Gender, Sexuality and the Politics of Positionality in Political Science

he study of gender and sexuality in political science used to be a question of absence, as scholars grappled with Cynthia Enloe's famous question in Bananas, Beaches and Bases (UC Press, 2000, p. 7): "where are the women?"Today, women are present in the discipline as both knowledge producers and subjects of study.But formal inclusion does not guarantee substantive equality, and silences and exclusions remain pronounced.Nor is "woman" a stable political category, as decolonial, antiracist, and queer theorists challenge monolithic, essentialized accounts of gender and sex.Political science now asks more complex questions-about the multiple marginalizations that some women and LGBTQ+ people face across race, class, nationality, and ability and about capitalism and the gendered division of labor.Notably, recent books embrace diverse methods and center the lives and agency of the communities they discuss.Gender and sexuality, as objects of study, often turn our attention to the "underside" of political institutions and capitalist formations; as methods, they reveal how everyday people theorize and navigate the power asymmetries that shape their lives.Where Are the Women in Politics?Household Hierarchies, Patriarchial Power, and Political Participation While gender and sexuality aren't "new topics" within political science, some subfields still privilege white, straight men and deny the full complexity of genders and sexualities.Halvard Leira, reviewing Elise Stephenson's The Face of the Nation, notes that diplomatic studies only recently began to take women's roles seriously.Stephenson's book, based on interviews, historical analysis, and statistics, explores the "path-dependencies and institutional inertia which help perpetuate gender (and other) inequalities" in Australia's diplomatic corps (see review, this issue).For instance, female diplomats accompanied abroad by a wife often had an easier time-revealing the ongoing challenge of balancing unpaid and paid labor, even at the upper echelons of government service.Similarly, Blessing-Miles Tendi's The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe: Gender, Coups, and Diplomats argues that scholars have not paid enough attention to gender and