J U D E H OW E L L

Gender and Civil Society: Time for Cross-Border Dialogue

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Abstract
This article sets out to provide a framework for thinking about the gendered nature of civil society. The rst section looks at how civil society researchers, both past and present, have failed to provide any analysis of the gendered relations of civil society. This is not least because the family is posited as a residual boundary-marker for the purposes of clearing the analytic path for the investigation of statecivil society relations. Similarly, feminist researchers have not reworked civil society theories to explain the engendering of civil society, a key reason for this being that civil society is not an organizing category for analyzing gender relations. In the nal section we propose a framework of analysis that uses a circuit of gender relations to trace the ow of gendered norms, values, and practices across the sites of the state, market, civil society, and the family.

The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union heralded profound changes in the political, economic and welfare regimes across Eastern Europe. As young East Europeans poured into neighboring Western countries in search of a better life and newly founded states began to seek membership of the European Union, the jigsaw of Europe changed dramatically.
Winter 2007 Pages 415436 doi:10.1093/sp/jxm023 # The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] Advance Access publication December 8, 2007

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When East European dissidents and intellectuals such as Adam Michnik in Poland and Havel in Czechoslovakia drew inspiration from the language of civil society to articulate an alternative vision of society, they could not have imagined how their revitalization of the discourse of civil society would give fuel to democracy movements across the world. Nor could they have anticipated how regime change would alter the fabric of everyday life in contradictory ways and with differential impacts for men and women. The gendered nature of social transformation did not pre-occupy the minds of East European dissidents. Similarly, feminist theorists trying to make sense of the profound social and political changes across Europe have paid scant attention to the engendering processes of civil society activism. Indeed this is not surprising. Theories of civil society and gender oppression pass each other by, like ships in the night. Neither has the other in its gaze. It is thus the purpose of this article to reveal how the theoretical frameworks we deploy to make sense of the world frame what we see and how we see this. This in turn has implications for how we set about visualizing alternatives. The article begins by outlining how feminist theorists have engaged with the idea of civil society and how civil society theorists have conceptualized gender issues. It reects on why both theoretically and empirically these two bodies of thought should be woven more closely together. In the nal section we put forward a framework for conceptualizing the relation between gender and civil society.

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Feminist Theory and Civil Society: the Civil Society Gap

Civil society theorists, both past and present, have paid scant attention to the gendered nature of civil society, whilst feminist theorists have engaged little with civil society theories. This is not to say that women are not active players in the theatres of civil society or that gender issues do not become the subject of political struggle. Indeed womens studies, gender studies, feminist economics, feminist historians, feminist social policy theorists, politics, and international relations have produced a rich literature on the gendered nature of historical and contemporary economic, social, and political processes.1 Feminist theorists have used the frameworks of social movements, voluntary action, rights, equality, civic engagement, and emancipation to understand womens political struggles, while civil society theorists have pointed to womens activism to illustrate the vibrancy of actual civil societies. The problem is rather that the way civil society is conceptualized is not through the lens of gender and

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that how gender relations are explained has not led to a re-evaluation of civil society theories from a gender perspective. Since the mid- to late 1990s the language of civil society has been increasingly deployed by feminist researchers exploring womens movements and organizations in the elds of development studies, political science, and feminist history of social policy (Rabo 1996; Howell and Mulligan 2004; Beckwith 2000; Howell 1998; Phillips 2002). Feminist historians such as Sklar (1999, 1993), McCarthy (1999, 2001, 2003), Koven and Michel (1993), Michel and Koven (1990), and Skocpol (1992) have carried out stellar work on the historical role of womens organizing in the USA and Europe in shaping state welfare provision, employment, and social legislation and public values.2 Moreover their work has highlighted the importance of political context in shaping womens activism, and the signicance of womens voluntarism in bringing women into the public sphere and in constructing the boundaries of gender.3 Increasingly from the mid-1990s they begin to weave the language of civil society into their work, reecting the more general re-insertion of civil society into the conceptual armory of social scientists.4 This growing literature has not however provoked a critique of the gender-blindness of much civil society theory or a re-working thereof, and as Sklar laments (1999, p. 202, footnote 1) there is still much to be done with regard to integrating womens activism into our understanding of the larger political culture. Though there has been some interrogation of the gendered nature of social capital (Edwards, Franklin, and Holland 2003; Lowndes 2004; Molyneux 2002; Goulbourne and Solomos 2003), this has not extended more generally to the concept of civil society.5 This conceptual gap is no mere accident; on the contrary it reveals fundamental differences in the epistemological premises of these two elds of enquiry. Let us then rst examine how feminist theorists have engaged with the idea of civil society in relation to gender issues. For feminist thinkers the key conceptual divide lies between the public (state, market, and civil society) and the private (family) as socially constructed sites. Civil society has not been a conceptual reference point for theorizing gender relations, even though women activists may have used the language of civil society in their rhetoric. As Anne Phillips (2002, p. 72) points out, Civil society is not a signicant organizing category for feminists, and rarely gures in the feminist taxonomy. Yet, given the ambiguity in political theory around public and private, this dichotomy could have provided an opportunity for feminist and civil society theorists to engage in a common dialogue. In political theory, as Susan Moller Okin (1979, pp. 68 70) points out, the dichotomy is laden with ambiguities in

