Lacking tools to measure substantive representation, empirical research to date has determined women’s substantive representation by identifying “women’s interests” a priori, with little attention to differences across race, class, or other inequalities. To address this problem, I develop the concept of intersectional interests and a method for identifying these. Intersectional interests represent multiple perspectives and are forged through a process of political intersectionality that purposefully includes historically marginalized perspectives. These interests can be parsed into three types: expansionist, integrationist, and reconceived. Identification of intersectional interests requires, first, an inductive mapping of the differing women’s perspectives that exist in a specific context and then an examination of the political processes that lead to these new, redefined interests. I demonstrate the concept of intersectional interests and how to identify these in Bolivia, where I focus on the political process of forging reconceived intersectional interests in Bolivia’s political parity and pension reforms.

Scholarship on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) politics argues that political claims, such as access to the military and marriage, are most effective when representatives from the group articulate that the desire for inclusion and participation in those institutions is similar to the desires held by their straight and nontransgender counterparts. This strategy of assimilation has yielded many positive legal changes. And yet the Donald Trump administration marks a period in which these gains have been repeatedly challenged and particular segments of the LGBTQ group are increasingly under attack. This article offers a preliminary analysis of how LGBTQ politics has been impacted by the 2016 election. Using a historical case study of LGBTQ identity construction and agenda development during the second half of the 1990s, I ask: how might the LGBTQ group mine its recent history for clues to rethink its political agenda and political strategies? Having shown that opportunities to advance a different movement—one focused on more radical, broadly inclusive changes—were bypassed during this period, I conclude by putting forward several recommendations for contemporary LGBTQ movement building and resistance strategies.

Very little in my adult life has made me feel my feminism so strongly as the 2016 defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton. And by “defeat,” I mean her utter evisceration by the press, many Bernie Sanders supporters, the Donald Trump campaign, and a shocking number of regular Americans. The disgusting patriarchal bacchanalia that occurred during the campaign has nearly been matched by the attacks on Clinton that have continued since the election. She has been criticized even for writing a memoir of the election, What Happened, a book that has been variously called too long to read (Frank 2017) and an exercise in shifting responsibility (Zurcher 2017).

The purpose of these Critical Perspectives is to consider gender gaps in politics with a specific focus on men, as opposed to the traditional focus on women. The study of gender and politics implies the gendered study of both sexes, yet very little scholarship within this large body of research has men as its primary object of study. We argue that a critical focus on men is necessary to understand the nature of male dominance, the way that male power is wielded and perpetuated, and the negative effects this has for politicians and citizens of both sexes. Reframing the question of gender and representation permits the identification of new research agendas focusing explicitly on men's dominance in politics rather than women's marginalization or underrepresentation. New questions and research areas within the field of gender and politics are invoked, and these essays will demonstrate that the study of men, masculinities, and politics is fertile ground for research, requiring much greater exploration.

Recent years have witnessed a troubling rise in reports of assault, intimidation, and abuse directed at politically active women. The United Nations General Assembly first called for zero tolerance for violence against female candidates and elected officials in Resolution 66/130 in 2011. In 2012, Bolivia became the first country in the world to criminalize political violence and harassment against women, in response to a more than decade-long campaign by locally elected women to document the numerous injuries and abuses they confronted. Resonating across the region, this development led the states-parties to the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women to endorse a Declaration on Political Violence and Harassment against Women in 2015.

Research on gender and politics has made use of Pitkin's (1967) distinction between descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation to conceptualize and understand the different facets of women's underrepresentation and misrepresentation. The corresponding overrepresentation of men has seldom been explicitly recognized in this literature. We explore what the critical study of men and masculinities could contribute to the study of different forms of representation. Researching the descriptive overrepresentation of men implies recognizing male dominance and turning our attention from the factors that constrain women from entering politics to the factors that enable and reproduce men's presence. Researching the substantive representation of men also implies investigating how men represent men and identifying whether hegemonic masculinities privilege the representation of some men while neglecting others. Finally, a study of the symbolic representation of men implies identifying and describing the masculine signals and symbols that permeate political life but remain largely invisible because they constitute the political norm. Naming them as “masculine” will facilitate a gendered analysis of political institutions, practices, and discourses that are seldom questioned. We also consider the symbolic representation of men who do not conform to hegemonic masculine ideals and are not represented descriptively.

