Why have there been so many obituaries for the women's movement, written in so many different countries, despite so many continuing manifestations of life? We argue here that the problem is not simply the short attention span of the media and the constant quest for newness but also the terms in which social movements have been understood. This is partly a methodological question concerning how social movements are distinguished from other political actors, the repertoires that are expected of them, and the associated measurement of social movement activity through protest event databases. It is also a question of how “institutionalization” is understood. It has often been assumed that social movement activism is by definition extrainstitutional or that institutionalization is something that comes after, replaces, or usurps the role of social movements.

So long as the state defines, confers, and uses marital status as a vehicle for protecting and supporting associations of intimate caregivers, also known as families, it must offer the status to same-sex intimate caregiving couples. A commitment to equal treatment before the law demands it. Period.

“The word I would use to describe my position on the bench is lonely.” So said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2007, when asked to comment on her position on the U.S. Supreme Court after the resignation of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. After a year as the Court's only woman, Ginsburg had begun to feel the solitude that comes from judging alone, being the Court's only descriptive and often symbolic representative of women's interests. Ginsburg's position was not, sadly, as rare as we might hope in industrialized democracies. Although some countries, such as Canada, have had near majorities of women on their respective high courts, other countries, such as the United Kingdom, continue to have only one woman on their national tribunals.

That issues related to migration and global householding are finally being taken seriously by mainstream development institutions is clear from the focus of the United Nation's 2009 Human Development Report. Subtitled Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development, it is the first major intergovernmental organization publication to view transnational mobility as integral to human development. The report makes a strong case for recognizing that the impact of migration in relation to development aims is significant for both sending and receiving countries. As the report states repeatedly, the old nation-centered growth and antipoverty frameworks and policies no longer fit when migrants work in one country yet send remittances that reduce poverty and promote human development in another country. Similarly, global householding—the reconfiguration of household and family arrangements as people move across national boundaries—necessitates new frameworks for understanding human livelihood strategies at the micro level. In addition to making the case for taking transnational mobility seriously in development policy, the report offers a set of recommendations that are centered on migration management, regularization, and liberalization policies, such as bilateral temporary workers' agreements that allow nations to enhance growth and competitiveness while simultaneously securing their borders.

They do look awfully romantic, those chocolate brides in Victorian gowns and matching pink bouquets. But just as the romance of the wedding often belies the more mundane realities of marriage, the romance of the movement that has come to call itself “marriage equality” may blind us to how difficult and long the struggle for real political equality will be. After all, traditional gender roles have not gone the way of the dinosaur. Why should we expect this to be true of hierarchies based on sexual orientation, particularly if the vehicle for inclusion is the institution of marriage?

Sally Kenney's essay reminds us of the range and the limitations of our scholarship on gender and judging. At one point in her discussion, after reviewing the views of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O'Connor discounting the role of gender in their own decision making, Kenney says this:

Global householding encompasses a variety of (re)configurations of family and household arrangements due to people on the move across national boundaries (Douglass 2006). My essay focuses on global householding associated with educational migration, and in particular, the flow of students and scholars from Asia to the United States.

The social movements that first flourished in the 1960s and 1970s were initially characterized by protest activity against the state and against dominant norms, and by their only loosely organized structures. Over time, however, these social movements, including feminism, have become partially institutionalized in government and nongovernment bodies, and in policies, practices, and social norms.

Protest event analysis (PEA) and the related concept of repertoire of contention are widely used in the study of social movements. Are they appropriate for the study of feminist protest? I argue that conventional forms of protest event analysis may have significant limitations when applied to feminist protest. Unobtrusive or individualized forms of resistance and protest associated with feminism are difficult to measure through typical protest event data. Moreover, the concept of repertoires of contention retains within it a number of unwarranted gendered assumptions. Some flow from being too reliant upon protest event data. I suggest that repertoires may be gendered, that this is unacknowledged by those who use the concept, and that this has implications for its normative dimensions.

