youth vulnerable to the sex trade.

A large percentage of women receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) — known colloquially as welfare—have experienced domestic violence in their lives, with studies reporting that upwards of 50% of welfare recipients have been abused at some point. Receiving TANF benefits can provide the financial stability that is necessary for a woman to leave an abusive relationship, though some TANF provisions, such as child support reporting requirements, may also put victims of domestic violence at risk. Under TANF, states may adopt the Family Violence Option and waive many program requirements, including time limits, work requirements, and child support reporting requirements, for victims of domestic violence. Given the importance of TANF for those trying to leave, or who have left, abusive situations, this article asks: Who represents the interests of these women in the states? To answer this question, I employ a mixed methods approach, combining a quantitative analysis of the diversity of interest groups in the states with a case study of Connecticut and New Jersey. I find that feminist and domestic violence organizations do not consistently have a significant effect on the adoption of policy accommodations for survivors, but these groups are speaking out.

This article assesses the implications of the shifting market-state relationship for feminism in the neoliberal era. In a case study of the private military and security industry as an actor that is uniquely positioned at the intersections of security governance and global markets, the analysis combines feminist security studies’ critique of securitized gender discourses and feminist global political economy scholarship on corporate-led equality initiatives. Based on a critical discourse analysis of documents from industry and nongovernmental organizations, such as codes of conduct and policy recommendations, I argue that the discourses on gender put forward in the context of security privatization merge securitized and marketized discourses to the effect that the emancipatory potential of “gender” is further curtailed, raising new challenges for feminist knowledge in powerful organizations. The article thus contributes to the critical gender research on private security, debates on the neoliberalization and securitization of feminism, and the integration of feminist security studies and feminist global political economy.

This article analyzes the relationship between parties and the representation of women in Spanish subnational legislatures. We argue that studies on party ideology and gender have generally failed to (a) acknowledge the effect of electoral time: the left started to recruit women earlier, when their number was low and they were mainly perceived as liabilities; and (b) distinguish between two different party mechanisms: parties can be gate openers and ease the access of newcomers to the legislature, and they can be career promoters, which facilitate the parliamentary continuity of incumbents. Drawing on a database containing comprehensive information about the population of regional members of parliament (MPs) (N = 5,353) in 138 elections and focusing on the two most prominent parties, the conservative People's Party and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party), we test the hypothesis that left-wing parties outperform right-wing parties concerning gender representation. Our statistical analyses show that electoral time blurs the effect of ideology on the share of women MPs. Once time is controlled for, the socialists emerge as systematically recruiting more women. Concerning the two mechanisms, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party fares better as a gate opener, while the People's Party, unexpectedly, excels as a career promoter.

In this article, I examine how conflicts over transgender bathroom rights have ignited debates concerning the fundamental nature of transgender identity. Through an institutional and discursive analysis of North Carolina's House Bill 2 or “bathroom bill,” the Title IX case in Gloucester County School Board v. G. G., and similar federal court cases, I explore how and why forces both on the right and in the LGBTQ movement have come to rely on scientific expertise to legitimate their conceptions. As conservatives have marshaled evidence to challenge notions that transgender identity is innate, LGBTQ and transgender organizations as well as the American Civil Liberties Union have crafted a “born this way” biopolitical construction of transgender identity. I find that at their core, these conflicts are over the meanings of gender and sex in relation to transgender identity. Conservatives posit sex as biologically rooted and gender as a psychological phenomenon, whereas transgender advocates subsume gender identity into the definition of sex in arguing that constitutional and federal civil rights law must recognize gender identity as a biologically constitutive element of sex. I conclude by noting the limits of a liberal assimilationist and litigation-centric transgender politics and by exploring alternatives to this biopolitical form of transgender political identity.

