Laurel Weldon
Biographic Data
| ID | 91396 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laurel Weldon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laurel |
| FAMILY NAME | Weldon |
| SIGNATURE | WELDON L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Purdue University West Lafayette |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1927-5242 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1025 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Black lives matter and say her name
State feminism, global feminist waves and democratic backsliding
Dimensions of Transnational Feminism
The importance and impact of feminist mobilization across borders is well documented, but the impact of autonomy as an aspect of such organizing has not been explored in the transnational context. We argue that to understand the impact of transnational feminist mobilization, at least two distinct types of feminist mobilization require further conceptual development and empirical exploration in the transnational context, namely, autonomous as cont…
Feminist waves, global activism, and gender violence regimes
Global waves of activism are powerful social forces shaping - and shaped by- policy and politics worldwide. Such waves are constituted not by a single movement or campaign but rather comprise national, local and transnational organizations and networks of activists. We lack the conceptual underpinnings necessary to fully capture the impact of such a diffuse and complex phenomenon. This prevents scholars from fully grasping the ways that waves sha…
Domestic workers from margin to center
(***Special Edition Gendered Pandemic)In India, domestic workers' movements advocated for their own and other workers’ rights both before and during the pandemic. Over the course of the pandemic, however, the political landscape and degree of disunity among workers changed. Despite dwindling resources and a hostile political environment that offered paltry prospects for success, domestic workers persisted in protesting for improved conditions. We…
Drive-By Solidarity
This article offers a theoretical and empirical exploration of a form of solidarity in which one group spontaneously mobilizes in support of another, unrelated group. It is a fleeting solidarity based not on shared identity but on temporarily aligned goals, one aimed less at persistence and more at short-term impact. We call this drive-by solidarity because of its spontaneous, unilateral, and unsolicited nature. We argue that it is a “thinner” fo…
New Dimensions of Global Feminist Influence
Feminist mobilization, crucial for advancing women's human rights, has increased in all world regions since 1975. However, we do not know enough about the global impact of this mobilization because we lack adequate databases to explore the ways that feminist mobilization interacts with other factors that enhance and limit women's rights, such as democracy, intergovernmental processes, and transnational, regional organizing. Our ability to explore…
When States Come Out
Response to Kara Ellerby’s review of The Logics of Gender Justice
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Active Solidarity
While solidarity lies at the heart of collective action, it is not easily achieved. Social movements are characterized not only by difference within activist ranks but also by power asymmetries that reflect broader domination and distrust. The concept of intersectional solidarity is central to contemporary social justice movements’ efforts to negotiate these divisions, but how can it be achieved? To answer this question, we offer some guidelines …
The Logics of Gender Justice
When and why do governments promote women's rights? Through comparative analysis of state action in seventy countries from 1975 to 2005, this book shows how different women's rights issues involve different histories, trigger different conflicts, and activate different sets of protagonists. Change on violence against women and workplace equality involves a logic of status politics: feminist movements leverage international norms to contest women'…
Intersectionality and the politics of knowledge production
Since its coinage in the 1980s, intersectionality has journeyed across borders and disciplines, which is a testament to its resonance. We examine how intersectionality has travelled within political science and the potential impact that this has had on its political project, with particular attention to the politics of knowledge production. The analysis draws on: (1) an original database of articles published in political science journals; (2) de…
Gender and global justice
Catherine Lu’s important book argues that global justice must be conceived in structural terms, paying special attention to the way this approach applies to colonialism and its legacies. Lu shows how our states system perpetuates colonial injustice, and how deconstructing or disaggregating nation states reveal the ways that colonial legacies continue to permeate contemporary problems of justice. In this essay, I apply these arguments to key issue…
Some Complexities of Solidarity
This paper is a response to Shirin Rai’s essay on the good life and solidarity. The paper takes up many questions about solidarity and the good life raised by Rai, and discusses issues such as strategic essentialism and intersectionality in contemporary social movements
Power, exclusion and empowerment
Logics of Gender Justice
A Discussion of Aida H. Hozic and Jacqui True’s Scandalous Economics
“Critical analyses of the global financial crisis of 2008 (GFC) have neglected the ways in which structural inequalities around gender and race factor into (and indeed make possible) the current economic order. Scandalous Economics breaks new ground by arguing that an explicitly gendered approach to the GFC and its ongoing effects can help us to understand both the root causes of the crisis and the failure to significantly reform financial instit…
