In this essay, I consider whether or not the contestatory potential of rights politics turns on replacing identity claims with universalist ones, and why one might be inclined to urge such a move from “the ontological” to “the political.” While this argument has much to commend it, as it sheds light on the constitutive dimensions of identity-based rights and their depoliticizing tendencies, I remain unconvinced that a better form of rights necessarily requires detachment from identity per se. Engaging the work of Wendy Brown, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, and Judith Butler, I argue that an understanding of rights as political claims should include an appreciation of the importance of identity and injury, for rights can function as a discourse through which identity is contested and reconfigured rather than simply reified.This article has gone through many revisions and left me with a debt to generous readers too numerous to list here. But for their direct impact on this version and ongoing enthusiasm for the project, I must thank wholeheartedly Paul Apostolidis, Sam Chambers, Michaele Ferguson, Tim Kaufman-Osborn, Jill Locke, Patchen Markell, Laurie Naranch, and the anonymous reviewers at Politics & Gender.

Scholars have argued that the feminization of industrial work in developing countries since World War II is primarily a result of women being the cheapest source of labor in the global economy. I argue that scholarship on feminization underestimates the power of gender in labor markets by framing it primarily as an issue of lower wages. This article shows how gendered discourses of work—ideas and practices about men and women providing distinct forms of labor—play a critical role in the feminization process. While agreeing with feminization theorists that competitiveness in export sectors forces employers to reduce production costs, I show that firms and sectors facing similar competitive constraints deploy varied gender divisions of labor in production. Gendered discourses of work not only illuminate processes of job allocation and reallocation at the firm level but also provide a means of connecting shop-floor gender divisions of labor with broader gendered patterns of industrialization and help to explain puzzling empirical patterns. They are as important as, and in some cases more important than, wages. By tracing the processes through which work is gendered and regendered, the analysis opens the black box of feminization and shows how changes in industrialization policy set in motion gendered transformations that ultimately resulted in the feminization of manufacturing work in Indonesia.I would like to thank the editors of Politics & Gender and the anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this article.

The emergence of the feminist network Magín in Cuba in the mid-1990s challenged the monopoly of the official women's organization over issues related to women. Magín came into being as a result of encounters with feminists in international meetings, and it grew and developed through transnational support. Yet the organization did not extend beyond a small group of professional women and eventually the state closed it down. This article probes the question of why autonomous feminist organizing did not succeed in Cuba, particularly given a window of opportunity presented by the collapse of the Soviet Union. I suggest that the nature of transnational networks, combined with the political hegemony of the Cuban government, limited the scope of Magín as an independent women's organization. Although transnational advocacy networks helped Cuban feminists to create new spaces for dialogue, they also encouraged tendencies of specialization and professionalization that led the women to forgo the possibility of building a broad-based autonomous movement. An analysis of feminist networks in Cuba can contribute to our knowledge of the pitfalls and promises of transnationalism, particularly in nonliberal democratic contexts.This research was made possible by support from the Social Sciences Research Council, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University. I am grateful to the women of Magín who gave generously of their time to share their experiences and ideas. In particular, I would like to thank Norma Guillard for providing materials and carrying out investigations for me long distance. Thanks to Mervyn Bain, Matt Cleary, Elisabeth Friedman, Kathryn Hochstetler, Catherine Murphy, Hairong Yan, and anonymous reviewers and editors of Politics & Gender for crucial feedback and/or enlightening conversations. An earlier version of this article was presented at the American Political Science Association meetings in Chicago, September 2004.

Although gender plays an enormous role in structuring personal relationships, society, politics, and culture, we know relatively little about when people's gender ideologies will influence their opinions on issues that do not trade directly on matters of gender. This article presents a theory of “group implication,” which defines the conditions under which elite political discourse can lead citizens to perceive and evaluate issues in terms of their gender schemas—their cognitive representations of gender beliefs. I apply this framework to an analysis of the 1993–94 U.S. health care reform effort, and demonstrate how elite frames structured the issue in a way consistent with the gender schema. This structuring was subtle and symbolic, and served to associate people's gender ideology with their thinking about health care reform. The article concludes with consideration of the implication of these findings for our understanding of the political impact of gendered rhetoric, and for our conceptual understanding of the relationship between gender and public opinion.

In their essay “Defending Modernity” (Politics & Gender 1 (March), 2005), Julia Adams and Ann Shola Orloff took gender and politics scholars to task for the ways in which they (we) engage gender and “high politics.” They call for a “more serious analytical engagement between gendered and mainstream students of politics,” with particular attention to “the relationship between gendered representations of war and actual military campaigns” (p. 179). Ultimately, they argue, scholars must consider that logics of masculine protection and domination “arise out of properly political sources that need to be better understood and incorporated into gender studies” (p. 179).

Julia Adams and Ann Shola Orloff's insightful critical perspective in the first issue of this journal makes several important points about the relationship between modernization and gender equality. We agree with Adams and Orloff that—despite strong claims to the contrary (e.g., Young 2003)—modernization tends to be conducive to gender equality. And we also agree that the classic versions of modernization theory were inadequate. The basic insight that economic and technological development tends to bring coherent patterns of social and political change holds up well in the light of a large body of recent evidence; but previous models of modernization were mechanical and linear, and they omitted cultural factors that cannot be ignored. We join forces with Adams and Orloff in striving to develop a more adequate concept of modernization, recognizing that understanding ongoing processes of socioeconomic change is a long-term task that will need input from many perspectives.