After the publication of What Happened, much attention was directed toward analyzing and commenting on a section of Hillary Rodham Clinton's book that detailed her thinking in a split-second situation during one of the presidential debates with Donald Trump. Clinton explains that during the second debate, which occurred just days after the release of the famous Access Hollywood tape in which Trump “bragged about groping women” (Clinton 2017, 136), Trump was more or less following her around the small stage, “staring at [her], making faces” (136). She notes that it was “incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck” (136). But she also considers her response to Trump's physically threatening demeanor during the debate and whether she responded appropriately or “correctly.” Clinton kept her cool—she kept going in the face of what she describes as a physically menacing situation. She refused to be “rattled” by Trump's proximate presence or by the individuals he invited to sit in the audience to intimidate her.

Territorial debates have recently shaken the political systems in Scotland and Catalonia, leading to referenda on independence. This article engages with questions concerning whether this extraordinary process has affected the women's movement and why. Specifically, feminist scholars have often expressed concern regarding how strong territorial identities and nationalist projects might prove detrimental to the movement's unity and success. Here, I look for indications of engagement and revival within the frames of the Scottish and Catalan referendum campaigns. A comparative approach revealed the mobilizing potential of these contexts when certain conditions were present. While the women's movement in Scotland has thrived in the last couple of years, territorial debates in Catalonia have not provided fertile ground for feminist campaigning and have shown divisive potential. The specific dynamics of the women's movement in each setting and the presence of political and discursive opportunity structures account for the different outcomes.

The European Parliament (EP) is credited as an important actor in improving the rights of women in Ireland. Lacking a power base in national political parties, Irish feminists and European Union (EU) officials, including members of the EP (MEPs), have worked to secure progress on gender equality. This research explores whether, in the contemporary context, Irish female MEPs remain critical actors for women's interests at the EU level. Findings show that although Irish female MEPs have a limited record of involvement with the EP's main site for gender equality, the Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality, they do act in a variety of ways on women's interests. These include mobilization on gendered occupational roles and traditionally gendered areas such as care work, child poverty, and issues constructed as affecting women outside the EU. Irish female MEPs also facilitate forms of supranational lobbying in their support of EU-level advocacy for domestic gendered civil society and campaign groups. However, ideology and party political discipline, the pull toward local and national interests, and an absence of strong feminist agency work to diminish opportunities for female MEPs to act as critical actors and deliver critical acts on women's interests.

While the same formal candidate selection rules are generally in place throughout a state, there is often intracountry variation in male descriptive overrepresentation. To explain this variation, scholars cannot focus exclusively on women (e.g., how do women respond to formal institutional opportunities?) or femininity (e.g., how do norms governing appropriate female behavior affect women's odds of being selected as a candidate?). Rather, scholars must attend to the ways that informal norms regarding masculinity operate across space and time within a country. Drawing on the insights of feminist institutionalism, this essay examines two intracountry sources of variation in candidate selection: the spatial urban-rural divide and temporal differences between first-time recruitment and renomination. While the formal candidate selection rules are uniform, informal institutions vary depending on where and when we look, leading to different levels of male overrepresentation.

On September 11, 2016, less than two months before Election Day, Hillary Clinton attended the 9/11 memorial service in New York City. Reportedly, Clinton left the event early, and as she was getting into her SUV, she fainted. A bystander caught on camera a wobbly Clinton needing assistance getting into her vehicle, which he posted to Twitter, where it immediately circulated (Kafka 2016). News media outlets soon picked it up and were quick to air the footage. Initially, the Clinton campaign explained that Clinton had been “overheated.” Later that afternoon, however, the campaign announced that two days prior, Clinton had been diagnosed with walking pneumonia, and despite being advised to rest, she had attended the memorial event.

Latin America has been at the vanguard in implementing diverse strategies to combat violence against women in politics (VAWIP). In 2012, Bolivia became the first country to criminalize “political violence and harassment against women” with Law 243. Soon, Ecuador, Peru, Costa Rica, and Mexico followed with similar proposals (Krook and Restrepo Sanín 2016). Despite high levels of criminal impunity (Piscopo 2016), legislative measures have been the preferred strategy to combat VAWIP within the region. The Inter-American Commission on Women (CIM) recently published a model law, drawing on experiences in Bolivia, to serve as inspiration for other legislative measures in the region. What can these legislative definitions tell us about the phenomenon of VAWIP, its limits, and its challenges?