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its points of reference and meanings. In one rendering, the dichotomy is between state and society, as in the familiar divide between public and private property; in another rendering, it distinguishes between the domestic and the non-domestic (see also Pateman 1988a, p. 102 for further discussion). How we understand the public and the private has implications for where we position civil society in relation to the state and the family. Hence civil society can be understood alternately as either part of the private or as part of the public. As Jonathan Hearn (2001, p. 342) notes, civil society is sometimes treated as primarily a matter of private interactions, especially in regard to the market, and sometimes as primarily a matter of publicness and the formation of collective identities and agendas. Though civil society is not the key organizing category for feminist scholars, there are different perspectives on whether the family is part or not of civil society. In dening civil society as part of the public, the arena of civil society is for some feminists as excluding to women as the concept and institutions of the state. Whether or not we accept the current dominant framing of civil society as in opposition to the state, this is uninteresting for feminist scholars as the key axis of analysis is between the public and the private. Similarly, the tortuous discussions over the denitional boundaries between civil society, state, and market in which many civil society theorists indulge appear irrelevant and of little consequence to many feminists, for whom the family gures larger in importance than the public (state, civil society, and market). What matters analytically is not the demarcation of boundaries but understanding how the relations between males and females in the family shape the norms, practices, and behaviors in the public realm, that is, in state, civil society, and market institutions (Phillips 2002, pp. 73 5). For others, though, the family does form an integral part of civil society. Carole Pateman (1989, pp. 1323, quoted in Phillips 2002, p. 88), for example, views the sphere of domestic life as at the heart of civil society rather than apart or separate from it. Drude Dahlerup (1994) likewise includes the family within civil society, though she does not justify this position. However, the relationship between the family and civil society, and in particular whether the category of the family can be subsumed within civil society, has not been a topic of analytic interest within feminist theory. Yet whether we place the family outside of or within civil society does have ramications for how we theorize civil society and gender. When Pateman suggests that the family is at the heart of civil society, she implicitly challenges the dominant modernist and voluntarist view of civil society as free of primordial and blood

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relations. Such a perspective could in fact refresh civil society theorizing so that it is better equipped to account for the persistence of ethnic and primordial blood-based relations in civil society organizations, as emphasized in many studies of civil societies in so-called developing countries, (though more often than not without acknowledging that such relations also manifest themselves in civil societies in so-called economically developed contexts) (Maina 1998; Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Obadare 2004; James 2004). Separating out the family and civil society reies the family as a distinct sphere with clear boundaries between the state and civil society. Drawing the lines this way has allowed civil society theorists to evade tackling the question of how the engendering of men and women shapes states and civil societies. In feminist theory the placing of civil society within the public coupled with the primacy of the public versus private analytic axis has led to the engendering processes in civil society becoming lost from view. Given that the socially constructed public versus private divide has given rise to a eld of enquiry around women and the state, both theoretical and empirical, there is no logical reason why feminist political theorists should not also interrogate civil society as a socially constructed site of gendered relations. Unpacking the public in this way would allow feminists to theorize better how civil society discourses, spaces and organizations, and practices are shaped by, and in turn reproduce, particular congurations of gender relations. Whilst feminist political theorists for the reasons given have not drawn upon the concept of civil society as an organizing category for their analyses or critiqued theories of civil society from a gender perspective, civil society theorists too have evaded any critical interrogation of civil society from a gender perspective, as will be demonstrated in the next section.

