Prostitution has been considered by feminists as, alternatively, a gendered relation, an issue of sexuality, and a kind of labor. In this article, I argue for an integrated feminist analysis of sex work that focuses on the first and third of these, leaving the second in the background. I argue that this reconstructed feminist analysis must reject the moralism and determinism of the gendered critique, and radicalize the economic critique. It must also, I suggest, orient itself toward consideration of prostitution as a symptom or function of various masculinities. In all cases, feminism has considered sex work as a question or problem of women's agency and sexuality. Reversing this standard feminist approach offers important new directions for empirical research, and denaturalizes prostitution as an inevitable feature of human life. This denaturalization radicalizes the otherwise traditional policy debate over prostitution by allowing for a more revolutionary critique of the relations of domination that both govern and constitute sex work as a stigmatized, hierarchical, and exploitative practice.I would like to thank Kate Baldwin, John Christman, Brandon Fogel, Traci Levy, William Roberts, Michael Zuckert, and four anonymous reviewers for Politics & Gender for their helpful criticism and insightful commentary on previous drafts of this article. Conversations with Terri Horning proved invaluable to its theoretical development.

This article examines the Cuban record concerning gender equality in political decision making. I begin with a brief overview of Cuba's system of government. I then examine the gender composition of the country's legislative structures, discuss efforts to strengthen women's political participation, and compare the inclusion of women into key state and party decision-making bodies. The article is guided by three main arguments: First, in Cuba's legislative structures, women have a greater presence at the national than at the local level, contrary to the experience of the United States and Western Europe. Second, despite the official position denying the existence of gender quotas, Cuba does implement measures of positive discrimination in order to strengthen women's presence in politics. Finally, Cuban women face a glass ceiling as they move up to positions of greater decision-making power, a reality faced by women all over the world. The excellent gender composition of Cuba's parliament is an apparent exception that confirms the following rule: The state of gender equality in Cuba's decision-making structures reveals an inverse relationship between the actual decision-making power of a particular institution and the presence of women. That is, the higher we get in the institutional decision-making hierarchy, the fewer women we find. The evidence presented in this article demonstrates that Cuba has not made as much progress in achieving gender equality in political decision making as some of the official data would indicate, and that women continue to be largely excluded from the most important decision-making bodies.The article is based on a report commissioned by the European Commission. The views expressed herein are those of the author and can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.The author gratefully acknowledges the excellent advice given by two anonymous reviewers and the editors for revising this manuscript.

Dominant psychoanalytic paradigms locate the breast or penis/phallus as the touchstone for gender/sex/sexual development. This essay offers a critique of these accounts and an alternative theory of sexed forms of being: pregnancy envy and the kinship rules that result from this. The essay also provides an intellectual history of how previous efforts to theorize pregnancy envy, especially work by Ida Macalpine, were suppressed.This article has benefited from audiences at the Yale University Feminist Lesbian and Gay Workshop, the City University Lesbian and Gay Studies Workshop, and the University of Southern California Center on Feminist Research, as well as from comments by Marianne Constable, Lisa Ellis, Laura Green, James Martel, Hanna Pitkin, and Michael Rogin. Many thanks especially to the reviewers and editors for their extremely helpful suggestions, including the reference to Bruno Bettelheim (1962).

In this study, we seek to describe and explain changes in mass abortion attitudes in Poland and the United States. Both countries exhibit modest, but significant, declines in support for legal abortion during the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century. When compositional, structural, and period effects are estimated separately, both countries exhibit strong pro-life period effects beginning in the late 1990s. In Poland, compositional effects exert pro-choice pressure but are counteracted by strong pro-life structural effects. By contrast, compositional effects in the United States are rather weak, but strong pro-choice structural effects are offset by pro-life period effects. The latter result is attributed to strategic framing of the abortion issue by pro-life elites.A version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September 2004. Thanks are due David Damore, Kenneth Fernandez, Sheila Lambert, Jonathan Strand, Matthew Wetstein, and Melanie Young for valuable comments and assistance.

This roundtable was originally presented as a panel at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the APSA in Philadelphia that was sponsored by the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession. It was the sense of members of that committee that far too much of the time and energy of many political scientists—especially within the hallowed halls of convention centers—has focused on methodological debates and conflicts, while far too little attention has been directed to issues of social change and/or to contemporary issues of public policy. Nevertheless, it was also our sense that the focus on method to the exclusion—or, at least, the devaluation—of substance has been less true for feminist scholars and others who have been on the margins of the discipline or of the society than it has been for members of the profession at large. Indeed, many of the women and minority scholars, in particular, who entered the field of political science in the past 20 to 30 years did so precisely because they wanted to make a difference in the world, and to learn how to use the tools of the profession to improve the situation of less empowered members of society, whether in the United States or abroad. Hence, the decision to sponsor this roundtable, to highlight some of those women and their contributions, and to reflect on what we have achieved and what significant questions and tasks remain to be addressed.

How should scholars view and relate to activism and social change? Concern over this question is neither new nor limited to political scientists. Nevertheless, because of the special relationship between our academic enterprise and the larger women's movement outside the academy, this concern is particularly acute for those of us who approach the study of politics from a feminist perspective.