As Julia Adams and Ann Shola Orloff rightly point out, one of the purposes of my essay “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State” (2003) is to complicate our understanding of what it means to view events, institutions, and ideas under a gender lens. Our society exhibits multiple logics of gender, that is, in varying ways that “masculinity” and “femininity,” as well as less heterosexual gender ideas, are defined and interpreted. In that essay, I suggest that a traditional meaning of masculinity less noticed recently by feminists, that of the husband/father as loving protector, has been mobilized by the Bush administration to justify both war abroad and the domestic contraction of civil liberties. Part of the lesson I wish to draw for feminist theory is that these varying gender logics may have loose or contradictory relationships to the comportments of actual men and women, especially today. Some women may stand in “masculine” positions, as soldiers or firefighters, and many men may stand in “feminine” positions, as fearful and protected citizens. Gender is better thought of as a set of ideational and social structural relationships that people move through, rather than attributes they have attached to their persons.

With respect to modernity and women's place in it, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris and Iris Marion Young are sharply at odds. Young sees a rending and tearing of the social fabric, and no determinate relationship between gender equality and modernity, while Inglehart and Norris think modernization and women's rights are seamlessly joined at the hip. We think that neither of these analytical stances will do. Our assessment extends from a concept of modernity that embraces a relational complex of features and tendencies—one that is analytical, not normative, and that must always be historically situated. Modernity is a vulnerable achievement rather than the secure culmination of automatic social processes. When called to its defense, we have argued, feminists and small-d democrats may sometimes have to endorse means and modes of coercion controlled by imperfectly democratic states.For their criticisms and suggestions, we thank Rachel Epstein, Bonnie Honig, David Weakliem, and Linda Zerilli. They bear no responsibility for the substance of our rejoinder, even if their arguments with us did help us think it through.

Gender and Civil Society: Transcending Boundaries. Edited by Jude Howell and Diane Mulligan. London and New York: Routledge. 2005. 257 pp. $125.00.

This book provides a welcome addition to the ever-growing comparative scholarship on gender politics and the state. Editors Jude Howell and Diane Mulligan bring together a group of experts with the ideal blend of country expertise and understanding about comparative analysis and theoretical issues to systematically map out and operationalize the concept of “civil society” in a cross-national study of the interface between women's organizations and the state. Howell raises the central analytical problem of the book in the introduction. While the concept of civil society has great promise for understanding how, why, and to what extent women organize and seek to influence the state, comparative gender and politics analysts have shied away from using the term; comparativists and political theorists have basically ignored the quite obviously gendered aspects of civil society. As this edited volume convincingly asserts, intersecting the study of civil society with comparative gender research moves the two areas much further along by compelling “researchers to gauge their understanding of empirical civil societies, to question the assumptions about the relationship between democratization, civil society and gender equality and to query the idea of civil society and feminism as universally valid concepts” (p. 246).

Sex and Consequences: Abortion, Public Policy and the Economics of Fertility. By Phillip B Levine. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2004. 240 pp. $35.00.

From the title alone it appears that either the author and his editor know little about sex and gender research or they think that any book with “sex” in the title will sell, or both. Thus, it is fortunate that the subtitle does accurately describe the contents of the book: an economic analysis of the consequences of changes in abortion law and policy on fertility behavior.

Abortion Politics in North America. By Melissa Haussman. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. 2005. 209 pp. $49.95.

Abortion politics is a bellwether of women's rights in any country. Melissa Haussman analyzes abortion politics in Canada, Mexico, and the United States using social movement and political mobilization theories to access these three North American states. She finds that rhetoric and reality for girls and women is very different in all three states. In Canada, the national health service covers abortion procedures. However, it is more complicated than that because of funding and access issues. In addition, Canada requires that only medical physicians have the ability to provide abortions, therefore excluding nurse practitioners and other qualified health care workers from providing these services. Mexico has officially criminalized and forbidden all abortions (except for rape survivors, who must petition their local state's attorney general for permission to abort). However, a thriving illegal abortion business exists in Mexico with semiacknowledgment from the state. The official ban on legal abortion is maintained despite the fact that illegal abortions are the third-largest cause of pregnant women's deaths in Mexico. In the United States, abortion is legal but highly restricted. Poor women have limited access to funds for legal abortions in a few states, while many states provide no public funding for abortions. Haussman summarizes these realities on the ground as “a gap formed between legal declarations of rights and the extent of health services provisions” (p. 1).

Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, and Globalization. By Drucilla K. Barker and Susan F. Feiner. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2004. 193 pp. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Work for women outside of the home was once thought to be the basis of women's equality and liberation. And it still may be. But the quality of that work is certainly of great importance, too. How have women fared with respect to the quality of the work that they have done in the past century? What consequences, if any, follow from globalization for the lives of female workers around the world? Is a distinctly feminist model of economics necessary for understanding women's lives or will classical economic models suffice? Drucilla Barker and Susan Feiner pursue all three of these questions very seriously and with considerable success in Liberating Economics.

List of contributors.