In emails from the besieged town of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip during Israel's December 2008/January 2009 war on Gaza, Majeda Al Saqqa (2009a), a long-time community and women's activist, describes to friends the shrinkage of her life into the domestic space. She explains the endless strategizing to protect children physically and psychologically and her fears not only for family but for friends all over Gaza, sometimes reachable by mobile phone, sometimes, most terribly, not. In her war diary, there is no mention of Palestinian leaders or governments, neither the Hamas-led de facto government in Gaza nor the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. She offers only bitter asides about the international community. Apart from family, neighbors, and friends, the only agents that offer a modicum of sanity and security are local: the Palestinian health workers risking their lives for the wounded and local radio broadcasters who stay on the air with news, warnings, and encouragement.

Although most states select their judges via merit selection or an appointive process, a number of states choose their trial and appellate judges on the basis of contested elections. Currently, approximately one-half of all state judges reach their state court benches by winning partisan or nonpartisan races. In the 21 states that elect their judges, women with judicial aspirations must be as competitive as men in these elections. Specifically, they must finance increasingly expensive judicial campaigns, garner widespread support from influential political elites, and, most importantly, convince voters that they are as capable as men. Do aspiring women judges experience similar barriers or challenges as women running for legislative or executive office?

In America, the arguments for same-sex marriage are articulated primarily in the language of liberalism: justice, rights, and equality. Activists in the public square appeal to rational and intuitive, or at least culturally relevant, notions of justice and fairness. In countering such a defense of same-sex marriage, feminists may feel compelled to rearticulate fundamental concerns about how gender normativity of marriage oppresses women. Marriage, feminists are certain, has never been a good thing, economically or politically, for women.

Social movements seek social and political change in very specific political, economic, and cultural contexts. Their very imperative for structural change means that they are nonbureaucratic, noninstitutional, fluid collectives that have no single head office and few formal records of their existence. This poses a substantial problem for researchers—how do we locate, measure, and record the trajectories of these phenomena?

Feminist critics of the institution of marriage point to its tendency to reproduce and solidify a gendered division of labor, norms of dependency and protection, and mandated monogamy. While I support the feminist call for a decoupling of state benefits, such as rights to health care and legal proxy, from the institution of marriage in light of discrimination against same-sex couples who are denied the right to marry, in this essay I draw attention to a separate but related issue. I focus here on what I consider one of the most troubling aspects of marriage for feminists, one highlighted by Simone de Beauvoir in her classic and still timely critique of marriage in The Second Sex (1952): the fact that marriage automatically confers bourgeois respectability on its participants. Even as we oppose antigay marriage legislation and recognize that marriage can protect vulnerable parties by guaranteeing health care, equity upon divorce, tax benefits, and so forth, feminists must continue to refuse the bourgeois respectability that is so deeply linked with the institution of marriage. Having the state accord legitimacy to some kinds of intimate relationships and consensual sex, but not others, goes against basic ideas of feminist freedom articulated most convincingly, I argue, by Beauvoir. While arguing this position, however, I will also ask whether only the relatively privileged are able to refuse the bourgeois respectability that marriage promises.

The appointment of Sonia Sotomayor and the nomination of Elena Kagan to the United States Supreme Court provides a timely opportunity for scholars, policymakers, and members of the legal community to consider why there are so few women on the world's highest courts. Although singular moments draw our attention to the importance of women on high courts, sadly, this attention is rarely sustained over long periods. While much was made of Ronald Reagan's historic nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor to serve as the first female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, more than a decade and four nomination opportunities passed by before Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed. On this point, Paula Monopoli aptly observes: “[T]he assumption that progress would steadily continue until gender parity was achieved has proven to be wrong” (2007, 43). Unfortunately, this same observation could be said of virtually all other high courts across the globe.

Imagine this: a court presided over by a majority of women judges—many of whom are from racially marginalized backgrounds—and which has a “constitution” that has gender justice at its core. Incredibly, given what we know about gender and judging cross-nationally, this is not some utopian vision but the current reality at the International Criminal Court (ICC). As of May 2010, the 18 member ICC bench consisted of 11 women judges, most of whom were from outside the West and many of whom have expertise in gender-based violence. This development raises a range of important questions, two of which I want to speculate on in the following discussion: How is it that the sex profile of the ICC bench differs so dramatically from domestic-level courts? What difference might this profile make to the transformation of international law in terms of expanding gender justice principles?