Introduction: Gender and the Politics of Scale

Abstract

Much of contemporary social science betrays its roots in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an era when the national state form, pioneered in Europe, spread across the globe, becoming the normal way of organizing social and political life. The centrality of the national scale thus operates as an assumption deeply embedded in social science theory and analysis. This also applies to much of the work on gender and social politics, not the least because welfare regimes, and more broadly gender regimes, had come to be consolidated at the national scale. To be sure, feminist politics had long transcended national boundaries, and an important strand of feminist research questioned the focus on (national) states. Nevertheless, feminist research frequently conformed to the methodological nationalism that characterized mainstream research. “Globalization” is challenging this nation-centered assumption and, with it, the very way of doing feminist research. Thus there is some feminist literature that, without invoking the concept of scale, begins to grasp these changes. For instance, Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht (2003) use the concept of “state reconfiguration” to draw attention to the transfer of state-policy responsibilities upward and downward and the implications of, and for, women’s movements. It is also recognized in the growing literature on the European Union (EU), some of which has appeared in the pages of Social Politics. Thus in the special issue on gender politics in the EU (volume 11:1), Walby (2004) and Stratigaki (2004) explored the EU as a new site for gender politics and policy, whereas Zippel (2004) and Kenney examined the impact of EU directives on national politics. For Zippel, in fact, it is a question of ongoing interaction between the two levels or what she calls a “ping-pong” effect. In a much earlier issue, an important article by Williams (1995) historicized the often taken for granted national scale of social policy and went on to highlight the current tensions between national social citizenship and the transnational flow of peoples. For the most part, however, feminists, like mainstream social scientists, have been slow to recognize that contemporary developments require a new spatial imaginary.