Abstract
Research Highlights and Abstract
The study of gender, sexuality—and, in particular, queer theory—is central to the social sciences and humanities. Our analysis of citation practices shows that queer theorist Judith Butler is one of Yet political science remains distinctly untroubled by queer theory, and gender and sexuality are frequently treated as marginal (not central) concerns. We argue that queer theory has much to offer political science, not only by highlighting the importance of sexuality and the body but also in analysing ‘power’ and in politicising ‘the political’ itself. We suggest that the ‘queering’ of political science is long overdue, not least through politicising processes of knowledge-production in the discipline.
There is something queer (by which we mean strange) going on in the scholarly practice of political science. Why are political science scholars continuing to disregard issues of gender and sexuality—and in particular queer theory—in their lecture theatres, seminar rooms, textbooks, and journal articles? Such everyday issues around common human experience are considered by other social scientists to be central to the practice and theory of social relations. In this article we discuss how these commonplace issues are being written out of (or, more accurately, have never been written in to) contemporary political science. First, we present and discuss our findings on citation practice in order to evidence the queerness of what does and does not get cited in political science scholarship. We then go on to critique this practice before suggesting a broader agenda for the analysis of
Introduction
Contemporary textbooks suggest that the scope of political science has broadened significantly in recent years following the emergence of critical and postmodernist perspectives to add to the traditional, and perhaps still dominant, schools of thought such as behaviouralism and institutionalism (see
Arguably, however, this presentation of an all-inclusive contemporary political science is far from reality. Significant (and voluminous) scholarly work by social and political scientists on sexuality, gender, and the body rarely receives sustained attention in the aforementioned leading textbooks. We appear to be teaching our students—and reminding ourselves—that the politics of sexuality, gender and the body are not ‘proper’ political science. Look through any index in the best-selling textbooks for references to sexuality, the body—and, for that matter, gender—and you will be disappointed. Beyond an absence from the pages of textbooks, the large body of work on these issues is also seldom, if ever, cited in the articles of leading political science journals, suggesting that, at best, such scholarship lacks the influence of ‘hard’ political science in scholarship and, at worst, is indulgent and frivolous.
Ironically, our research into citation practice has found that it is precisely work on gender and sexuality—and especially the huge body of work on queer theory—that is particularly highly cited in other fields. What we have discovered is a sharp discrepancy between how issues of gender, sexuality and the body are treated in political science compared with the social sciences and humanities more broadly. While such issues are massively influential and intellectually popular across a broad spectrum of cognate disciplines such as sociology, psychology, history, and philosophy, the theoretical and conceptual significance of such issues is not being conveyed and explained to the current generation of political science students and scholars. This implies that something odd is going on in political science, especially in the context of the growing professional reliance on the citations agenda. Far from being the broad and inclusive discipline it purports to be in modern textbooks, today's political science is consciously marginalising issues of gender and sexuality and hardly doing justice to the political analysis of social relations that queer theorists have been successfully doing for quite some time.
There are several consequences of these exclusionary practices within political science. One consequence is that the field is impoverished compared to other social science disciplines that are far more inclusive of issues surrounding gender, sexuality and embodiment. Another is that many scholars who work in these areas find themselves marginalised within the academic profession. In an age when one's academic and professional standing is increasingly measured and judged on the basis of the number of citations your published work receives (using methods such as the H-index 1 and Google Scholar), political scientists studying the politics of sexuality and gender will inevitably find their careers (if they can get appointed!) suffer compared to colleagues who focus on what is generally and widely misconceived as the proper stuff of the discipline. In sum, scholarly marginalisation matters and is itself, intellectually and professionally, a political act.
In what follows we discuss how issues of gender and sexuality—and in particular queer theory—are being written out of contemporary political science. Our purpose is itself political: we think they need to be written in and so we also discuss why political science should become more inclusive and seek to explore political processes in all social relations. The article is structured in three parts. First, we present and discuss our findings on citation practice in social science in order to evidence the queerness of what does and does not get cited in political science scholarship. Next, we critique this practice before, finally, suggesting a broader agenda for the analysis of
Show Me Your H-Index and I'll Show You Mine!
