Modern democracy is often considered to be tantamount to representative democracy. In her most recent statement on representation, Hanna Pitkin admits that when writing The Concept of Representation (1967), she took the relationship between representation and democracy to be unproblematic: “… like most people even today, I more or less equated democracy with representation, or at least with representative government. It seemed axiomatic that under modern conditions only representation can make democracy possible” (2004, 336). Almost forty years later, Pitkin's view is that “representation has supplanted democracy instead of serving it” (2004, 339). She concludes her analysis asking whether democracy can be saved from the increasing turn (or return) of political representation to more elitist forms of government and dominion.

For feminists interested in questions of freedom, the current era is as exciting as it is paradoxical. As we move into the second decade of the millennium, we find ourselves witnessing enhanced opportunities for women in many areas of life: More women than ever are earning college degrees and attending graduate and professional school, more women are now represented at the highest levels of government, and women continue to make major gains in the workplace (Rosin 2010a, 2010b). And while this progress is far from equal among the various populations of women, it is safe to say that within the United States, women today face fewer restrictions and have more options and opportunities to act in the world than ever before. Yet despite the increased presence of women and people of color within various elite circles, this is also a time of widening economic inequality. This condition of enhanced opportunity for an increasingly diverse elite alongside widespread and deepening inequality has important implications for the ways that feminists understand the dynamics of freedom today.

“Here Come the (Stylish) Grooms,” declared the headline, which was accompanied by a 9 1/2-inch-high photograph of two smiling, dancing, and, yes, stylish grooms. The article appeared on the front page of the Thursday Styles section of the October 20, 2011 edition of the New York Times. Alluding to the New York State law passed in June of that year that gave legal recognition to same-sex marriage, it began, “As they walk down the aisle, gay couples are making new rules while keeping some old ones.”

When are “the people”—with all its different groups—represented? It is commonly accepted that democratic representation implies that no significant parts of the population are excluded from the right to vote or to stand for election and, similarly, that parliaments and even governments should, to a certain extent, mirror the represented and governed population. If authorization and accountability indicate the democratic quality of the formal dimension of representation (i.e., it is democratic when it is accountable), then representativeness allows for evaluating descriptive representation (i.e., it is democratic when it is representative of society) (see also Celis 2009). But what are our standards for judging the democratic quality of substantive representation? According to Hanna F. Pitkin, that normative standard is the representative's responsiveness: substantive representation is “acting in the interest of the represented, in a manner responsive to them.” Responsiveness turns what representatives do into substantive representation of the demos. It is a metacriterion for democratic representation in the sense that accountability and descriptive representativeness need also to ensure responsiveness. But, again, questions arise: How should we understand responsiveness? How do representatives establish it? Where and when does responsiveness need to be established?

Disability is the new gender. I make this claim with trepidation and a sense of irony. Certainly, disability studies today is like women's studies was in the 1970s and 1980s, when feminist scholars had to convince colleagues in “mainstream” political science that gender was something worth attending to, that it was a serious enterprise, and that it should be part of the mainstream. The fields of history and English have been somewhat more welcoming of disability as a valid topic of study, just as these fields preceded political science in realizing that gender was an important category of study. But political science has been slow to catch on.

One of the most important contributions of feminist theory is the rethinking of core concepts, such as freedom and autonomy. While the inspiration for this rethinking is often the way traditional concepts fail women, the constructive project of reconstruction routinely goes beyond a focus on the particular significance for women—or gender or sexuality. For example, the canon failed to recognize not only the centrality of care work in women's lives but also the underlying issue of dependence as characteristic of human life (MacIntyre 1999). Integrating this dependence into conceptual reformulation has then led to the argument that theories of justice must include the distribution of care work (Kittay 1999) and to the rejection of independence as a key element of autonomy (Nedelsky 2011a). Of course, these reconceptualizations have important consequences for women's lives and for our collective understandings of gender and sexuality. But those important consequences are not the focus of every theoretical contribution.

In my recent explorations of black women as subjects in research-length articles that employ intersectionality, I discovered that black women are rarely, if at all, the sole subjects of such research projects (Jordan-Zachery 2011). This analysis focused on articles published, between 1996 and 2010, in two political science journals that are often ranked at the top—American Political Science Review and Journal of Politics (see Garand and Giles, 2003, on the issue of journal ranking). Also included were two political science journals whose central focus is women and politics, generally defined—Journal of Women Politics and Policy and Women & Politics. My analysis was limited to research-length articles with a U.S.-based emphasis. The data suggest the following trends: Research on intersectionality tended to treat black women in a monolithic manner; only a certain group of black women served as research subjects (elected officials dominated the research); and research tended to focus on structural and political intersectionality while ignoring representational intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991).

Some of the most interesting and important work on freedom in recent years has been produced by feminist theorists (e.g., Friedman 2003; Hirschmann 2003; Nedelsky 2011; Zerilli 2005; and see Anker, forthcoming). Feminist theory has also generated important insights about the character and conditions of human agency, the intersectional nature of human identities, and the dynamics of political action that richly enhance our understanding of freedom (Ackerly and Attanasi 2009; Alcoff 2006; Anzaldua 2007; Bartky 1990; Beltrán 2010; Benhabib 1992; Brown 1995; Butler 2004, 2006; Crenshaw 1989; Hill-Collins 2005; Love 2007; Mohanty 2003; Young 2005). Yet feminist perspectives on freedom—like others in political theory today (e.g., Berlin 1990; Pettit 2000; Villa 2008)—are limited by their tendency to conceive freedom in a monistic way. Whether freedom means the exercise of personal choice (Hirschmann 2003), or inaugural acts of world making (Arendt 1958; Zerilli 2005), or noninterference (Berlin 1990), or nondomination (Pettit 2000), or something else, theorists generally describe freedom as being just one thing. Yet the experiences that we have of freedom come in different forms, and sometimes the different kinds of freedom that we have, or that we seek, conflict with one another. Nor is it obvious that these conflicts could ever be fully reconciled, even under ideal conditions. Our freedom today is complex: We are at once free and unfree, in ways that are multiple and often conflicting.

