This a guest post by Dr Morgan Healey. Morgan completed her PhD through the University of Limerick, Ireland, in 2009 focussing on Irish women politicians and their experiences of gendered political spaces.
Reading
the news (and in particular social media) yesterday I was incredibly
disheartened to see statements from both men and women MPs discounting the potential
Labour party policy calling for temporary special measures to ensure a 50:50
gender representation in the Caucus by 2017. It is a laudable goal for Labour
and one that all political parties should strive for. But the misogynist discussion
that followed the announcement of the policy showed exactly what women MPs have
to face within the political party machinery when it comes to fighting for
selection and running a successful campaign. The sophistry of equal opportunity
for women and the idea that ‘good’ women candidates do not require any
additional support because they will get elected on merit must be contested if
this debate is to move forward.
The
construction of politics as ‘jobs for the boys’ has created myriad barriers to
women entering politics. Research by feminist political scientists and theorists
has attempted to grapple with the gendering of political tenets, such as the
abstract individual, the social contract and those dealing with the systemic
limitations of not being selected to run, facing a political party system that
prioritises ‘proven’ men politicians, rewarding them with safe, winnable seats
(or a high number on the list), and so on. If women do manage to succeed, and
make their way through the myriad gates that block their inclusion to win a
seat and enter Parliament, the discrimination continues. Women with children
face non-family friendly working hours, for example, being away from home for
three nights a week, needing a relatively high and stable income to afford
child care and perhaps assistance in the home (with the assumption still that
if they are married their husbands will also be in paid work).
What
is insidious about all of this is the tightrope women politicians are forced to
walk between trying to belong (i.e. be the ‘same’ as the men politicians) and at
the same time using their gender to promote a ‘different’ way of doing politics
– one that simultaneously or strategically sets them apart for the sea of men.
It is within this context that I want to unpick some of the unhelpful comments
made by women MPs themselves, and argue that acts of belonging to the political
gendered norm (read men) are being played out in these comments. Specifically,
arguments against the proposal seem to be focus on notions of merit vs special
treatment, with the latter providing a dangerous precedent whereby a woman’s
gender can be used and named to detract from an already tenuous attempt at belonging.
I
have a bit of experience when it comes to women in politics.. My PhD thesis,
“The Naturalised Politician: How Irish Women Politicians Construct their
Political Subjectivities”, examined the lived experiences of then-serving women politicians in both the lower and upper house of Parliament (known
as the Oireachtas in Irish). I used a poststructural feminist framework to investigate
how the women I interviewed understood and articulated their own gendered
political subject positions as politicians, so please excuse some modest use of
this frame and some of the associated language below. While I won’t attempt to
provide a wholesale summary of my thesis, I do want to return to one of the
overarching themes that came across when I interviewed the women – that is, a muted
sense of belonging – and how I think this is playing out in relation to the current
political storm over temporary special measures.
So
what does ‘belonging’ mean and require of women in politics? And how does it
play out? Academic theorists like Breda
Gray (2002), Ruth McElroy (2002), Anne-Marie Fortier (1999), and Elspeth Probyn
(1996) have used notions of belonging to deconstruct how identities or
processes of identification are produced. They argue that individuals, groups,
or nations are constructed along dichotomous relations of insider/outsider, and
that these are often produced along racial, ethnic and gender lines. As Anne-Marie Fortier (2002) argues, the social and historical practices which mark out
terrains of belonging or commonalities amongst groups delineates the dynamics
by which people/groups fit into the norm. My argument is that an important
element of women politicians’ ability to belong to the ‘gendered spaces’ of
politics is conditional upon their ability to show they too can ‘fit in’. If we
assume that being a politician is an example of Fortier’s ‘group identity’ and
argue that through the gendering of this category as ‘man’ certain terrains of
belonging are marked out, then women’s ability to belong and be considered
legitimate politicians will be based on their ability to approximate the male
norms of politics.