Academia has become somewhat transfixed by counting citations and Google Scholar is a popular method scholars (and appointments panels) use for measuring the impact of publications for research, profile, promotions and appointments purposes. 2 Given its growing significance in the academy we decided to use Google Scholar to explore citations praxis within our discipline. Using Scholar to search for articles in ‘political science’ (choosing the option of the term appearing ‘anywhere in the article’ rather than ‘in the title of the article’), we found that the most cited article is ‘Political Science and the New Institutionalisms'by Peter Hall and Rosemary Taylor (1996), with 3,810 citations. We then searched for articles in what most would consider the most dominant perspectives in political science—rational choice theory; institutionalism; pluralism; elitism; Marxism; and feminism. We found that the most cited ‘rational choice’ article is ‘A Behavioural Model of Rational Choice’ by Herbert Simon (1955), which gains 8,015 citations. The most cited article on ‘institutionalism’ is ‘Games real actors play: Actor-centered institutionalism in policy research’ by Fritz W. Scharpf (1997), with 2,510 citations. For ‘pluralism’, ‘Spheres of justice: A defence of pluralism and equality’ by Michael Walzer (1983) gets the most citations, with 5,895. For ‘elitism’, ‘The theory of democratic elitism: A critique’ by Peter Bachrach (1967) gains the most citations at 789. And finally, for ‘Marxism’, ‘Marxism and literature’ by Raymond Williams (1977) comes up top, with 7,065 citations.
Things became a little more interesting, however, when we searched for ‘feminism’ (which is undeniably recognised as part of political science even if, as we shall discuss, its influence is greater in other disciplines). Judith Butler's (1990)
Of course, these figures highlight the ludicrousness of using Google Scholar to ‘count’ impact and influence by collating and comparing citation numbers.
3
(According to what was presumably a glitch in Scholar at the time of our search, the most cited Marx was actually Robert, not Karl, who gained 18,596 citations for his co-authored paper on ‘A comparison of particulate allogeneic and particulate autogenous bone grafts into maxillary alveolar clefts in dogs’ (Marx et al. 1984)). This is not to suggest that the figures are made up—they did indeed appear in the search engine results—but neither can they be treated as transparent ‘facts', at the very least because Google Scholar has been criticised for its ‘massive content omissions’ (Jacsó 2005, 208). And yet: you can't really argue with 21,986 citations. 21,986 citations suggests that
In short, what the figures denote is that Judith Butler is a hugely important social theorist. Continuing a long tradition of what can be loosely defined as ‘poststructuralist critical theory’ in the spirit of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, Butler's work has been enormously influential across the social sciences and humanities. She has introduced key concepts such as ‘gender performativity’ and has offered philosophical critique of a wide range of social concepts such as power, gender, the subject, agency, ethics, justice, and knowledge. Her work is cited by philosophers, sociologists, law scholars, historians, geographers and literary theorists, among others. Together with scholars such as Eve Sedgwick, Annamarie Jagose and Jack Halberstam, Butler has become intimately associated with a distinct school of thought (if it can be termed a ‘school of thought’ at all): queer theory. Somewhat dismissively labelled by Dennis Altman as ‘the bastard child of the gay and lesbian movement and postmodern literary theory’ (cited in Binnie 2004, 41), queer theory emerged as a challenge to ‘the normative social ordering of identities and subjectivities along the heterosexual/homosexual binary as well as the privileging of heterosexuality as “natural” and homosexuality as it's deviant and abhorrent “other”’ (Browne and Nash 2010, 5). Yet queer as a body of thought is by no means exhausted by its concern with gendered and sexual subjectivities; rather, ‘it is a philosophical commitment to contesting the logics of normativity’ (Rooke 2009). (It is for this reason, for instance, that Lynne Huffer identifies Foucault's
Indeed, it is a real worry for some queer theorists that ‘queer’ is no longer radical but rather has become part of the very orthodoxies it set out to challenge. As Giffney writes (citing Doty): ‘what happens when a discourse meant “to challenge and break apart conventional categories'’ becomes one itself?’ (Giffney 2004, 73). While queer as a body of thought has, perhaps above all else, sought to expose and interrogate ‘the excesses, the excluded, the margins which are themselves constitutive of the centre’ (Doty 1997, 386), queer theory can itself hardly be seen to lie on the margins of academic enquiry, forgotten, ignored and uncited. 5
Bodies That (Don't) Matter
What all of this suggests is that it is hardly