Implicit Theories in Intimate Partner Violence Sex Offenders
Religious Power, the State, Women's Rights, and Family Law
Family law is an essential dimension of women's citizenship in the modern state. The rights established in family law shape women's agency and autonomy; they also regulate access to basic resources—such as land, income, and education—that determine a citizen's ability to earn a living independently, among other life chances (Agarwal 1994; Deere and León 2001; Kabeer 1994; Okin 1989; World Bank 2012). Yet family law is a notorious site of sex ineq…
Mini-Symposium Introduction
It is increasingly evident that informal institutions, or the sets of unwritten rules and configurations of social practices that exist outside structures of govern- ment (Chudek and Henrich 2011; Helmke and Levitsky 2004, 727), exercise tremendous influence over social behavior and political choice, and should not be ignored by those seeking approaches to solving seemingly intractable problems. A vital component of many infor- mal institutions a…
Using Statistical Methods to Study Institutions
We can and should use a wide range of measures and methods to study institutions; we need a combination of approaches to chart such complex phenomena meaningfully. This is true for all kinds of institutions, both formal and informal. In this essay I argue that statistical methods, including large-scale cross-national analyses, can be fruitfully employed by feminists and others seeking new insights into institutional change. Moreover, large-scale …
Making Change
This paper identifies and describes two new norm-based strategies for institutional change to address intractable social problems. In both strategies, advocates “foreground” and criticize norms supporting the institutional status quo before either promoting an alternative existing norm via normative reframing of the issue, or creating and promoting an entirely new norm via normative innovation to build support for new institutional arrangements. …
Introduction
This article discusses the gendered nature of politics (as practice) and political science (as an academic discipline). It studies the sex-typing characteristic of most institutions in the modern world and describes how gender shapes the ways people organize, think, and know about the world. The article then identifies the changes that have occurred in politics and political science over the last hundred years and examines the politics and gender…
Feminist mobilisation and progressive policy change
Some national governments have adopted a wide variety of measures to address violence against women, including legal reform, public education campaigns, and support for shelters and rape crisis centres, but other governments have done little to confront the problem. What accounts for these differences in policy? To answer this question, we analysed policies on violence against women in 70 countries from 1975 to 2005. Our analysis reveals that the…
When Protest Makes Policy
The Civic Origins of Progressive Policy Change
Over the past four decades, violence against women (VAW) has come to be seen as a violation of human rights and an important concern for social policy. Yet government action remains uneven. Some countries have adopted comprehensive policies to combat VAW, whereas others have been slow to address the problem. Using an original dataset of social movements and VAW policies in 70 countries over four decades, we show that feminist mobilization in civi…
When Do Governments Promote Women's Rights? A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Sex Equality Policy
This essay proposes a framework to analyze cross-national variation in women's legal rights. To explore the distinct logics of policy change, we disaggregate sex equality policies on two dimensions: 1) whether they improve the status of women as a group or alleviate gender-based class inequalities, and 2) whether or not they challenge the doctrine of organized religion and the codified tradition of major cultural groups. We show that policies pro…
Beyond Bodies
The idea that individual members of marginalized groups provide substantive representation for the wider group rests on a problematic understanding of the relationship between individual experience and group perspective. I propose understanding group perspectives as collective products. In this view, institutional structures and social movements, not just bodies, can be more or less representative of groups. Comparing the impact of various modes …
The Structure of Intersectionality
A comparative analysis of gender relations incorporates and goes beyond a "women and politics" approach by focusing on the organization of political life, illuminating the systematic way that social norms, laws, practices, and institutions advantage certain groups and forms of life and disadvantage others. In order to illuminate the various ways that women and men are advantaged and disadvantaged as women and men, gender analysis must incorporate…
Inclusion, Solidarity, and Social Movements
Women's movements are increasingly divided along lines of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and class. When such division obstructs cooperation, women lose their most effective advocates in the public sphere. How can movements overcome these divisions and improve their influence on policy and society? In some contexts, it seems that activists are able to overcome such divisions without denying politically salient conflicts. The transnational movement a…
Feminist mobilisation and progressive policy change
Some national governments have adopted a wide variety of measures to address violence against women, including legal reform, public education campaigns, and support for shelters and rape crisis centres, but other governments have done little to confront the problem. What accounts for these differences in policy? To answer this question, we analysed policies on violence against women in 70 countries from 1975 to 2005. Our analysis reveals that the…
