Describing and assessing feminist inroads into the state

Feminists walk the halls of power. Governance Feminism: An Introduction shows how some feminists and feminist ideas—but by no means all—have entered into state and state-like power in recent years. Being a feminist can qualify you for a job in the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Criminal Court, the local prosecutor’s office, or the child welfare bureaucracy. Feminists have built institutions and participate in governance.

The authors argue that governance feminism is institutionally diverse and globally distributed. It emerges from grassroots activism as well as statutes and treaties, as crime control and as immanent bureaucracy. Conflicts among feminists—global North and South; left, center, and right—emerge as struggles over governance. This volume collects examples from the United States, Israel, India, and from transnational human rights law.

Governance feminism poses new challenges for feminists: How shall we assess our successes and failures? What responsibility do we shoulder for the outcomes of our work? For the compromises and strange bedfellows we took on along the way?  

Can feminism foster a critique of its own successes? This volume offers a pathway to critical engagement with these pressing and significant questions.

Janet Halley is Royal Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. 

Prabha Kotiswaran is reader in law and social justice at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London.

Rachel Rebouché is professor of law at Temple University Beasley School of Law. 

Hila Shamir is associate professor of law at Tel Aviv University Buchman Faculty of Law.

"What happens when feminist critique inverts into governing norms? What kind of feminism becomes law and what becomes of arguments among feminists when it does? How are feminist challenges to male super-ordination transformed and distributed by bureaucratization and NGO-ification? How might we honestly assess feminism that governs? In this deeply intelligent, reflective, and pedagogical work, four feminist legal scholars probe these theoretical and empirical questions. No reader will favor every move, but all will be usefully provoked and instructed."—Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley

"The book delivers a good summary of which feminist theories have prevailed and can be seen as the governing ones. Excellent for collections on feminism and women’s rights."—Choice