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Gender and Civil Society: The Gender Gap

It is curious that despite the extensive work on gender carried out in the elds of political theory, development studies, social policy, and international relations, civil society theorists have barely touched upon the relationship between gender and civil society. This is not to say that there have not been studies of womens organizing; on the contrary there are many. The point is that the broad arena of civil society has not been analyzed through a gender lens. Whilst feminist theorists have centered their analysis on the social construction of the public/private divide, civil society theorists have been more preoccupied with the relationship between the state and civil society and to a lesser degree with the market. Where they have cast

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a glance at gender, this has been conned to a cursory discussion of whether the family or household is part of civil society or not. The treatment of this historically has in turn inuenced contemporary thinking. Even then, this relationship has been of marginal interest and not one to arouse much passion. Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Rousseau, Ferguson, Paine, and de Tocqueville, counterposed civil society not only to the state but also to the family. Their prime interest lay in the state-civil society relation. In exploring this relation they operated with a gendered notion of the public based on the abstract individual male. For Hegel civil society is positioned between the two hierarchical poles of the (patriarchal) family and the state. As economic relations are integral to civil society, civil society is dened as both non-state and non-family. Hegel excludes the family from civil society not only because the family is the rst context in which the abstract legal person is situated but also because the norms and values governing family life are distinct. The family is assumed to be a unity, based on love, free of conict between its members, and from which its (male) head enters the world of civil society (Cohen and Arato 1995, pp. 62831, n. 48). Among contemporary writers on civil society the Hegelian distinction between family and civil society is, whether implicit or explicit, commonplace,6 (see for example, Biekart, 1999; Carothers 1999, p. 207; Diamond 1994, p. 5; White 1994, p. 379; Hawthorn 2001, pp. 26986; Ottaway and Carothers 2000; Van Rooy 1998, pp. 6 30). One of the few contemporary writers to engage more systematically with the family in relation to civil society, public spheres and the state is Juergen Habermas. In his discussion of the transformation of the eighteenth century bourgeois public sphere Habermas distinguishes the family from civil society (understood as the realm of commodity exchange and social labor) and state. For Habermas (1989, pp. 46 7) the family is both a precursor to civil society and a site of intimacy. Whilst the family gives the illusion of autonomy, voluntariness, and humanity, it plays a key role in reproducing social norms and values and patriarchal authority. In tracing the decline of the bourgeois public sphere through the processes of urbanization, the rise of the welfare state and mass democracy, Habermas (1989, pp. 1545) paints a picture of a weakening, income-dependent, and consumerist family that loses its functions of social internalization and welfare protection, and becomes increasingly disengaged from social production. Although the family forms an important element in Habermas account of the transformation of the public sphere, he does not

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explore any further the gendered nature of public spheres. This task has again been left to feminist thinkers such as Joan Landes, Mary Ryan, and Nancy Fraser. Mary Ryan (1998, pp. 195222), for example, documents the entry of North American women into politics from the early nineteenth century onwards, thereby undermining Habermas depiction of a decline of the bourgeois public sphere. Ryan goes on to reveal the profusion of counter-publics that were neither liberal, nor bourgeois, nor necessarily male. Joan Landes (1988) demonstrates how women were excluded in the new republican sphere in France through discursive practices that belittled womens participation in political life. In defense of the normative concept of public spheres in actually existing democracies, Nancy Fraser (1997, pp. 1367) argues that any adequate conception of the public sphere has not only to bracket social differences such as gender but also to eliminate social inequality if citizens are to engage on an equal basis. In contrast to Habermas, Jean Cohen (1998, p. 37)7 and also Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato (1995, p. 631, n.48) suggest that the family is the rst association of civil society. In their idealized depiction of the family as an egalitarian social unit, the family provides an arena where the principles of horizontal solidarity, collective identity and equal participation are rst experienced and constantly reproduced. Such principles in turn form the bedrock of other associations of civil society and democratic political life. This picture of the family, however, glosses over the unequal power relations and hierarchies prevalent within families, often drawn along gender and inter-generational lines and underpinning processes of exploitation, violence and abuse within families. Though Cohen, Arato, and Habermas unusually give some justication for their positioning of the family in relation to civil society, most civil society theorists refer to the family merely as a boundary marker to civil society, their prime concern being the state-civil society relation. Moreover most writings on state-civil society relations make no reference at all to the family, or indeed gender relations. As a result most civil society theorists fail to investigate how gender relations permeate states and civil societies and how these gendered sites of power reinforce norms and values governing how women and men should and do behave. Why then have civil society theorists ignored the family and by default gender relations? The reasons are at least threefold. First, such gender blindness reects a more general failure in political theory and other social sciences to absorb the concepts, methods, and theories developed by feminist researchers over more than three decades. For example, feminist political theorists and philosophers

