ABSTRACT
This collection begins from the premise that while there is more and more literature on gender and politics, as yet there is little which usefully links the analysis of gender, politics and the state. As editors we believe that this is a lack which should be addressed. There is a pressing need to do a number of things. First, to use the term politics as defined more widely to include activities often undertaken by women which fall outside the boundaries of conventional politics and therefore not usually deemed to be ‘political’. Second, to examine the interrelationship between ‘politics’ and the construction of gender relations and gendered identities. And third, to analyse satisfactorily in gendered terms both political activity and processes together with the institutions/structures which constrain them – the main structure in this case being the state. As Terrell Carver makes clear in his contribution to this volume, gender is often seen very unhelpfully as ‘loosely synonymous with “sex” and lazily synonymous with “women”’. However, following the arguments of Joan Scott (1986) we see gender not only as a ‘constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived difference between the sexes’, but also as ‘a primary way of signifying relationships of power’. Within Scott’s formulation, while it has often been overlooked, the contextually specific ways in which politics constructs gender and gender constructs politics become an important subject of inquiry.
