CfP: Panel “Theorizing Gender and Power”

World Congress of the International Political Science Association (IPSA)
Lisbon, Portugal
25-29 July 2020

Deadline: 10th October 2019

Chair: Pamela Pansardi (Univ. Pavia) and Federica Gregoratto (Univ. St Gallen)
Discussants: Amy Allen (Penn State)

“Theorizing Gender and Power”
While gendered relations have long been cast in terms of women’s oppression and men’s domination, where women are described merely as passive objects of power, more recently power literature has brought into the debate a number of notions aimed at describing or even normatively promoting women’s power. Most notably, on the one hand, the notions of ‘power to’ and ‘power with’ have been opposed and added to the traditional understanding of power as ‘power over’; on the other hand, positive instances of ‘power over’ have been identified in terms of ‘transformative power’.
Fewer studies, however, have concentrated on discussing the material basis of power, namely power resources, and their role in the gendered distribution of power. Is the classical tripartition of power resources (economic, of violence, and symbolic) apt at describing the basis for the gendered distribution of power? Should we consider, in addition, other bases of power? How do further power relations, as those based on race, class or other norms and structures, reinforce and/or undermine gendered ones? Lastly, even fewer studies have investigated the role of women themselves in the reproduction of gendered power relations and their exercise of power on other women (of same or different race, class, etc.)
This panel aims at gathering together sociologists, political theorists and political scientists working on the relation between gender and power in both analytical and materialist traditions, with the goal of shedding new light on the theorizing and understanding of gendered power relations and their persistence in nowadays societies.

Session
RC36 Political Power

Please submit an abstract of no more that 350 words by registering to https://wc2020.ipsa.org/my-congress/submit/paper before October 10th 2019.

Further information can be found on the Congress website: https://wc2020.ipsa.org/wc/home