Focusing on the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality, this book examines how state practices and modern science shape societal hierarchies. Using the U.S. as a case study, it analyzes laws and policies related to civil rights, education, housing, and policing, revealing how they create invisible structures that affect the life prospects of individuals based on their racial and ethnic identities. The author sheds light on the political origins of these constructs, challenging the notion of them as natural characteristics.
Embodied Power explores dimensions of politics seldom studied, illuminating state practices that produce hierarchically-organized groups through racialized gendering and tracing how modern science and law produce race, gender, and sexuality as natural characteristics, masking their political genesis. Taking the U.S. as a case study, Hawkesworth demonstrates how diverse laws and policies concerning civil and political rights, education, housing, and welfare, immigration and securitization, policing and criminal justice create well-honed and invisible hierarchies of difference that structure the life prospects of men and women of particular races and ethnicities within and across borders.
This fully updated edition provides a comprehensive overview of two centuries
of transnational feminist efforts to produce a more just global order. Mary E.
Hawkesworth analyzes continuities and changes in the nature and scope of
gendered inequities and power dynamics within national and international
regimes and weighs strategies for social transformation.
Western political theory typically incorporates certain assumptions about sex and gender as natural, unvarying and “pre-political.” This book critically examines these assumptions and shows how recent scholarship undermines the illusion that bodies exist outside politics and beyond the reach of the state. Leading political theorist Mary Hawkesworth’s cutting-edge intersectional account demonstrates how popular conceptions of human nature, public and private, citizenship, liberty, the state, and injustice relegate women, people of color, sexual minorities, and gender-variant people to inferior status despite constitutional guarantees of equality before the law. Hawkesworth argues that traditional political theory has contributed to the perpetuation of pernicious forms of injustice by masking the state’s role in the creation of subordinated and stigmatized subjects. The book draws insights from critical race, feminist, postcolonial, queer, and trans* theory to give a compelling, original, and highly readable introduction to historical and contemporary debates on gender and political theory for students.
Focusing on women's political struggles across various contexts, this book serves as a comprehensive resource for understanding the complexities of gender politics. It explores local, national, regional, transnational, and international dimensions, making it invaluable for students and scholars in women's studies. The text delves into the historical and contemporary challenges women face, offering insights into their activism and contributions to political discourse.
