I seek to engage the authors in a deeper interrogation of their claims, particularly that societies can mitigate the evolutionary legacy of patriarchy by limiting the influence of religious/cultural enclaves and instead promoting universalism, as exemplified in CEDAW and international law. I challenge and politicize this alleged “choice” between universalism and cultural/religious enclaves/relativism, as it ultimately rests on a series of too-easy dichotomies (secular/religious, western/nonwestern) that may inadvertently stymie collaborative attempts between “western” and “non-western” feminists to challenge inequitable family law and gender violence. Hudson, Bowen, and Nielsen (2011) do offer critiques of western states. They are careful to point out nuances, subtleties, and complexities with their concept of religious/cultural enclaves. They also convincingly broaden the concept of gender equality beyond formal political rights to the kind of social, legal, and economic justice encapsulated in equitable family law and freedom from violence. And, they provoke an examination of why and how gender equality and gender violence are linked. But I suggest that their empirical research might have better traction by taking seriously two problematic implications of championing the “universal” as necessarily progressive: the failure to recognize patriarchy as part of universalism; and the inattention to why and how religious/cultural enclaves are patriarchal.

Despite the large amount of attention by politics and gender scholars to analyzing gender parity in political representation and the impact of the increasing participation of women in electoral politics, little attention has been paid to women's participation in the governance of the economic sphere nationally or globally. Yet men overwhelmingly dominate economic decision-making positions, such as those on corporate boards, as business executives, government financial regulators, trade negotiators, and central bankers around the world.

For the last twenty years, my research has focused on the ways that legal, medical, and community organizations respond to sexual violence in the United States. This research has been informed and, I believe, enriched by my work in local organizations that provide supportive services to survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence and to those seeking access to abortion. When I arrived at Rutgers for graduate school, I was surprised and frustrated at how few of the stories I heard as a service provider had made their way into the academic discussions about feminism, feminist movements, and feminist organizations that I encountered in the political science literature.

Transforming conceptual insights about gender into political practice is a critical element of feminist scholarship in the field of political science. This transformational project often entails engagement with activism and advocacy. Examining particular activist modes of translation has been the focus of my own scholarship beginning with my work in the Women and Politics program and at the Center for American Women and Politics while in graduate school at Rutgers. Feminist theorizing, Grosz explains (2010, 96), “enable[s] us to understand the logic at work in culture, social relations, or individual psychology, its points of vulnerability and its capacity for change.” Moreover, feminist theorizing is self-consciously normative; it is about exposing, explaining, and elaborating that which makes possible systems of injustice, with the goal of bringing forth a more gender-just reality.