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such as Carol Pateman (1998a, 1998b, 1989), Nancy Fraser (1992, 1997), Anne Phillips (1991, 1998), Jean Bethke Eshtain (1981), Susan Moller Okin (1979), and Catherine MacKinnon (1989) have pioneered research on gender relations and the gendered assumptions that underpin political thought over the last three centuries.8 Carole Pateman (1988b, p. 114) exposes the patriarchal underpinnings in the works of contract theorists such as Locke and Rousseau, who, in Patemans words, see women as unable to transcend their bodily natures in the manner required of individuals who are to . . .uphold the universal laws of civil society.9 Anne Phillips, for example, draws attention to the seemingly innocent but highly gendered view of the public and the private apparent in Hegels work. In the Philosophy of Right (1821) Hegel depicts women as having their substantive destiny in the family, while mens lives were played out in the state and civil society (section 166, cited in Phillips 2002, p. 72). Post-structuralist theorists such as Judith Butler (1992), Judith Butler and Joan Scott (1992), Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips (1992), Joan Scott (1997), Linda Zerilli (1994), and Julie Kristeva (1981) use genealogical and interpretative frames of analysis (Squires 1999, pp. 105111) to query and destabilize seemingly xed binary concepts such as gender and sex, to challenge basic assumptions of political theory, and to highlight the uid and inherently political nature of meanings and concepts. The absence in the writings of most civil society theorists of any critical interrogation of civil society from a gender perspective is thus symptomatic of a more general tendency in social science disciplines to ghettoise gender and womens studies. One exception here is Steven DeLues (1997) survey of political theory and civil society, which includes a chapter on feminist responses to civil society.10 A second reason for civil society theorists not problematizing the family and for separating it from civil society hinges on the conceptualization of civil society as a modern phenomenon. Gellner, Hegel, Marx, and Fergusson all link the emergence of civil society to capitalist development and the gradual shift from agricultural to industrial societies. Hence, forms of social organization based upon familial, blood-ties are treated as traditional and so doomed to attenuate with processes of urbanization, industrialization, and modernization. Finally, the revitalization of the concept of civil society in the late 1980s drew intellectual sustenance from the past. By looking backwards to justify the present, civil society theorists succumbed to the same trap as their predecessors. That is, they took the family to be merely a boundary-marking device that had little relevance to understanding the relationship between the state and civil society.

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This silence on gender and civil society suggests a more pervasive hegemonic framing that acquiesces in rather than challenges the gendered relations of civil society. In most theoretical texts on civil society and empirical studies, civil society is discussed as though gender were irrelevant. This is despite the attention given to gender issues in international and national institutions. Even though gender is now a globalized concept, civil society researchers continue their analyses oblivious to the gender content of the UN Millennium Development Goals or global treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Such a perspective implicitly reinforces the notion that the public is the natural domain of the male and the family that of the female. Similarly, the inclusion of economic relations within civil society in the writings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political thinkers such as Ferguson, Tocqueville, Hegel, and Marx in turn discursively reinforced the separation of the political economy (and later classical and neo-classical economics) from the household economy, thereby masking the structural interrelations between the domestic sphere, civil society and capitalist economy. In challenging these gendered dichotomies, feminist thinkers have also criticized the narrow and dominant understanding of politics which excludes the private domestic world. Instead, they have argued for a broader conceptualization of politics that extends beyond the study of formal political institutions to include all aspects of social life (McClure 1992, p. 346). Does it matter then that civil society and feminist researchers have not engaged in a serious dialogue with each other? Clearly it does at both the theoretical and practical levels. Had civil society theorists engaged more with the feminist problematization of the publicprivate divide, they might have been better equipped conceptually to explore how the family shapes norms and practices in the sphere of civil society and how gendered power relations pervade the spheres of state, market, civil society, and family. This might have led civil society researchers to lavish more attention on issues of power and subordination within the realm of civil society, thereby introducing caution into debates that portray civil society as the realm of the benign, virtuous and harmonious, in contrast to the venal, oppressive state. Moreover, it might have steered civil society theory and discussion away from denitional marathons towards a more productive focus on the interconnectedness, uidity, and permeability of spheres. Similarly, if feminist theorists were to apply their theories, concepts, and methods to the analysis and theorization of civil society, they too could reveal more clearly the unevenness of civil society, the production and reproduction of power relations within

