Abstract
The subfield of women and politics challenged mainstream political science scholarship to take up gender as a central category of analysis. In the same vein, Nadia Brown and Sarah Gershon, in Distinct Identities: Minority Women in U.S. Politics, have compiled a set of essays that center minority women in electoral and representational politics. This ambitious edited volume presents a strong case to extend the practice of intersectionality in the gender and politics literature, as well as in political science more broadly. As a collection, these essays complicate the experiences of women in politics—a group that is not homogeneous—and present a more complete picture of political participation and representation in the US context.
Distinct Identities, which comprises 18 research essays in addition to the editors’ introduction and afterword, is organized into four thematic sections: The essays span the areas of mass political behavior and attitudes, voter evaluations of candidates, mass media, and pathways to political office for women of color. This volume of intersectional works makes both theoretical and methodological contributions to the subfield of gender and politics. The editors selected essays that develop the gender and politics literature by interrogating mainstream theories of politics at multiple levels and demonstrating the range of methodological approaches undertaken in intersectional research. While the empirical chapters make substantive contributions to a range of areas in gender and politics, I will draw on a few examples that illustrate the theoretical and methodological contributions of the collection as a whole.
The major theoretical contribution of this collection is the degree to which chapters apply intersectionality to develop mainstream theories of political participation. Contributions by Mirya Holman and by Tonya Williams are exemplars of this. Drawing on American National Election Study (ANES) data, Holman challenges resource models for participation, which do not adequately explain Black and Hispanic women’s political activity. In the arena of legislative politics, Williams challenges the notion that gender predicts legislative behavior by comparing roll-call votes and bill co-sponsorships of Black men and women lawmakers on abortion policy. In each of these essays, analyzing political participation and behavior along multiple axes of identity challenges long-standing assumptions of political theories.
Methodologically, this collection of essays displays the range of quantitative and qualitative approaches employed by intersectional scholars in service of theoretical and empirical developments. Quantitative approaches in the volume include secondhand experimental data and firsthand biographical data collected from multiple sources. In evaluating the effects of stereotypes on Black women candidates, for instance, Jessica Johnson Carew draws on mock election experiments and cognitive survey data. Intersectionality highlights many of the deficits in current data sources, which may be overcome through methodological innovations. To fill the gaps in data on Asian Pacific American elected officials, Nicole Filler and Pei-te Lien merge biographical data from a variety of search engines and news articles. Qualitative approaches ranged from content analysis and semi-structured interviews, exemplified by Andra Gillespie’s comparative analysis of media representations of First Ladies as well as Diane-Michele Prindeville and Lawrence Broxton’s face-to-face interviews with Native American tribal leaders in Arizona and New Mexico.
The range of women of color’s political participation analyzed in Distinct Identities is substantial, although the empirical work is limited to electoral and representational politics. Chapters by Christina Bejarano and Kira Sanbonmatsu span state legislative and statewide elective office. In the arena of national politics, Shyam Sriram analyzes support for a Hindu Congressional candidate among South Asian Americans, and Christina Greer takes an historical perspective on the presidential candidacies of Charlene Mitchell and Shirley Chisholm. While the collection does span an impressive range of political participation and representation, the essays focus exclusively on electoral and elite representational politics. Thus, the chapters in this collection do not develop intersectional approaches in the study of politics outside of the electoral arena, such as the participation and leadership of women of color in social movements.
Distinct Identities highlights the many contributions of intersectionality to research on gender and politics. Brown and Gershon’s selections demonstrate the potential for theoretical development at many levels and forms of politics by taking an intersectional approach, although the volume emphasizes electoral politics at the local, state, and national political arenas. The range of methods employed by contributors demonstrates the possibilities of practicing intersectionality in studies that are both qualitative and quantitative. Distinct Identities, as an entire volume or as a selection of chapters, would be an excellent addition to courses on political behavior, electoral politics, and gender and race. Moreover, the research chapters serve as examples of intersectional approaches to studies of electoral and representational politics for scholars new to practicing intersectionality. In short, this collection of essays makes a much-needed clarion call for greater attention to intersectionality in political science and gender and politics.