Race, Gender, and Political Representation: Toward a More Intersectional Approach
Beth Reingold, Kerry L. Haynie, and Kirsten Widner
Abstract
Who gets elected? Who do they represent? What issues do they prioritize? Does diversity in representation make a difference? Race, Gender, and Political Representation approaches these questions about the politics of identity in the United States differently. It is not about women’s representation or minority representation; it is about how race and gender interact to affect the election, behavior, and impact of all individuals—raced women and gendered minorities alike. By putting women of color at the center of the analysis and re-evaluating traditional, one-at-a-time approaches to studying t ... More
Who gets elected? Who do they represent? What issues do they prioritize? Does diversity in representation make a difference? Race, Gender, and Political Representation approaches these questions about the politics of identity in the United States differently. It is not about women’s representation or minority representation; it is about how race and gender interact to affect the election, behavior, and impact of all individuals—raced women and gendered minorities alike. By putting women of color at the center of the analysis and re-evaluating traditional, one-at-a-time approaches to studying the politics of race or gender, the authors demonstrate what an intersectional approach to political representation can reveal. With a wealth of original data on the presence, policy leadership, and policy impact of Black women and men, Latinas and Latinos, and White women and men in state legislative office in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, each chapter shows how the politics of race, gender, and representation are far more complex than recurring “Year of the Woman” frameworks suggest. An array of race-gender similarities and differences is evident in the experiences, activities, and accomplishments of these state legislators. Yet one thing is clear: the representation of those marginalized by multiple, intersecting systems of power and inequality is intricately bound to the representation of women of color.
Keywords:
race,
gender,
representation,
intersectionality,
identity politics,
legislators,
diversity
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2020 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780197502174 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2020 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780197502174.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Beth Reingold, author
Associate Professor of Political Science and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Emory University
Kerry L. Haynie, author
Associate Professor of Political Science and African & African American Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Social Sciences, Duke University
Kirsten Widner, author
Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Tennessee
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