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its folds, and the potential of civil society as both a conservative and a progressive force for men and women. Given that politicians across the ideological spectrum have embraced the language of civil society for different purposes, feminist researchers could be more on the alert when the language of civil society is used to justify user choice, state deregulation or community provision, initiatives that might prove to be double-edged swords for women.

Towards a Reconceptualization of Gender and Civil Society

In pursuing a gender perspective on civil society, discussions around whether the family is a part of or separate from civil society are clearly insufcient. Placing the family outside civil society has allowed researchers to treat this as an uninteresting, residual boundary marker. Subsuming the family within civil society allows the family and with it gender relations to disappear from analytic view. Moreover locking a gendered analysis of civil society to the interrogation of the family is to reduce gender relations to this one domain and its effects in the spheres of the state and market to subsidiary phenomena. In the end, however, whether or not the gendered relations of civil society become problematized depends a good deal on power relations within society that nd expression in academic, political, and practical discourses. To start to problematize these we need to sharpen our intellectual tools and move beyond a discussion about the boundaries between the family, civil society, and the state. In this section we put forward a conceptual framework for a gendered analysis of civil society. This framework builds upon the pioneering work of Diane Elson (1998), who has put forward a conceptual model of the political economy that factors in the domestic. We take this framework as a starting-point for analysis because it allows the analyst to focus on key structural nodes of power, their absorption of and also production of meanings, norms, and values, and the subsequent possibilities for change and destabilization, which a focus on solely discourse and identities or on structure would not readily permit. We develop this model further by factoring in civil society and by introducing a circuit of gender relations. In Elsons tripartite model of production, the sectors of the private, public, and domestic are woven together through circuits. The circuits of the market (through which goods, services, money, and labor ow), of taxes and benets (through which income transfers and public goods ow), and of communications (through which information, rumors, ideas, values, and meanings ow) connect the private, public, and domestic sectors. The public, private, and domestic sectors in turn feed into these circuits. To illustrate, the market

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feeds commercial values through the communications network, the state transmits regulatory values, and the domestic feeds provisioning values. These values in turn can have positive as well as negative dimensions. Thus, the domestic sector may feed in values of caring and giving as well as of patriarchy (Elson 1998, p. 6). Elson argues that both the sectors and the circuits are gendered. Hence the domestic sector constitutes, and is constituted by, the circuits of the market, of taxes and benets, and of communications. To illustrate, the market relies on a labor force that is reproduced daily and across generations in the domestic sector using unpaid labor. Market transactions are frequently gendered to the disadvantage of women, as reected in the exclusion of women from contracts or certain marketplaces. The tax and benet system is often based upon an implicit assumption that women are dependent on men, though in some contexts where both men and women are in waged employment, this assumption is increasingly undermined (Lewis 2005). Essential to the communications network are communicative people, and the primary locus for producing such people is the domestic sector (1998, p. 6). Elsons model provides a useful starting point for conceptualizing gender and civil society. We develop this model in two ways. First, we introduce the forgotten site of civil society, which receives no mention in Elsons model. This is partly because Elsons analysis is concerned with the discourse of macro-economics rather than politics and partly because, like other feminist theorists, she subsumes civil society within the public.11 Hence in Elsons model the domestic stands in contrast to the private (enterprises) and the state. In the discourse of politics, the domestic is presented as the private and contrasted with the public sphere of government, trade unions, factories, and clubs, a depiction of the public that blends the governmental and non-governmental. As Elson rightly claims, in both the macroeconomic and political discourses the domestic is taken for granted, and not deemed worthy of further analysis. Like the public and domestic sites, civil society, too, is made up of a diversity of associational forms, varying in their size, forms of participation, purpose, duration, values, ideologies, degree of formality, and interconnections with the market and state. These can range from burial societies to single mothers groups, trades unions, animal rights groups, football clubs, business associations, global social movements, and world social forums. What unites these diverse units is the dynamic of voluntary solidarity. For civil society to sustain itself, people need to be able to associate voluntarily (in contrast to the ascriptive ties of the family) and to have a common reason to associate. We prefer here the concept of sites

