Women, Feminism, Gender and Law in Political Science: Ruminations of a Feminist Academic

Research on women and the law within the discipline of Political Science has advanced from inserting women into conventional legal paradigms, to attacking law itself as male, to understanding law as gendered. Obstacles within the discipline, however, hinder scholars in incorporating the latest and most sophisticated work in feminist theory. Understanding the conditions of the production of knowledge within our discipline leads to an accounting of the most frequent problems: Appropriating a conservative reading of the work of Carol Gilligan or importing a circumscribed version of the insights of Catharine MacKinnon. After diagnosing some problems with scholarship in our subfield and accounting inpart for why that occurs, I offer some tentative suggestions for improvement.