School of Social and Political Science

Content

‘You have something to say’. Without these words from pioneering Politics & Gender (P&G) professors, Joni Lovenduski and the late Vicky Randall, I may well have walked away from academia. My part-time PhD took seven, long years. Four years in, I didn’t think I had accomplished anything beyond note-taking. I was on the verge of giving up. Their belief in my research gave me the confidence to later speak with Labour’s 1997 newly elected women MPs, which is where my research on gender and representation started. Joni became my unofficial mentor a few weeks after our first meeting, and quickly introduced me to one of my oldest P&G friends, and now European Research Council Co-PI, Rosie Campbell.

continue reading...

Over a generation, the study of gender and politics has blossomed. There are many more of us in the UK and globally. Our research foci has multiplied and diversified, reflecting this and the greater numbers of women in elected office. We investigate the who, what, where, how, when, and why of political representation. We want to know how to end the poverty of women’s political representation, and which representative processes will deliver good representation for all. In short, as my Belgian co-author and longstanding P&G friend Karen Celis and I put it, how do we redesign and build feminist institutions? Undertaking theoretical and empirical research, many of us also embrace the ‘feminist imperative’ to change as well as study politics. It is why we seek out collaborations with party and parliamentary actors, international organizations, and women’s civil society. In all this, we have disturbed the discipline of political science and been party to the re-gendering of formal politics – in no small part through our network building and burgeoning feminist friendships beyond academia.

Women’s friendships are popularly, and unfairly, depicted as superficial, fraught, and exclusive. In such contexts, feminist friendships must realize high ethical and political ideal. As my New Zealand friend Jennifer Curtin writes, with Heather Devere: normatively, friendship promises equality, justice, and democracy. Caring about and for each other is not just a personal act but a political one. In the House of Commons, women’s friendships can constitute a crucial personal and political resource. Located in shared gender consciousness, it supports women MPs to work in Westminster’s male-dominated spaces and rework the masculinized rules, enabling them to be better, more effective, representatives. That said, their friendship incurs critical comment, if not backlash. In privileging gender over party identity and adversarial politics, their friendship is deemed inappropriate to the way things are and should be done, threatening men’s preferences and power. Seemingly always plotting: sitting together on the Commons’ benches, hanging out over dinner, or exchanging ‘mother MP’ WhatsApp messages. Feminist parliamentary friendships are an important potential dynamic of what P&G scholars call institutional re-gendering. The same is true for P&G scholars in the academy. And it is why in this lecture, I foreground the ways in which academic feminist friendship sustains us in the gendered power struggles we face, and how it acts as a bridge to political actors so that our research makes a difference too.

Image credits

The illustrations in the presentation slides are used with kind permission by the artist, Hazel McCoubrey.