Introduction: Feminist State Theory

This is an interesting historical moment to reflect on feminist state theory. Both the response to the global financial meltdown and the widely celebrated U.S. presidential election signal a faith in the role and promise of state-based politics. Yet it is also true that currents of recent scholarship in a variety of settings have decentered the state. Political theorists of violence, law, and biopolitics have expanded the concept of sovereignty to address distinctly non-state-based contexts, while transnational feminist studies of citizenship have critically dismantled the logic of state sovereignty. The field of development studies has elaborated the need to broaden notions of security beyond military understandings to include the fulfillment of basic needs, and feminist analyses of violence against women have creatively recast our understanding of security. Feminist scholars have also scrutinized the internally contradictory and disciplinary apparatuses of welfare policies. Across various regions, feminists are contesting both the paring down of the state's welfare responsibilities and the intensification of security functions in post-9/11 geopolitical alliances. When taken together, this historical conjuncture and these various critiques of sovereignty, security, and welfare call for more complex modes of engagement with states.

Within feminist theory, states occupy a vexed space. Whereas states have often supported feminist goals, states are also the locus of many of the problems that occupy feminists, such as militarism, moral regulation, and the cheapening of women's labor. This special section of the journal explores this central, and old, tension within feminist state theory, offering a perspective that foregrounds geographic location. This emphasis on location emerges from a philosophical suspicion of the universalizing gestures of state theory. Despite the feminist normative opposition to views from nowhere in particular that purport to be relevant everywhere, feminist state theory has staged its key debates with little specification of state contexts. Geographic coordinates and national histories remain largely undescribed in classics within the field of feminist state theory.¹ What do we mean when we speak of "the state," and how does location inflect our understandings? The articles in this section presume that feminists in different locations vary in their relationship to states and that these differences potentially affect the orientation of their theoretical scholarship on the state.

An emphasis on location does not imply a neglect of common ideological and discursive shifts in how states are approached. Neoliberal globalization and the heightened militarized security objectives post-9/11 have led to cross-national patterns of questioning the role of states in markets and to foregrounding the protective functions of states. The contributions to this special section emerged from conversations and presentations conducted at an international symposium on interdisciplinary approaches to feminist state theory held at the University of Toronto on 6-7 March 2009. This symposium emphasized that, unlike more disciplined and conventional versions of state theory dominated by political science and legal studies, feminist state theories draw on other domains such as literary studies, anthropology, queer theory, development studies, history, and sociology.² This special section reflects this diversity. Two of the contributors, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and You-me Park, are literary theorists who have records of writing about states and imperialism. Hagar Kotef, working in the field of political philosophy, has written elsewhere about urgent issues such as Israel's occupation. Margaret Little is an academic in political studies and women's studies and an antipoverty activist, while Lynne Marks is a historian interested in issues related to gender history and the social history of religion. Gita Sen is a professor of public policy and a founding member of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, or DAWN, an enduring example of a cross-border network of activists and scholars in the global South.

Each contribution charts a path for innovative feminist engagements with states, steering clear of rigid presupposed teleologies—whether it is the state as a liberating force or as a coercive and co-opting force. Sunder Rajan and Sen argue strongly against ideological purism, articulating modes of engagement that are wary of the dangers of governance feminism while also being attentive to the redistributive potentialities of state...