The Personal is Indeed Political: Sex, Gender and the State

Abstract

The scarcity of reviews of “gender and politics” books in disciplinary journals limits opportunities for “mainstream” political scientists to learn about the field. As chair of the jury to select the 2015 winner of APSA's Victoria Schuck prize for “the best book … on women and politics,” I realized that the field's size and diversity makes it hard to identify central themes, especially since feminist scholars are also active across the discipline's many fields and in the multidisciplinary enterprise of gender studies. In my CPSA presidential address (Vickers, 2015), I argued that although the “gender and politics” field has expanded greatly in its four-decade history, its impact on the discipline generally hasn't been transformative, since gender isn't being used as a key category of analysis in the discipline and the field's key theme that “the personal is political” isn't reflected in the discipline's main approaches, especially its dependence on a liberal conception of the private/public divide. This essay explores how the books reviewed use gender and this key theme in explaining contemporary political issues.