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to sectors, as the term allows for more fuzzy, porous, and evolving boundaries than the more compartmentalized, legalistic, and rigid image that sector evokes. Furthermore, we conceptualize these sites as concentrations of power galvanized by distinct dynamicsin the case of the state, the dynamic of coercion and regulation; in the case of the market, the dynamic of prot and accumulation; in the case of the household, the dynamic of material and affective provisioning; and in the case of civil society, the dynamic of voluntary solidarity.12 By separating civil society from the state, we can explore the interconnections between civil society and the household and how these in turn refract upon the state. While the communications network provides a channel through which civil society can transmit ideas about solidarity, trust, citizenship, and the values of association, it is in the household that people have their rst experience of association. It is here that they develop a sense of empathy towards others, trust in strangers, a sense of citizenship and responsibility towards those beyond their immediate household or family unit. Just as the market depends on the unpaid work (and to some degree the paid work) (Jenson 1997) of the household in regenerating its labor force, so too civil society depends on the unpaid work of the household, such as the care of dependents, child-rearing, and other household activities, to free its participants to commit time and energy to its causes. Given that in most societies it is women who take the main responsibility for these household activities, participation in civil society that requires at least time becomes a gendered activity. Compared then to the civil society theories discussed earlier which treat the family (domestic) as a residual boundary marker in order to focus attention on civil society/state or civil society/state/ market relations, the model proposed here incorporates the four sites of family, civil society, state, and market. By treating the family as separate from civil society, we are able to concentrate on the specic power relations that are played out in the realm of the domestic. In doing so it becomes harder to dispose of the family analytically as a mere boundary marker for each site is infused and inter-connected by a circuit of gender relations as we discuss next. Second, we put forward a circuit of gender relations, comprising culturally specic roles, identities, norms, and values that delineate men and women as socially distinct beings.13 This circuit of gender relations ows between, and connects the sites of, market, state, household, and civil society. By conceptualizing gender relations as a circuit, we free it from any essentially given location. Compared with the civil society theories discussed previously, the idea of a circuit of gender relations that permeates all four sites means that

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gender relations, as long argued by feminist analysts, can no longer be conceptualized as being located in, solely derivative from and contained within the family. Thus, it recognizes not only that the household is the primary site in which young bodies become impregnated, from the moment of birth, with gendered identities, values, norms, and roles that make up the gender order of any particular society, but also that other sites of power such as the market, state, and civil society can also create, reafrm, usurp, and destabilize any gender order. Furthermore, this conceptualization allows the disaggregation of the household so that the hidden gender relations can surface and be analyzed. This avoids the trap that most civil society theorists fall into: that is, after deploying the household as a boundary-marking device, they dispense with it as analytically irrelevant for understanding civil society and the state and fail to interrogate its internal relations, which are constituted in part through gender relations. The circuit of gender relations also allows us to take into account the gendered socializing effects of different institutions such as schools and faith-based organizations and how these in turn refract upon the state, family, and market. In Elsons model the private, public, and domestic sectors pass different messages through the circuit of communications, which reect the organizing dynamics of these sectors. If we take the organizing dynamic of civil society to be voluntary solidarity, civil society then transmits the values of voluntariness, common cause, and solidarity, which contain both positive (generosity, sociability, peacefulness) and negative dimensions (exclusion, prejudice, violence). Similarly, the sites of civil society, state, market and household also transmit through the gender relations circuit different messages reecting their engendering organizational dynamic. Gendered norms and values distribute men and women across the sites of state, market, civil society, and household in different ways. Gendered hierarchies prevail in the state, where male bodies inhabit most positions of leadership and authority, while gendered divisions of labor characterize certain markets (textiles are often dominated by female workers in many countries and the steel industry by male workers, for example). The site of civil society not only is constituted by the gender relations circuit but also shapes this in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways. When nationalist movements deploy the symbol of motherhood to depict the nation, they promote an image of gender relations that draws on womens reproductive role. Or, when civil society associations exclude women, either implicitly through gendered norms or explicitly through regulations, as with working mens clubs, then men and women become