Making Change
This paper identifies and describes two new norm-based strategies for institutional change to address intractable social problems. In both strategies, advocates “foreground” and criticize norms supporting the institutional status quo before either promoting an alternative existing norm via normative reframing of the issue, or creating and promoting an entirely new norm via normative innovation to build support for new institutional arrangements. …
Active Solidarity
While solidarity lies at the heart of collective action, it is not easily achieved. Social movements are characterized not only by difference within activist ranks but also by power asymmetries that reflect broader domination and distrust. The concept of intersectional solidarity is central to contemporary social justice movements’ efforts to negotiate these divisions, but how can it be achieved? To answer this question, we offer some guidelines …
Religious Power, the State, Women's Rights, and Family Law
Family law is an essential dimension of women's citizenship in the modern state. The rights established in family law shape women's agency and autonomy; they also regulate access to basic resources—such as land, income, and education—that determine a citizen's ability to earn a living independently, among other life chances (Agarwal 1994; Deere and León 2001; Kabeer 1994; Okin 1989; World Bank 2012). Yet family law is a notorious site of sex ineq…
Women’s Movements, Identity Politics, and Policy Impacts
Scholars of social movements and democratic political theorists have argued that “identity politics” weakens social movements and undermines their influence on public policy. I offer a theoretical argument that at least some forms of “identity politics” likely have the reverse effects. In particular, when marginalized groups organize around ascriptive characteristics or “social location,” they generate knowledge about the social group, strengthen…
Intersectionality and the politics of knowledge production
Since its coinage in the 1980s, intersectionality has journeyed across borders and disciplines, which is a testament to its resonance. We examine how intersectionality has travelled within political science and the potential impact that this has had on its political project, with particular attention to the politics of knowledge production. The analysis draws on: (1) an original database of articles published in political science journals; (2) de…
Perspectives Against Interests
Do women share interests? Seeking interests that women share is theoretically problematic and politically undesirable for feminists. Efforts to redefine interests as subjective, contingent and/or context sensitive are unsatisfying for those who want to link women's representation to the fact of their oppression, exploitation, and discrimination. Fortunately, we need not posit shared interests to make strong claims about the importance of women's …
Informal Institutions, Protest, and Change in Gendered Federal Systems
Federalism seems to play a widely varying role in maintaining or undermining gender hierarchies around the world. In 1869, for example, federalism allowed Wyoming—a new state in the United States—to enfranchise women before this happened at the national level. But in Switzerland, federalism let a recalcitrant canton disenfranchise women until the 1990s—20 years after women achieved the vote on the national level (Banaszak 1996). More generally, f…
Power, exclusion and empowerment
The Dimensions and Policy Impact of Feminist Civil Society Democratic Policymaking on Violence against Women in the Fifty US States
In this article, I develop the concept of feminist civil society, that is, the idea that women's self-organizing to further their own empowerment constitutes a sort of counter-public of women that can influence the broader, male-dominated (and raced and classed) public sphere in which it is embedded. The development of feminist civil society, particularly the proliferation of feminist civic and political organizations, makes democratic policymaki…
New Dimensions of Global Feminist Influence
Feminist mobilization, crucial for advancing women's human rights, has increased in all world regions since 1975. However, we do not know enough about the global impact of this mobilization because we lack adequate databases to explore the ways that feminist mobilization interacts with other factors that enhance and limit women's rights, such as democracy, intergovernmental processes, and transnational, regional organizing. Our ability to explore…
Feminist waves, global activism, and gender violence regimes
Global waves of activism are powerful social forces shaping - and shaped by- policy and politics worldwide. Such waves are constituted not by a single movement or campaign but rather comprise national, local and transnational organizations and networks of activists. We lack the conceptual underpinnings necessary to fully capture the impact of such a diffuse and complex phenomenon. This prevents scholars from fully grasping the ways that waves sha…
Dimensions of Transnational Feminism
The importance and impact of feminist mobilization across borders is well documented, but the impact of autonomy as an aspect of such organizing has not been explored in the transnational context. We argue that to understand the impact of transnational feminist mobilization, at least two distinct types of feminist mobilization require further conceptual development and empirical exploration in the transnational context, namely, autonomous as cont…
Implicit Theories in Intimate Partner Violence Offenders
Using Statistical Methods to Study Institutions
We can and should use a wide range of measures and methods to study institutions; we need a combination of approaches to chart such complex phenomena meaningfully. This is true for all kinds of institutions, both formal and informal. In this essay I argue that statistical methods, including large-scale cross-national analyses, can be fruitfully employed by feminists and others seeking new insights into institutional change. Moreover, large-scale …