This article presents a qualitative analysis of profeminist Islamic women public figures’ discourses in the abortion debate in Turkey in 2012. The aim is to reveal the possibilities and limitations of achieving an intersectional and egalitarian profeminist collaboration on the Islamic-secular axis in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on recent feminist scholarship on coalition politics, the article exposes the fluctuations of meaning and the shifting frames of reference in these women's narratives and relates this hybrid, dynamic narrative quality to profeminist Islamic women's unique social location. It also elaborates on the blockage points in these narratives that hinder coalitional ways of thinking. Within this frame, this article suggests that in a social and political context that has witnessed a striking upsurge of antifeminist gender politics in the last decade, the building of coalitional profeminist politics beyond the Islamic-secular divide can be facilitated by shifting the focus from the apparently irreconcilable character of ideological positionings and lived experiences toward coalitional rhetorical strategies and intermediary narrative lines in profeminist subjects’ accounts.

Though the concept of intersectionality has been in circulation for nearly 30 years and women's organizations have long been criticized for failing to prioritize the concerns of women of color, poor women, and LGBTQ women, more research is needed to determine precisely why women's organizations do and do not discuss those intersectional identities during policy debates. This study analyzes 1,021 comments that women's organizations submitted to rulemakers to test a series of hypotheses about how women's organizations’ references to women's intersectional identities increase or decrease depending on the organization's primary constituency and ideology, the proposed rule's target population, and other features of the policy-making context. Using automated text analysis and a series of models, it shows that women's organizations do discuss intersectionally marginalized women in their comments. However, not all subgroups of women are equally represented during the process. Women's organizations focus on women's sexual orientations and gender identities more than their races, ethnicities, nationalities, or socioeconomic statuses. Intersectionally marginalized women also tend to receive the most attention when commenters are from organizations that are explicitly focused on representing intersectionally marginalized women and when bureaucrats include references to intersectionally marginalized women in their proposed rules.

Concepts such as risk aversion and anxiety have received renewed attention in various strands of gender and politics research. Most contemporary scholars suggest that gender gaps in this area are related to social norms and stem from social learning rather than from inherent gender traits. Very few, however, elaborate on the gender variable to reach a fuller understanding of the dynamics at work. In this study, we examined gender gaps in levels of anxiety, an area closely related to risk aversion, and we applied a combination of categorical measures of gender distinguishing between “woman, “man,” and “other” and scales capturing grades of femininity and masculinity in individuals. We label this approach fuzzy gender, and we suggest that it can be used to advance research in our field. The key finding is an interaction effect between categorical measures of gender and fuzzy gender: The more female characteristics in women, the higher the levels of anxiety. Moreover, there is no difference in levels of anxiety between men and women with few female characteristics. The data used draw from a large-scale survey among Swedish citizens in 2013.

In this study, we examine substantive representation of women in the 2011–15 Turkish Parliament by focusing on sponsorship of private members’ bills by members of parliament (MPs) across eight major issue areas. The Turkish case offers new insights into women's representation, not only because this topic is unexplored in the Turkish context but also because it provides an opportunity to examine the tension between gender as a social identity and ideology as a political identity in a legislature characterized by disciplined political parties and low gender parity. Findings indicate that women MPs in Turkey substantively represent women by sponsoring more bills on women's rights and equality issues than their male colleagues, despite their low numbers in parliament and affiliation with highly disciplined parties. Party ideology also shapes women MPs’ issue priorities depending on the emphasis placed by the parties on different issue areas. Whereas left-wing women MPs sponsor more bills on women's rights and equality issues defined with a feminist accent, right-wing women MPs sponsor more bills on issues regarding children and family. Left-wing women also differ significantly from right-wing women in their sponsorship of bills on health and social affairs issues, as left-wing parties prioritize those issues more than right-wing parties.

Research on female politicians suggests that women face a double bind. Female politicians must embrace their femininity but not be too feminine, and they must demonstrate masculinity without deviating from gender norms. Hillary Clinton has often struggled with this balance, which has resulted in conflicting and inconsistent portrayals of her in the news. To examine the extent of this coverage, this study provides a longitudinal analysis of Clinton's personal and professional media coverage in the New York Times. A content analysis of news coverage of Clinton from 1969 to 2016 shows that she has largely not been bound to gender labels, gender traits, or mentions of physical appearance. In addition, Clinton was not overly discussed as a novelty or norm challenger. These findings contradict previous literature, demonstrating a potential trend away from using gender as a descriptor for or limitation to female politicians.