Introduction: Feminist State Theory

Abstract

his is an interesting historical moment to reflect on feminist state theory. Both the response to the global financial meltdown and the widely celebrated U.S. presidential election signal a faith in the role and promise of state- based politics. Yet it is also true that currents of recent scholarship in a variety of settings have decentered the state. Political theorists of violence, law, and biopolitics have expanded the concept of sovereignty to address distinctly non- state- based contexts, while transnational feminist studies of citizenship have critically dismantled the logic of state sovereignty. The field of development studies has elabo rated the need to broaden notions of security beyond military understandings to include the fulfillment of basic needs, and feminist analyses of violence against women have creatively recast our understanding of security. Feminist scholars have also scrutinized the internally contradictory and disciplinary apparatuses of welfare policies. Across various regions, feminists are contesting both the paring down of the state’s welfare responsibilities and the intensification of security functions in post- 9 /11 geopolitical alliances. When taken together, this historical conjuncture and these various critiques of sovereignty, security, and welfare call for more complex modes of engagement with states. Within feminist theory, states occupy a vexed space. Whereas states have often supported feminist goals, states are also the locus of many of the problems that occupy feminists, such as militarism, moral regulation, and the cheapening of women’s labor. This special section of the journal explores this central, and old, tension within feminist state theory, offering a perspective that foregrounds geographic location. This emphasis on location emerges from a philosophical suspicion of the universalizing gestures of state theory. Despite the feminist normative opposition to views from nowhere in particular that purport to be relevant everywhere, feminist state theory has staged its key debates with little specification of state contexts. Geographic coordinates and national histories remain largely undescribed in classics within the field of feminist state theory. 1 What do we mean when we speak of “the state,” and how does location inflect our understandings? The articles in this section presume that feminists in different locations vary in their relationship to states and that these differences potentially affect the orientation of their theoretical scholarship on the state.