Abstract
As a political movement inspired by a belief in fundamental equality and committed to eradication of embodied injustices, feminists have illuminated the politics of exclusion—the use of law and policy to grant rights, opportunities, privileges, and immunities to particular elite men while denying them to marginalized others. With the theorization of gender as an analytical category, feminist scholars have investigated how manifold policies have discursively produced hierarchies of citizenship structured by gender, race, and sexuality. This chapter provides an overview of feminist contributions to policy studies, including key critiques of mainstream policy scholarship, an examination of feminist policy interventions and their mixed results ranging from attempts to eradicate sex discrimination in law and policy, the creation of women’s policy agencies, and the shift to gender mainstreaming. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the politics of equality, comparing nondiscrimination and equal opportunity approaches with structural and substantive conceptions of equality.
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Notes
- 1.
Feminism is a rich and complicated tradition. Like other political movements, it is characterized by a great deal of internal debate concerning the nature of women’s oppression and appropriate strategies for political emancipation. Some of these debates are relevant to feminist approaches to policy studies and will be discussed below, while others are not. For an introduction to the diversity of feminist approaches, see Jaggar (1983); Hawkesworth (1990); Jaggar and Rothenberg (1993). For a discussion of core characteristics underlying these various approaches to feminism and feminist theory, see Grant (1993).
- 2.
The literature in this field is voluminous. Citations are illustrative and in no way claim to be exhaustive.
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Hawkesworth, M. (2018). Feminism, Gender Inequality, and Public Policy. In: Boonin, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93907-0_33
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