Men are overrepresented in most legislatures of the world. However, in parliaments in which women reach a “critical mass” or even approach parity with men in terms of numbers, they still must contend with and adapt to the symbolic representation of men. Using the cases of the Australian and Polish parliaments, we point to the need to deconstruct the parliamentary standard by shifting the theoretical and empirical focus from women's disadvantage in politics to problematizing men's advantage and power (Eveline 1994, 1998; Murray 2014). Rather than placing the problem and solution with women, we address the practices that maintain men's unearned power, or privilege. Privilege is the “systematically conferred advantages” that individuals enjoy by virtue of their membership of a dominant social group (Bailey 1998, 109). Institutions in the form of taken-for-granted practices and gendered discourses embed a “masculine blueprint” in political institutions that legitimizes men's place as parliamentarians and privileges men, enhancing their power and advantage in the election process. By focusing on men's dominance, it becomes evident that sustaining gender inequality through practices and discourse advantages men as a group.

Violence against women is considered a systemic social practice. Aware of the presence of systemic violence “at the horizon of social imagination,” members of some groups, women in this case, learn that they might suffer it any time “simply because they are members of that group” (Young 1990, 62). This understanding encompasses physical attacks as well as humiliation, harassment, intimidation, and stigmatization. Systemic violence targets women because they are women, although they are differently affected and have gendered experiences that are also shaped by race, class, sexuality, generation, and nationality (Collins 2015).

Discussing employment problems in universities enacts an information asymmetry that has recently highlighted sexual harassment as a legal wrong while dampening other potential descriptions of reasons for disparities. Defining sexual harassment as unwanted sexual attention both understates and overstates problems at work, not least because it is not an issue for all women. This focus contrasts with books that popularized other kinds of barriers at work for women just a few years earlier. The stories about sexual harassment contrast with systematic evidence concerning reasons for disadvantage at work, which is less easy to tell as a story with characters, events, and a time line. In this instance, law, along with university leaders’ willingness to publicly act on claims, has proven productive of complaints that women have been reluctant to make since the Office of Civil Rights issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” in 2011 addressing sexual assault in higher education. This article draws on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s reports of discrimination. It concludes by arguing for proliferating stories, motivated by lessons from systematic research, even if law is not a remedy.

“Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!” This battle cry erupted at one Donald Trump rally after another throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump even threatened to jail Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) if he won the election. “Crooked Hillary” emerged as Trump's disparaging nickname for his Democratic opponent. Taking a further moralistic step, Trump equated HRC with pure evil, calling her the “devil” at an August 2016 campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

Progress toward gender equality in politics is striking. With the help of electoral gender quotas in more than 130 countries, women's national legislative representation more than doubled in the last 20 years. Other historically marginalized groups—racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, immigrants, and indigenous peoples—are also increasingly making their way into our parliaments. Political institutions are, then, more inclusive today than they have ever been. Yet equal representation has not been fully realized: some marginalized groups have seen a decline, and men from dominant social and economic groups—hereafter “elite men”—remain numerically dominant. Globally, there are no known cases in which elite men do not hold a disproportionately high share of positions in national elective office (Hughes 2015).

Hillary Clinton's memoir of the 2016 election and her life in politics, What Happened, is an affective rollercoaster. Wrath, frustration, regret, and sorrow, among other intensified emotions, saturate the book's pages. This range of affect is surprising for a political autobiography. Books in this genre typically present their subject-selves as stalwart and emotionally controlled actors whose range of feeling is limited to the proper amount of righteous irritation or vague empathy necessary to justify a policy proposal. None has the rawness of Clinton's book, a rawness that is, I would argue, made possible by her gender. This is one of the few vectors of political expression that is expanded, not contracted, for Clinton in her role as the first woman to become a major-party presidential candidate.

The field of violence against women in politics (VAWIP) is so new, it seems unfair to discuss its “gaps”; rather, the study of VAWIP is defined by its uncharted territory. The bulk of existing literature, compiled by scholars as well as practitioners, emphasizes theoretical conceptualization, empirical forms of violence, and the tracking of incidents across regions (Krook 2017; Krook and Restrepo Sanín 2016). Researchers have stressed the gendered motivations and implications of VAWIP. In short, women are targets of violence because they are women and because they are in politics.