Introduction

Sonia Palmieri

When asked, I have readily described myself as a classically trained feminist political scientist. After all, I began to study gender and politics in the early 1990s in what was then called a ‘department of government’. I learned about the entrenched nature of political party discipline, the efficacy of electoral gender quotas and the centrality of a critical mass to women’s descriptive and substantive representation. These remain foundational concepts in the gender and politics literature, allowing continued intellectual focus on the experiences and challenges faced by women in political institutions.

But these are not universal experiences or challenges. Indeed, years of travelling to parliaments around the world have crystallised in my mind the danger of universalising minority-world or Euro-American experience. Political parties operate in vastly different ways in each context; gender quotas work when local rules—written and unwritten—are heeded in their design and implementation; and the specific institutional norms in which politicians, of any gender, work weigh heavily on their ability to perform substantive representation.

As the chapters in this section make clear, a majority-world approach and a multidisciplinary lens expand our appreciation of diverse critical actors in advancing gender equality in the political sphere and the contexts in which they live and work. Each in their own way—Jaemin Shim, Anna Kwai and Elise Stephenson—exposes the limits of dominant research approaches to our collective body of knowledge about gender and politics. These chapters methodically outline the injustice of theoretical and empirical exclusion in this majority-world–focused literature and present cogent examples of what a more inclusive approach would look like.

In perhaps the most empirical of all our chapters, Jaemin Shim presents compelling evidence of the inequality of authorship and citation practice in the gender, politics and media literature. Having purposively curated a robust database of articles and book chapters from the discipline’s two most used scientific search engines, Shim finds the literature substantially overrepresents authors from the ‘minority’ world, compared with what he calls their ‘demographic weight’. Studies covering minority-world countries—in particular, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia—tend to be cited more and published in journals with higher impact scores. More disconcertingly, however, theorisation of gender, politics and media continues to rely on the experience of women (and men) in the minority world, with more than 90 per cent of the theory used in this literature drawn from studies in these countries and less than 3 per cent derived from authors based in the majority world.

With strong intrinsic motivation to question the gender and development discourses often imposed in her country of Solomon Islands (and beyond), Anna Kwai poetically describes the damaging consequences of colonial misinterpretations of culture. Drawing on the inspirational work of Edward Said, Sally Engle Merry and Anne Dickson-Waiko, Kwai identifies the complex relationship between colonialism and patriarchal cultures that global gender and development practitioners have underappreciated in their quest for gender equality. Kwai’s is an eloquently written cautionary tale of the ‘gender equality saviour’ who fails to grasp the intricate web of gender relations and dynamics in Pacific settings.

With their respective interdisciplinary lenses, both these chapters invite us to reconsider foundational concepts and theories used in mainstream gender and politics narratives. Can we continue to speak of a ‘gender gap’ in the reporting of news media if the examples used to develop this concept rely on the experience of women in a handful of English-speaking countries? Can we advocate for gender equality in the communities of Pacific nations when the term continues to be contested?

Similarly, can we continue to understand political participation when significant populations feel they have been marginalised from mainstream institutions? In the final chapter of the section, Elise Stephenson delves deeply into questions of intersectionality to consider alternative ways in which diverse young people engage in politics and understand their pathways to politics. Revisiting the concept of ‘proxies’—or alternative understandings of politics as formal representation—Stephenson suggests that marginalised actors construct their participation in creative industries, entrepreneurship and non-profit activism as meaningful forms of political participation. Stephenson explores these alternative pathways to politics for actors who identify across several axes of diversity: youth, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability. This is a strong call for diversity of pathways that legitimise a wider range of actions that can have significant impact on our polity. If our democracies are to truly listen to all, the very mechanisms by which diverse voices are heard must themselves be diverse and accessible for all.

These chapters show us the value in exposing the limits of our traditional framings and narratives on gender and politics. With lived experience of diversity, Shim, Kwai and Stephenson compel us to see the world through their lenses to find innovative, alternative answers.