The issue of care work has become a burning issue in western capitalist welfare states because of the greater proportion of women in the workforce and the growth of alternative forms of family arrangement outside of the traditional male breadwinner model. This article addresses equity and welfare states with respect to social entitlements around care. It asks how new theoretical concepts can be applied to understand welfare states and their evolving employment-related family policies, using Nancy Fraser's utopian universal caregiver approach (...) as a model for evaluation. It focuses on carers and evaluates how a modern citizen is expected to be financially self-sufficient and yet also perform care duties at home. The term 'carer-commodification' captures the extent to which the state expects carers to engage in the labour market and how non-carer earners are engaged in care duties. The term 'carer-stratification' incorporates the extent to which the state creates differences between carers. Policies from selective welfare states (Sweden, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States) are evaluated speculatively with these tools, and how they fare with equitable social entitlements is illustrated. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to incorporate trans?national actors and institutions into citizenship theory both theoretically and empirically. We analyze three cases of recognition movements promoting gender, ethnic/minority and indigenous rights. Using one societal context, Sweden, we map the processes and mechanisms of power and agency (boundary?making and brokering) that shape how trans?national institutions and actors offer new forms of leverage politics to recognition movements as well as constrain their agency. These mechanisms of power are formalized in a model (...) showing the multi?level effects of leverage politics on recognition movements. Our three cases of recognition politics demonstrate the increasingly complex links between actors in policy communities across regional, national, European and international levels. They also reveal the processes implicit in our model: that policy imports are reframed when translated into specific national political cultures; and more broadly, that national citizenship frames of membership and inclusion are not easily dislodged. (shrink)

With the question of the title of this paper, which recalls an issue that Valcárcel already asked herself in 1991, I reflect on the need to recover the struggle of feminism as a political struggle. To this end, I argue that feminism cannot be understood without the objective of trying to transform societies, without the aspiration to emancipation. Therefore, it will be urgent to be able to answer and resist the task of depoliticization that the neoliberal capitalist system administers until (...) it tries to convert feminism into another commodity. I propose to recover the collective subject of feminism, above the constant ontological and epistemological function that neoliberal politics applies, as the only way to aspire to that liberation and emancipation that we feminists long for. (shrink)

A fundamental debate within feminist scholarship and activism centers on what relationship feminism should have with the state. This article explores this debate empirically by examining differences in the emotion cultures of a state-dependent and an autonomous feminist organization in postsocialist eastern Germany. The comparative analysis demonstrates how organizations construct specific emotion cultures in response to emotional opportunities and constraints created by their relationships with state institutions. The state-dependent organization adopts a less expressive emotion culture that assures broad public appeal (...) and future state support, but does not build critical consciousness among participants. In contrast, the autonomous organization encourages displays of feelings as part of consciousness raising, creating an emotion culture that reduces public appeal but produces especially loyal and active constituents. (shrink)

The relationship between descriptive representation and substantive representation is an issue that has been widely discussed by women’s studies scholars. In general, it is assumed that there exists a positive relationship between the two, but the literature and empirical analysis show that substantive representation also depends on the action of other critical actors, such as gender agencies and the women’s social movement. Comparative research has shown the existence of a common pattern in post-industrial democracies: the development of women-friendly policies depends (...) on the existence of coalitions between these critical actors. However, the analysis usually focuses on the national or regional level, and there is very little analysis at the local level, despite this being a political arena in which these processes can be developed. The aim of this article is to analyse the effect of coalitions of critical actors on the responsiveness to the demands of women’s groups in the case of Spanish municipalities using a representative survey. The objective, therefore, is to apply advances in the women’s substantive representation literature to the local level in Spain. Main results show that responsiveness is higher in municipalities where women’s coalitions exist. (shrink)