As noted in the introduction to this issue of Politics & Gender, for this Special Issue on Gender and Conservatism, we have coordinated the book review section with the thematics of the volume's four research articles. This lends the volume an intellectual cohesion that we hope will prove engaging, as it also expands the purview of topics that come into play where the intersections of conservatism and feminism are concerned. The books reviewed here suggest the rich diversity of the scholarly work that is now being generated on this question.

The “corporatization” of the academy is often cited as a cause of the “de-professionalization” of the professoriate, and that in turn is cited as a cause of the faculty’s current disempowerment. The specifically modern conception of professionalism presupposed by these arguments occludes the deep implication of the academy in the generation and legitimation of specific configurations of power. This essay begins, accordingly, by elaborating this early conception of professionalism and showing how it informs twentieth century arguments on behalf of tenure, academic freedom, and the participation of faculty in institutional governance. The explicitly political reading of professionalism I offer as an alternative better explains how the academic workforce in recent decades has been thoroughly reconfigured in accordance with neoliberal imperatives. The downside of this reading, however, is that it deprives us of the justification for tenure, academic freedom, and shared governance that rested on an apolitical representation of the professoriate. I close, therefore, by asking what we stand to lose if we relinquish this ideal, but I then ask what costs we are likely to incur if we cling to a notion that compromises our ability to grasp the faculty’s current situation.

The discipline of political science in the United States evolved in tandem with the development of democratic education and the modern university system. Since the early years of the twentieth century, political science has been an academic discipline housed in universities and colleges, and most political scientists earn their living as university or college teachers. And yet as individual academics or as a discipline, we rarely stand back from our institutional environment and ask hard questions about what is happening with higher education and what this means for the practice of political science. Suzanne Mettler does precisely this in Degrees of Inequality: How Higher Education Politics Sabotaged the American Dream. And so we have invited a range of political science scholars, many with extensive experience as university leaders, to comment on her book and its implications for the future of political science.

Punishment and Political Order. By Keally McBride. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. 194p. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

What part does punishment play in the constitution of political order, and under what circumstances does punishment reinforce or undermine that order? In recent decades, suggests Keally McBride, this question has too often been ceded by students of political science to sociologists, legal scholars, and criminologists. In this discerning collection of essays, McBride seeks to reclaim this turf by asking, first, how certain pathbreaking texts have responded to the dilemmas generated when political orders, real or imagined, inflict suffering in response to misdeeds and, second, how we might make, specifically, political sense of controversies engendered by contemporary practices of punishment, especially but not exclusively in the United States.

This essay explores the controversy spawned by the release, in April, 2004, of the photographs taken by U.S. military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Its particular concern is with photographs that depict American servicewomen engaged in various forms of abusive conduct against Iraqi prisoners. In its opening half, the essay examines and criticizes the responses to these photographs offered, first, by right-wing commentators and, second, by American feminists, most notably Barbara Ehrenreich. All read these photographs as a referendum on feminism and, more particularly, its commitment to the cause of gender equality; and all do so, I argue, on the basis of a naive understanding of gender. In its latter half, accordingly, the essay offers a more adequate understanding of gender, one loosely grounded in the work of Judith Butler and the concept of performativity. Referencing various official interrogation manuals, as well as the investigative reports released in the wake of this scandal, the essay employs this concept in offering a more adequate account of the gendered import of the deeds depicted in the Abu Ghraib photographs. It concludes by arguing that what is important about these photographs is neither whether the perpetrators of the exploitation they depict are male or female, nor whether the deeds they portray somehow compromise the feminist quest for gender equality. Rather, what is important are the multiple ways in which specifically gendered practices, which can be detached from the bodies they conventionally regulate, are deployed as elements within a more comprehensive network of technologies aimed at disciplining prisoners and so confirming their status as abject subjects of U.S. military power.This essay has its origins in a roundtable titled “Gender Relations in the Age of Neo-Liberalism,” which was conducted in conjunction with the 2005 meeting of the Western Political Science Association. I wish to thank the other participations on that roundtable, Jane Bayes, Mary Hawkesworth, and Judith Hicks Stiehm, as well as Paul Apostolidis, Renee Heberle, Jinee Lokaneeta, Jeannie Morefield, Aaron Perrine, Kari Tupper, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of the essay.

Failure to Hold: The Politics of School Violence.

We sometimes experience more than we can say, and often it is the “questions” posed by such nondiscursive reality to which feminist writings speak most profoundly. Feminists should therefore decline Richard Rorty's neopragmatist exhortation to forgo all appeals to “women's experience.” Invoking an alternative account of pragmatism's import for feminism, I explore the problematic relationship between the experience of being pregnant and the language we use in talking about it.