Where is feminist state theory today? This book offers novel insights into social science debates by analyzing feminist theories of the state. It argues that we need feminist tools for analyzing states and focuses on two debates, domestic violence and childcare, as areas where feminists discursively construct the state. These themes are developed within a comparative perspective. Focusing on devolution in Scotland and the European Union, the book further explores how feminist state theories conceive multi-level governance.

Most Western democracies established women's policy agencies to improve the status of women by the 1990s. One of the book's key questions is how have women's policy agencies been able to develop, maintain or enhance their roles in the transformed political context and how have women's movements adapted to change in twelve states.

This broad ranging new text provides a systematic assessment of the emergence of gender as a significant issue on the EU agenda and of the EU's impact on gender inequality, both in terms of specifically gender-related policies and the gender dimensions of other policies.

As a field of scholarship, gender and politics has exploded over the last fifty years and is now global, institutionalized, and ever expanding. The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics brings to political science an accessible and comprehensive overview of the key contributions of gender scholars to the study of politics and shows how these contributions produce a richer understanding of polities and societies.

Like the field it represents, the handbook has a broad understanding of what counts as political and is based on a notion of gender that highlights masculinities as well...