Current feminist debates

Most recent feminist debates about gender and the state attempt to address the issue of complex institutional changes taking place at the sub-national, national and international levels, and to evaluate its meaning for feminist debates about the state.

The first position surfaces frequently in feminist literatures on globalisation (Jacobs 2000; Kelly etal. 2001; Pettman 1996, 1999), multi-level governance (Banaszak, Beckwith and Rucht 2003; Prugl and Meyer 1999), and tran­snational networks (Keck and Sikkink 1998). It also gains support from the analyses of changing world politics. Transnational prostitution, migration, global policing, international human rights and globalized service economy all take place across, beyond and regardless of state borders. Feminists have been critical about globalization and related trends, and have pointed to their gender-specific consequences. Women in their domestic or reproductive roles have had to compensate for state retreat and for state failure to provide social infrastructure and support (Pettman 1999: 212). In relation to gender and the state - feminist discourses about the state, feminist activism, feminist movements - such conclusions give rise to a concern that women’s organ­izing needs to shift direction away from both its focus and its reliance on the state (Briskin 1999: 29).

Some feminists have confronted this dilemma and argued that the state has reshaped, relocated, and rearticulated its formal powers and policy responsibilities throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and women’s movements face a reconfigured state that offers them opportunities for advancing feminist agendas but also threatens feminist successes (Banaszak, Beckwith and Rucht 2003: 3).

Whilst this focus on the transformation of the state is a concern for a number of feminists, there is another significant development in relation to gender and the state. This is the rise in feminist engagements with the state, both scholarly and activist. A number of feminist scholars argue that the state has not lost its centrality in institutionally fixing and resourcing particular discursive categories (O’Connor, Orloff and Shaver 1999: 11). Instead, the state has played an integral role in the restructuring of state social provision throughout the 1990s and the changes cannot be captured without studying the (welfare) state.

Furthermore, recent years have witnessed an increase in state feminism - activities of government structures that are formally charged with furthering women’s status and rights - and in the interest of studying this (Mazur 2001; Outshoorn 2004; Stetson 2001; Stetson and Mazur 1995). Here the interest is in the ways in which women’s movements have challenged states to deal with women’s status and have made states to incorporate women as political actors. Key research questions include how the states respond to femi­nist demands and what roles state institutions play in advancing the goals of women’s movements. (Outshoorn 2004: 1). The state remains a key concept in these debates although some attention is paid to international changes.

Another recent development in feminist political analyses is an interest in gender mainstreaming.

Summing up this trend, Gillian Youngs argues that the state needs to be reclaimed as a political space in feminist theories and practice (2000). Socially and spatially constructed boundaries within and across states, affecting race, class and gender, are depoliticized, if they are not identified as aspects of the dynamics of power relations and struggle (Youngs 2000: 47). Therefore, there is a need to think of the state as a political space within which power struggles continue to take place (Youngs 2000: 46).

The two trends in feminist debates about the state - state transformation and feminists turning to the state - may seem antithetical. However, they share some important features. Scholars focusing upon state transformation (Beckwith, Beckwith and Rucht 2003), state feminism (Mazur 2001; Stetson 2001) and welfare state regimes (O’Connor, Orloff and Shaver 1999) attempt to capture the recent developments through large-scale systematic comparisons of Western states. They seek to be sensitive to national differences and reference the poststructural feminist work on the state as having influ­enced their approaches.

One consequence is a paradoxical situation in which these approaches are actually in tension with poststructural feminism despite their acknowl­edgement of the significance of the poststructural arguments about the differentiated state. The first part of this chapter showed that both Nordic and poststructural feminists have usefully questioned the possibility of universally establishing what the state is. In light of this, I suggest that rather than establishing what the state is, there is a need to search for critical tools to analyse the state. Here one could consider the contributions of the earlier feminist theories of the state in conjunction with the most recent debate about the relevance of the transformed state for feminists.

Nordic and poststructural feminists have established the need to focus both on differences between states and differences within states. Whilst Nordic feminists stressed the need to do comparative research, poststructural femi­nists highlighted the need to study discursive constructions of the state that differ within and between states. Combining discursive and comparative methods highlights the need to focus on context-specific discourses, institutions and agency rather than abstract theorizing. Contextualizing analyses of the state in this way, challenges the hegemony of the Anglo-American language on states including feminist notions and research (Siim 2000: 9).

In some ways the current debate is informed by the ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the state dichotomy, defined in the introduction to this chapter, and therefore one could question the helpfulness of the debate. Nevertheless, the debate is important because it shows that the state cannot be studied in isolation from the diverse institutional changes that are currently taking place and resulting in different multi-level governance frameworks. The consequence for feminist theories about the state is that feminists cannot conceptualize the state in isolation of new institutions and levels of governance. The most recent debates sensitize scholars to the mobility of discourses and institutions between different levels of governance, for example from the EU to the member-states, and the problems related to this.