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distributed unevenly across the terrain of civil society. The model proposed here allows us then to explore how gendered norms, values, and identities are circulated through and shaped in different sites, a model which makes gender integral to the analysis of states, markets, civil societies, and households. It should be noted that the circuit of gender relations is concerned with a diversity of gender identities, norms, and values, where the relationship between gender and sexuality is not automatically given (Connell 1995, p. 51; Martin 1992; Pringle 1992). It thereby includes within its analytic vision trans-sexuality, homosexuality, and diverse masculine and feminine identities. In this way it becomes possible to investigate gender-issue organizational forms in civil society such as global transsexual activism, chauvinistic male organizing, feminist mens groups, or pro-life groups. The idea of a circuit of gender relations allows the study not only of gender-issue groups but also of how forms of organizing in civil society become gendered, regardless of their ultimate purpose, and how this is shaped by the circulation of the particular gendered norms, values, and identities that are privileged in different sites. Furthermore the circuit of gender relations extends beyond historically dened national boundaries. Though the specic manifestations of gender relations will be historically and culturally specic, the circuit of gender relations traverses the national, local, and global. In this way it becomes possible to understand how gender relations pervade multilateral institutions and shape civil society activities and discourses at the global level and contrasts with the previous discussion of civil society theories which have focussed on nationally bounded civil societies. This model thus operates with four rather than three sites of concentrated power relations, namely, the state, civil society, market, and household. By breaking down the public into the state and civil society, the model enables an analysis that recognizes the different organizing principles of the state (regulation and coercion) and civil society (voluntary solidarity) and the connections made between these through the gender relations circuit. By positing a circuit of gender relations the model frees gender relations from afnity to any particular site and allows an analysis of engendering processes across all four sites. This contrasts with the civil society theories discussed earlier that treat the household as a mere boundary marker and the repository of gender dynamics. Another advantage of this model over static formulations of state, civil society, and the market lies in the interconnections between circuits and the notion of autonomy. In liberal and neo-liberal theories of the state, state institutions are often conceptualized as

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autonomous of social relations (Dunleavy and OLeary 1987) . Such a perspective has also inuenced liberal studies of civil society. The model here undermines the hegemony of autonomy. The notion of sectors, the prevalence of negative (and reductive) denitions of civil society organizations as non-prot and non-governmental, and the dominance of the civil society versus state debate have all contributed to the denition of these sites within rigid boundaries. Civil society theorists have deployed the concept of autonomy as a distinguishing feature of civil society-type association. This concern with autonomy leads analysts to focus more on the boundaries between regimented sectors than on their permeation by social relations. In contrast the model here allows us to understand how particular gendered norms, ideologies, practices, and values work their way through the power sites of the state, civil society, market, and family and position men and women in different ways, and why particular gender patterns become congealed at certain points and moments. Recognizing this uidity makes it harder at the conceptual and practical levels to ignore the inuence of gender relations in apparently separate domains such as the state and civil society or in apparently non-gender specic issues such as architecture, health, and the environment, or the cross-cutting of gender relations with other organizers of identity such as class, religion, sexuality, and ethnicity. Furthermore, it also gives us scope to examine the blockages in ows, and in particular, ows of men and women between sites of power.

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Conclusion
There is no doubt that research on civil society, both theoretically and empirically, has experienced a renaissance since the 1980s. Much of this has been preoccupied with the role of civil society in democratization processes; with relations between the state and civil society in different political and welfare contexts and the intersection of civil society and market relations. So it is at rst glance curious that there has been so little theorization of the engendering processes of civil society. This is not for want of an extensive body of research on the economic, political, cultural, and historical aspects of gender relations. Instead there has been a signal failure on the part of civil society and feminist political researchers to engage with each others frameworks for the reasons given. This article has put forward a framework for re-conceptualizing the relation between gender and civil society. This framework overcomes on the one hand the predilection amongst civil society