Difference and Social Structure
From Living Wages to Family Wages
This paper analyzes the rhetoric and policy goals of the living wage movement. While the rhetoric focuses on workers in the context of their families, the wage levels demanded by activists and mandated by laws are almost never adequate to support families with children, especially single-parent families. We contend the problem is a fundamental, conceptual one: focusing only on setting a single hourly wage obscures the diverse needs of poor famili…
Drive-By Solidarity
This article offers a theoretical and empirical exploration of a form of solidarity in which one group spontaneously mobilizes in support of another, unrelated group. It is a fleeting solidarity based not on shared identity but on temporarily aligned goals, one aimed less at persistence and more at short-term impact. We call this drive-by solidarity because of its spontaneous, unilateral, and unsolicited nature. We argue that it is a “thinner” fo…
Gender and global justice
Catherine Lu’s important book argues that global justice must be conceived in structural terms, paying special attention to the way this approach applies to colonialism and its legacies. Lu shows how our states system perpetuates colonial injustice, and how deconstructing or disaggregating nation states reveal the ways that colonial legacies continue to permeate contemporary problems of justice. In this essay, I apply these arguments to key issue…
Mini-Symposium Introduction
It is increasingly evident that informal institutions, or the sets of unwritten rules and configurations of social practices that exist outside structures of govern- ment (Chudek and Henrich 2011; Helmke and Levitsky 2004, 727), exercise tremendous influence over social behavior and political choice, and should not be ignored by those seeking approaches to solving seemingly intractable problems. A vital component of many infor- mal institutions a…
Protest, Policy, and the Problem of Violence against Women
Beyond Bodies
The idea that individual members of marginalized groups provide substantive representation for the wider group rests on a problematic understanding of the relationship between individual experience and group perspective. I propose understanding group perspectives as collective products. In this view, institutional structures and social movements, not just bodies, can be more or less representative of groups. Comparing the impact of various modes …
The Dimensions and Policy Impact of Feminist Civil Society Democratic Policymaking on Violence against Women in the Fifty US States
In this article, I develop the concept of feminist civil society, that is, the idea that women's self-organizing to further their own empowerment constitutes a sort of counter-public of women that can influence the broader, male-dominated (and raced and classed) public sphere in which it is embedded. The development of feminist civil society, particularly the proliferation of feminist civic and political organizations, makes democratic policymaki…
Product Review
From Living Wages to Family Wages
This paper analyzes the rhetoric and policy goals of the living wage movement. While the rhetoric focuses on workers in the context of their families, the wage levels demanded by activists and mandated by laws are almost never adequate to support families with children, especially single-parent families. We contend the problem is a fundamental, conceptual one: focusing only on setting a single hourly wage obscures the diverse needs of poor famili…
The Structure of Intersectionality
A comparative analysis of gender relations incorporates and goes beyond a "women and politics" approach by focusing on the organization of political life, illuminating the systematic way that social norms, laws, practices, and institutions advantage certain groups and forms of life and disadvantage others. In order to illuminate the various ways that women and men are advantaged and disadvantaged as women and men, gender analysis must incorporate…
Women’s Movements, Identity Politics, and Policy Impacts
Scholars of social movements and democratic political theorists have argued that “identity politics” weakens social movements and undermines their influence on public policy. I offer a theoretical argument that at least some forms of “identity politics” likely have the reverse effects. In particular, when marginalized groups organize around ascriptive characteristics or “social location,” they generate knowledge about the social group, strengthen…
Inclusion, Solidarity, and Social Movements
Women's movements are increasingly divided along lines of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and class. When such division obstructs cooperation, women lose their most effective advocates in the public sphere. How can movements overcome these divisions and improve their influence on policy and society? In some contexts, it seems that activists are able to overcome such divisions without denying politically salient conflicts. The transnational movement a…
Difference and Social Structure
Intersectionality
The concept of intersectionality is an important contribution of feminist theory to the general endeavor of understanding society and politics. The concept is especially valuable for those scholars (such as critical theorists) who aim to critically evaluate social relations, exposing relations of domination, or “speaking truth to power.” As I explain below, the concept originates in efforts of Black feminists in the United States to theorize abou…
Difference and Social Structure
Iris Young was a wide-ranging political and social theorist whose works transformed the study of democratic theory, theories of justice, multiculturalism, nationalism, and group rights, among others—all of this in addition to her enormous contribution to feminist theory. Young left not only specific substantive legacies but also her method as a critical social theorist: She sought to undertake projects that helped make sense of the claims and ana…