Except, it seems, in political science. In a recent systematic study of 629 modules in political science and IR taught in United Kingdom (UK) universities, Emma Foster et al. (2013) find that just one per cent were devoted specifically to feminist or gender studies (none of which were compulsory). As they highlight: ‘Very clearly, the findings from our mapping exercise suggest that gender and sexuality are not classified, generally, as core components of a “politics'’ or “international relations'’ degree’ (ibid., 13). Furthermore, if textbooks can be used to gauge the state of debate in a discipline—as, we argue, they should be because they are key tools through which we define the field to our students—then it appears that political science remains distinctly untroubled by queer theory. UK political science textbooks (and we must assume core undergraduate modules in UK universities) will often include some discussion of both feminism and postmodernism, but queer theory is rarely (if ever) mentioned. To take a few examples: Colin Hay's
This is not to suggest that there are no queer theorists or people working in and around issues surrounding gender and sexuality within the field of political science. Quite clearly there are (or, more accurately, we are); indeed, this is precisely our point. There are, in fact, many of us working on issues surrounding gender, sexuality and the body and we are doing so here, in the discipline, right now. Indeed, quite a few of Judith Butler's citations—and at least one of the books dedicated to discussing her work—come from members of political science departments.
8
What we
As Laura Shepherd (2012) notes: ‘The idea of
A key problem regarding queer theory here is that it has not, as yet, had a great deal to say about the state (although see for instance Duggan 1994; Bernstein and Reimann 2001; Brandzel 2005). But it also reflects how states and bodies are nevertheless imagined to reside in different realms: the state is often seen as synonymous with the ‘public’ sphere of politics—a world of government, power and collectivity—whereas the body is frequently imagined to reside in the ‘private’ sphere—a world of intimacy, selfhood and individuality. Yet feminist scholarship has long sought to highlight how this supposedly straightforward division between states and bodies is, in fact, deeply gendered. Indeed, a central project for feminist theory has precisely been to reveal how the state itself is often coded as masculine: that is, it is associated with the public realm of political power and decision-making and, as such, with masculine influence and identity (Youngs 2000a). The body, in contrast, is frequently coded as feminine in its multiple associations with nature, emotions, sexuality, vulnerability, reproduction and the family (Hooper 2000). In so doing, feminists have sought to expose and challenge the complex ways in which ‘body politics'become invisible, denied and erased (for a detailed discussion see Jenkins 2005). (Charlotte Hooper 2000, 39), for instance, has explored how rational masculinity is organised around a series of gendered dualisms (including public/private, mind/body, and inside/outside) that include a ‘fantasy of disembodiment’ which ‘depends upon the apparent invisibility or absence of bodies in social discourse, so that masculine reason could be separate from and untainted from the body’. As such, feminists have sought to reveal the ‘problem of the missing body’ in social and political discourse in order to expose and challenge how this very invisibility is steeped in, and (re)productive of, power relations (Youngs 2000b, 1). In this way, feminists have also sought to show how bodies and politics are intertwined, for the body is:
… a place for political mobilization interconnected with other sites of resistance and political action … bodies are not external to political processes but firmly enmeshed in them, even if they are not necessarily the defining site for action. The lived experience of the body, the identity and definitions attached to bodies, inform and are connected to all political struggles (Harcourt 2009, 23). 10
Queer Theory and Political Science
One of the most crucially important contributions of feminist political analysis, then, has precisely been to gender the state (for a review see Kantola 2006) but also, more fundamentally, to show how the personal is political and, consequently, to shift the focus from politics-as-government to politics-as-power. This latter notion is, of course, shared by many political scientists—indeed, to quote one of the aforementioned textbooks, Hay's (2002, 168)
… power pervades the very conceptual apparatus that seeks to negotiate its terms, including the subject position of the critic; and … this implication of the terms of criticism in the field of power is not the advent of a nihilistic relativism incapable of furnishing norms, but, rather, the very precondition of a politically engaged critique. To establish a set of norms that are beyond power or force is itself a powerful and forceful conceptual practice that sublimates, disguises and extends its own power play through recourse to tropes of normative universality (Butler 1994, 6–7).
