Saturday, March 15, 2014
Private Dining Room (Omni Shoreham)
The ‘intersectional turn’ within gender scholarship raises a number of theoretical, empirical and methodological challenges, not least for those seeking to explore women’s descriptive representation (DRW). Much of the scholarly work on DRW acknowledges diversity, this usually constitutes a focus upon two intersecting points of identity (frequently gender and ethnicity), rather than providing an intersectional analysis per se. The distinction between intersectionality as a theoretical approach and empirically examining specific intersecting points of identity is important. But it is far from clear how scholars can operationalize the latter in such a way as to address the conceptual concerns of the former. This paper explores the extent to which a full intersectional analysis of descriptive representation is either empirically possible or politically desirable; it does this by combining conceptual work on intersectionality with empirical analysis of the campaigns surrounding women’s political representation in the US and UK. Drawing upon interviews with those involved in campaigns to increase women’s representation, as well as interviews with feminist activists, this paper reflects upon the ways in which intersectional framing offers both an important opportunity and set of difficult challenges to conceptions, and analysis, of women’s descriptive representation.