During a discussion of my first book manuscript with a senior colleague, he informed me that an academic “best-seller” actually sells about 2,000 book copies. I was stunned. All this work and even if I am wildly successful, only 2,000 copies will circulate in the world? My colleague intended, I suppose, to humble me. Even more, it threw me into doubt (how could I have gotten so far and still be so naive?), and I continue to wonder many years later, why do we all work so hard to gain such a small audience? Now that academic journals are online, we can calculate the number of hits or downloads for each article. The results are disheartening for any of us who want our research to have an impact outside our academic discipline or subfield, let alone an impact on political life. Why do we labor over journal articles that will be read by so few people? (Of course, I am aware that the number of readers is a dubious measure for “evidence of impact.” Yet I have seen the sales ranking of books on Amazon.com and the tally of citations netted by a publication appear in promotion files many times as measures of “impact on the field.” Full disclosure: my Amazon sales ranking at the time of this writing is 287,537.)

African-American women represent fewer than 5% of the doctoral degrees awarded in political science. There are only a handful of tenured black women in the nation's top-rated political science departments (Sarkees and McGlen 1999). There is no major text in the field that deals exclusively with the public opinion, political behavior, or institutional contributions of African-American women. Despite some recent notable exceptions, black women as authors of and subjects of research inquiry are still largely absent from the pages of periodicals that define the field. Many black women in political science are laboring in obscurity relative to the profession. “African American women faculty continue to be concentrated among the lower ranks, primarily in non-tenured positions, promoted at a slower rate, paid less than their male and white female counterparts, located in traditional disciplines, and primarily employed by two year colleges,” according to Sheila Gregory (1999, 11). Even from this position on the margin, black women political scientists have contested the field, challenged the academy, and contributed to the development of more just communities.

I begin with a series of “starting points” (rendered simplistically, without the nuance, supporting argumentation for, and qualifications of them that warrant elaboration). These offer a context for the next section: assessing the contributions and activism of feminist scholars. I then consider prevailing—in contrast to feminist—analyses of power and schematically detail the contributions of feminist theory/practice. This illuminates what I consider our most productive, politically consequential, and transformative insight: theorizing “feminization as denigration.” A concluding section explores why feminists face so much resistance and what is at stake in persevering.

Black Sexual Politics: African-Americans, Gender and the New Racism. By Patricia Hill Collins. New York: Routledge. 2004. 374 pp. $26.00.

To a large extent, scholarship on black politics often focuses primarily on institutions, rule of law, processes, political actors, and citizens but with very little attention to issues of gender and sexuality. In contrast, the principal aim of this book is to explore what the author sees as the inextricable links between racism and gender. The basic thesis of this well-written, important, and provocative book is that the fight against racism, especially the “new racism,” can never be won without first challenging sexism, which simultaneously oppresses African-American men and women.

Regulating Intimacy: A New Legal Paradigm. By Jean L. Cohen. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004. 304 pp.

Although Jean Cohen's book was originally published in 2002, her argument for a reformulated justification for the right to privacy seems more relevant than ever. The resignation of a key swing vote from the Supreme Court makes feminist concerns about the future of legal abortion seem all the more pressing. As her subtitle—“a new legal paradigm”—suggests, Cohen undertakes an ambitious project of reviving the right to privacy as a key feminist concept, while simultaneously attempting to rethink the nature and use of the law. Defending the reflexive paradigm of law, she argues that neither the liberal nor welfare paradigms of legal action is adequate for formulating solutions to privacy issues tinged with issues of gender equity, including abortion, sexual orientation law, and sexual harassment. The book's strength and weakness is its admirable breadth, as it tackles an impressive pantheon of legal theory, political philosophy, legal doctrine, and substantive legal and political issues. The author successfully refutes the liberal and welfarist paradigms but is less persuasive that the reflexive paradigm offers a way out of the dilemma.

Women Making Constitutions: New Politics and Comparative Perspectives. Edited by Alexandra Dobrowolsky and Vivien Hart. Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. 277 pp. $90.00.

This edited volume addresses themes pertinent to all who study politics and gender, namely, how to incorporate claims for both equality and difference into politics, constitutional politics particularly. It achieves a difficult balance for any edited volume by discussing common themes and avoiding a focus on overly narrow debates. Thus, a range of problems and concepts are explored using empirical and theoretical research that provides a comprehensive insight into women's attempts to transform constitutions. The chapters are synthesized in the introduction and the conclusion, providing the reader with a more general insight. The editors highlight the tendency for mainstream analysis to oversimplify women's role in constitutional change. This theme is developed in other chapters. Anne Marie Goetz considers gender and accountability systems. She demonstrates the gendered assumptions underlying what is usually described as accountability failure. For example, should audit offices review whether resources are unequally distributed between the sexes?

Opposing Currents: The Politics of Water and Gender in Latin America. Edited by Vivienne Bennett, Sonia Dávila-Poblete, and María Nieves Rico. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 2005. 264 pp. $27.95.

This book represents an important contribution to a growing subfield of feminist scholarship. Moving beyond a focus on the traditional policy areas normally associated with women and politics, the authors bring a gender analysis to bear on the “politics of water” in Latin America. Not only is this a policy issue not usually linked to women's rights, but, as the editors argue, even the national-level women's policy agencies created in many Latin American countries have overlooked the way gender discrimination impacts the heightening water crisis facing much of the region. Nevertheless, they maintain that “the right to water underpins all other social rights” (p. 15) and that “a gender perspective is not only possible but essential for effective water management” (p. ix).

List of contributors.