Rather than being (only) interested in what truths
Indeed, this is a further reason why queer theory is written out of political science— because it seeks to destabilise rather than to discover foundational truths, it is dismissed as therefore being apolitical (and even downright unethical—see for instance Martha Nussbaum's outright condemnation of Butler's work in Nussbaum (1999)). Yet, as we've noted above, queer theory is fundamentally concerned with questions of power and—far from rejecting ethical enquiry—instead aims to uncover and critique how particular moral orders become naturalised, necessitated and thus positioned as being beyond ethical scrutiny.
12
Equally, what queer theory does is to encourage reflection on what it means for something to
On Disciplinary Technologies and Citation Porn
Let us return to the issue of citation practices in order to illuminate the above themes: it is important to be aware of (and critique) the professional consequences of a citation practice that marginalises scholarly work which focuses on the politics of the body, gender and sexualities. Where and how frequently (and indeed,
The professional consequences of this exclusion are immense. With few, if any citations in mainstream journals and textbooks, political scientists working with queer theory will find it difficult to quantitatively demonstrate the value of their work to colleagues and research councils, and as such may face severe employment and career progression constraints.
Citation practices also impact journal rankings, which in turn impact decisions about where to submit articles, which in turn impact universities' management of research, especially over decisions about which academics working in UK universities will be included in the forthcoming UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) return. In the 2014 REF, only research judged to be 3* and 4* by subject panels will be included in government funding calculations.
13
As a result, several universities are reportedly restricting REF entries with lesser scores (following internal university review of publications) and staff unable to submit articles considered to be 3* and 4* may be excluded from the REF (
Citation practice will also impact the outcomes of new developments in open access research in the UK, which will hold out the prospect of further professional constraints for political scientists working on research into the power relations of the body and sexuality. The UK government announced in 2012 new plans to ensure open access to publically funded research in response to the recommendations of
It is not just the professional consequences of excluding a particular social theory (queer theory in this case) that must concern us. We should be wary of the epistemological consequences, too, for as (Mark Blasius 2001, 3) puts it: ‘which knowledge is getting produced, and which knowledge is not, is itself an issue for further political analysis'. And, for us at least, if such political analysis was driven by a queer theory approach then that would be all the better. This is not to argue for new forms of ‘queer fundamentalism’ (Browne and Nash 2010, 8) in political science. Quite the contrary: what we find attractive about queer politics and queer theorising is precisely that they seek to destabilise and rupture pre-existing categories. These include the category of ‘queer’ itself. So, the essence of queer (although that is an oxymoron) is precisely that there is no one way of doing queer. Queer is not a stable category. Queer itself is contestable as a term and as a discursive terrain—an ‘open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning’ (although this is in itself only one of the things to which ‘queer’ can refer) (Sedgwick 1993, 8). Queer theory might, then, be seen as an approach (or, more accurately, a set of approaches) that tries to open up political space for different voices, and is about questioning and challenging those voices— engaging and critiquing but not drowning out. Queer, for us, then, means listening to the voices of others—it is about contestation, but it is also about self-reflection; it does not mean that one cannot make truth claims, or ethical judgements, or engage in political action—for queer theorists (and activists) do all of these things. But what it
Conclusion
There is indeed something very peculiar about political science as contemporary social theory. Although the scope of political science has, mercifully, expanded beyond a narrowly focused analysis of the exercise of power in the public realm of the state and the society of states, it has yet to fully incorporate analysis of the power relations in the ‘private’ realm and in particular around issues of sexuality, gender and the body. Yet work on these everyday aspects of social relations is commonplace in other disciplines within the social sciences. The absence, in particular, of serious consideration of queer theory is notable and appears to place political science in something of an intellectual silo compared to other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Our analysis of the content of political science textbooks and citation practices suggests that the discipline is (whether knowingly or not) ignoring issues of sexuality, gender, and the body as well as marginalising a hugely influential body of work—queer theory.