While Hanna Pitkin's multifaceted conceptualization of political representation is well known and often cited, in practice, researchers still tend to examine each of her four main dimensions independently. The connective tissue and complex configurations of representation deserve more attention, for there is a serious risk of misspecification when one looks at a single, or even a pair of dimensions in isolation from the others (Eulau and Karps 1977; Schwindt-Bayer and Mishler 2005). With regard to minority representation, an integrated perspective brings into clearer focus dimensions of the concept that have been somewhat neglected. In particular, I argue that the symbolic and descriptive dimensions of minority representation are especially important in the Canadian context and should not be discounted as less meaningful than the substantive “acting for” dimension of representation. Following Pitkin, I also emphasize that much depends on the formalistic dimension of representation.

One crucial element of Hanna Pitkin's (1967) definition of political representation has been relatively neglected in the voluminous literature her work has inspired. That element is what I will refer to as potentiality, the subjunctive idea that to be considered represented, citizens must feel that someone would defend their interests if those interests were threatened. Attention to potentiality provides a reason to value descriptive representation. Second, it illuminates the representation provided by nonelected leaders and social groups. Third, it clarifies the reciprocal links between participation and representation: persons who are participatory have better grounds to believe that their interests will be protected, and those who have such a belief participate more. Evidence to support this claimed relationship between participation and representation is presented for the U.S. case.

At the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, I presented the harrowing story of Judge Edward Aaron. In 1957, Aaron was tortured and castrated at the hands of several members of the Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy in an attempt to send a threatening message to black Civil Rights activists. At the conclusion of the panel, a male audience member asked, “Was he [Judge Aaron] raped?” I was stunned by this question; to me, it seemed obvious that Aaron had been sexually violated, at the very least, and my answer relayed my sense of the events as a sexual crime. It was clear, however, that this man, like many others, read the violation of Aaron, and many other black men, as being some other class of crime. In the absence of penetrative sex, he could not frame Aaron's assault as a sexual crime. In part, this is because in the absence of penetration, we do not generally read the male body as vulnerable and open to sexual abuse in the same way as the female body. For obvious reasons, lynching is bound up with sex. The narrative of the “black male rapist” is quite pervasive. Nevertheless, we tend to default to an almost exclusively racial lens when viewing lynching. This essay does not aim to displace this idea but to make a critical intervention in the conversation by suggesting that lynching can be understood as a type of racialized, sexual violence that uniquely harms black men.

In the Concept of Representation, Hanna Pitkin (1967) argues that legislators should be judged by their actions—substantive representation—and not just their closeness in characteristics to their constituents—descriptive representation. Pitkin's theoretical framework is the standard that political representation scholars use when evaluating whether the presence of women or racial and ethnic minorities in legislatures results in greater responsiveness to female or minority interests. Do female legislators better represent the interests of women in U.S. congressional committee hearings on domestic violence than male legislators? Are minority legislators more active in advocating for minority interests than white legislators in hearings relating to racial profiling? Although Pitkin is skeptical that descriptive representatives alone improve legislators' responsiveness to the interests of constituents that they descriptively represent, extensive normative and empirical analyses focusing on race and gender have demonstrated that it is not a question of whether descriptive representation matters, but rather when and how it matters to improving substantive representation (see, for example, Bratton 2005; Canon 1999; Casellas 2011; Gamble 2007; Gay 2001; Grose 2011; Haynie 2001; Lublin 1997; Mansbridge 1999; Tate 2003; Thomas 1994; Whitby 1997).

Throughout the past decade, governments across Latin America have experienced an unprecedented swing to the left. In this essay, I ask: Does the rise of the Left promote women's equality? Or in contrast, could women's continued subordination be an important factor promoting the rise of the Left? Using the case of El Salvador, I demonstrate how the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) deradicalized its public image—away from “guerrilla insurgents” and toward a viable political party—at least in part by converting its 1980s support for reproductive rights into present-day support for one of the most restrictive abortion policies in the world. I conclude that reversing the causal question about gender and left-leaning political parties may not only extend our understanding of the complicated relationship between gender and the Left but also improve our understanding of the factors moving Latin America from right to left, and from “red” to “pink.”

“Intersectional analysis,” or “intersectionality,” is a concept that is widely used in various academic disciplines to explain and articulate the oppressions faced by the “multiply minoritized” (Vidal-Ortiz 2006), those marginalized by their sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, and national identities. We are concerned that “sexuality” as an identity used in intersectional analysis is perhaps overly reductive, sometimes telling nothing more than whether someone is “straight” or “gay,” rather than leaving room to interrogate the complicated, diverse landscape that is at the intersection of gender, sex, and sexuality. In this essay, we apply a queer-theory critique of intersectionality to demonstrate how human-trafficking policy, particularly as it relates to sex trafficking, is productive of what Valentine (2007) calls culturally constructed and deployed identity categories, resulting in inclusion of some and exclusion of others. We aim to show how social science research that relies on normative identity categories can lead to incomplete intersectional analyses.