When Do Governments Promote Women's Rights? A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Sex Equality Policy
This essay proposes a framework to analyze cross-national variation in women's legal rights. To explore the distinct logics of policy change, we disaggregate sex equality policies on two dimensions: 1) whether they improve the status of women as a group or alleviate gender-based class inequalities, and 2) whether or not they challenge the doctrine of organized religion and the codified tradition of major cultural groups. We show that policies pro…
When Protest Makes Policy
When Protest Makes Policy
"A must-read for scholars across a broad sweep of disciplines. Laurel Weldon weaves together skillfully the theoretical strands of gender equality policy, intersectionality, social movements, and representation in a multimethod/level comparative study that unequivocally places women's movements at the center of our understanding of democracy and social change."\n---Amy G. Mazur, Washington State University\n"Laurel Weldon's When Protest Makes Pol…
Perspectives Against Interests
Do women share interests? Seeking interests that women share is theoretically problematic and politically undesirable for feminists. Efforts to redefine interests as subjective, contingent and/or context sensitive are unsatisfying for those who want to link women's representation to the fact of their oppression, exploitation, and discrimination. Fortunately, we need not posit shared interests to make strong claims about the importance of women's …
Informal Institutions, Protest, and Change in Gendered Federal Systems
Federalism seems to play a widely varying role in maintaining or undermining gender hierarchies around the world. In 1869, for example, federalism allowed Wyoming—a new state in the United States—to enfranchise women before this happened at the national level. But in Switzerland, federalism let a recalcitrant canton disenfranchise women until the 1990s—20 years after women achieved the vote on the national level (Banaszak 1996). More generally, f…
When Protest Makes Policy
Response to Hahrie Han's review of When Protest Makes Policy
Hahrie Han's review asks how the argument I develop in my book—that social movements can provide a form of democratic representation for marginalized groups—might be applied to movements other than women's movements and issues other than women's issues. In the book, I develop some distinctions between types of groups and types of issues as a way of answering these questions, arguing that social movements are especially important for social change…
Implicit Theories in Intimate Partner Violence Offenders
The Civic Origins of Progressive Policy Change
Over the past four decades, violence against women (VAW) has come to be seen as a violation of human rights and an important concern for social policy. Yet government action remains uneven. Some countries have adopted comprehensive policies to combat VAW, whereas others have been slow to address the problem. Using an original dataset of social movements and VAW policies in 70 countries over four decades, we show that feminist mobilization in civi…
Introduction
This article discusses the gendered nature of politics (as practice) and political science (as an academic discipline). It studies the sex-typing characteristic of most institutions in the modern world and describes how gender shapes the ways people organize, think, and know about the world. The article then identifies the changes that have occurred in politics and political science over the last hundred years and examines the politics and gender…
Feminist mobilisation and progressive policy change
Some national governments have adopted a wide variety of measures to address violence against women, including legal reform, public education campaigns, and support for shelters and rape crisis centres, but other governments have done little to confront the problem. What accounts for these differences in policy? To answer this question, we analysed policies on violence against women in 70 countries from 1975 to 2005. Our analysis reveals that the…
Mini-Symposium Introduction
It is increasingly evident that informal institutions, or the sets of unwritten rules and configurations of social practices that exist outside structures of govern- ment (Chudek and Henrich 2011; Helmke and Levitsky 2004, 727), exercise tremendous influence over social behavior and political choice, and should not be ignored by those seeking approaches to solving seemingly intractable problems. A vital component of many infor- mal institutions a…
Using Statistical Methods to Study Institutions
We can and should use a wide range of measures and methods to study institutions; we need a combination of approaches to chart such complex phenomena meaningfully. This is true for all kinds of institutions, both formal and informal. In this essay I argue that statistical methods, including large-scale cross-national analyses, can be fruitfully employed by feminists and others seeking new insights into institutional change. Moreover, large-scale …
Making Change
This paper identifies and describes two new norm-based strategies for institutional change to address intractable social problems. In both strategies, advocates “foreground” and criticize norms supporting the institutional status quo before either promoting an alternative existing norm via normative reframing of the issue, or creating and promoting an entirely new norm via normative innovation to build support for new institutional arrangements. …
Political science (36 works) · Sociology (35 works) · Gender Politics and Representation (32 works) · Law (30 works) · Law (29 works) · Politics (29 works) · Gender Studies (24 works) · Gender Studies (21 works) · Political economy (14 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (14 works)