The intellectual consequences of ignoring queer theory and everyday bodily experiences of power relations are clear. Political science is failing to fully account for the ways in which the personal is political and how this is fundamental to the ways in which we construct and control sexuality, gender and the body. There are also professional consequences for political scientists who
There is an intellectual and professional need for work that focuses on the power relations of sexuality, gender and the body to be written into our discipline to provide a fuller and more inclusive account of power. Universal ‘truths'around issues of sexuality, gender, and the body have enormous impact on the everyday experiences of us all. How strange it is then that political science fails to consider power relations on issues so central to individual human experience and to social relations. Contemporary political science is queer indeed compared to other social science disciplines and the queering of political science is long overdue.
Footnotes
We are indebted to Ian Bruff, Holly Snaith, Emma Foster and the three anonymous referees for their extremely helpful and insightful comments on earlier iterations of this paper.
1
H-Index or Hirsch Index claims to measure not only the number of publications but also the impact of a scholar's publications.
2
3
This is not to downplay the contribution of researchers who have offered systematic analyses of citation practices precisely in order to expose and critique the highly problematic way in which such practices themselves reflect and reinforce unequal power relations. For example, (Soreanu and Hudson 2008, 123) map citation networks in the field of IR and find that there is a ‘failure to love’ feminist scholarship even though feminists are ‘part of a ring of creativity connecting the emotional energies of different disciplinary fields'. More recently, a high-profile piece by (
, 2) uses data covering more than quarter of a century to show that ‘articles written by women are consistently cited less than articles written by men’ in IR. Our aim here is rather different, which is both
4
We do not wish to imply here that the study of gender, sexuality and the body can be collapsed into it each other nor that they are the exclusive terrain of queer theory. But a key contribution of queer theory has nevertheless been to show how gender, sexuality and the body cannot neatly be separated, either (and, for that matter, are deeply implicated in power relations). Nor do we wish to erase differences within and between queer theorising and feminist and post-structuralist thought more broadly. And yet (again) queer theory is not easily separable from these longer-standing traditions of thought, for it has instead emerged out of, and remains in constant dialogue with, them (along with a diversity of other approaches such as post-colonialism, black studies, trans* studies, crip theory, and so on). Our overarching aim in this article, though, is to highlight how scholarship on gender, sexuality and the body—and, in particular, queer theory (which explores the intersections between them)—are positioned together as being on the outside of political science and how the discipline is impoverished for this.
5
The prominence of queer theory can somewhat perversely be seen in the recent pronouncements on its death (see for instance Ruffolo 2009; ).
6
Accessed 22 January 2013.
7
8
It is very much because we, as individual scholars in political science departments, have been so excited and inspired by this very scholarship—and yet have so frequently been met with bemusement, amusement and, very occasionally, open disdain—that we are writing this article.
9
In the United States, these include Cornell University, Georgetown University, Harvard University, Wesleyan University and in the UK they include the Department of Government at the University of Essex and the School of Government and Public Policy at Strathclyde University.
10
Here we draw from Cameron et al., 2013.
12
This is not to suggest for a moment that there is one, distinctive ‘queer ethics'—for example, we are grateful to one reviewer for rightly noting that a number of queer scholars have highlighted how ‘a strict “anti-normative” posture for queer theory and the “ideal queer” promotes a kind of neoliberal flexibility and mobility that excludes many’. An important task for queer scholarship has therefore been to unpick and unpack the ‘disconnect between morality and ethics’ (). Our key point here, then, is to argue that queer theorists are centrally concerned with—and do not refuse or ignore—ethical questions. It is deeply ironic (and troubling) that queer scholarship is so often characterised as somehow being outside of, or antithetical to, ethical enquiry.
16
According to Dame Janet Finch the annual costs of open access to UK universities will be around £60 million (
17
Academics whose universities cannot or will not pay the costs may have to fund publications in peer-reviewed journals out of their salaries in order to enhance their career prospects.