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researchers to deposit gender relations into the category of the family and then proceed to ignore these relations; and on the other hand the tendency for feminist theorists to deposit civil society into the box of the public so that it too disappears from analytic view. There is much more that remains to be done. We need to re-write the historical account of the civil society concept in Western political thought from a gender perspective, as well as similar ideas used in other traditions. We need to bolster our knowledge about the gender composition of civil society in different historical and political contexts and deepen our theoretical understanding of how civil societies work from a gender perspective. We need to understand more about how gender discourses, norms, and practices permeate different sites of power at particular moments and why these change in a crosssection of political and cultural contexts. Are the barriers that women face in engaging in politics at national levels or in the market different to those they encounter in civil society and how can this be best theorized? These are but some of the issues that call for further investigation. A rst step will be for civil society and feminist theorists to engage more closely in cross-border dialogue.

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NOTES
Jude Howell is Professor and Director of the Centre for Civil Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her recent books include: Gender and Civil Society (co-edited with Diane Mulligan) 2005, Routledge; Civil Society and Development (co-authored with Jenny Pearce) 2002, Lynne Rienner Inc.; and Governance in China, 2004, Rowman and Littleeld Publishers, Inc. She has written extensively on issues relating to civil society, governance, development policy, and gender, and much of her empirical work focuses on China. Her current research projects include female rural political participation in China, with case-studies of Hunan and Shandong provinces, labor organizing in China and organizing around marginalized interests in China. She is currently directing a 5.24 million Economic Social Research Council research programme on Non-governmental Public Action. Her own project under this programme investigates the effects of the increasing securitization of aid policy in the post-911 context on civil societies in the South, including case-studies of India, Afghanistan, and Kenya. I am grateful to the very useful comments of two anonymous reviewers. Direct all correspondence to Centre for Civil Society, Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE. Tel. 44 207 955 7360; Fax 44 207 955 6039; Email: [email protected]. 1. See for example Kabeer (1994), Helman (1999), Lewis (1992), Mies (1983), Perrons (2002, 2003), Elson (1995), Keck and Sikkink (1998),

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Power (2000), Zellerer and Vyortkin (2004), Molyneux (1985), Pringle and Watson (1992). 2. McCarthys (2001) excellent edited volume on Women, Philanthropy and Civil Society extends research on this theme beyond the US and Europe to other contexts such as Brazil, Egypt, India, and Korea. 3. Sklar (1999) examines womens voluntarism in the USA between 1890 and 1920. She considers the role of organizations such as the Womens Christian Temperance Union, the National Consumers League and the social settlement movement in creating new models for addressing social issues. In her work she highlights the importance of partnerships between the state and civil society and explores the multiple reasons for the decline in womens activism. Similarly, McCarthy (1999) draws out the importance of womens organizing through religion in propelling them into public life in the USA, particularly in Protestant denominations. In her historical study of civil society in the USA (2003) she also underlines the role played by voluntary associations in constructing the boundaries of gender, race, and class. It is interesting to note how feminist work in the 1980s had not yet begun to deploy the language of civil society to conceptualize womens organizing (see for example Walkowitz 1980 in her writings on the Ladies National Association or Molyneux). 4. For example Skocpols (1992) outstanding analysis of the political origins of social policy in the United States does not draw on the concept of civil society in analyzing the rise of womens organizations and maternalist politics and social policies. Koven (1993) uses the term civil society occasionally in the chapter on maternalist politics but uses it to describe how womens organizing challenged the distinction between civil society as the site of private productive and reproductive activities and the state as the site of public political life. For a discussion of the gradual resurrection of the concept of civil society into political and academic discourses, see Keane (1988) and for its encounter with the eld of development studies see Howell and Pearce (2001). 5. However, in the practical world of development Molyneux (2002, p. 169) notes the parallel development of work on social capital and that on gender, as reected in the absence of any discussion of social capital in the World Banks report Engendering Development (2001). 6. However, most writers often depart from this in positioning the economy as separate from civil society, which is conceived as the realm of voluntary association around shared concerns. Furthermore, it should be noted that most writers are so centered on the relationship between civil society and the state that they do not even mention the boundary with the family. 7. Jean Cohen (1998, p. 37) states, I understand civil society as a sphere of social interaction distinct from economy and state, composed above all of associations (including the family) and publics. 8. See also the work of Butler and Scott (1992), Squires (1999), and Randall (1987).

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9. Another reason for the failure of civil society theorists to engage with the household lies in their emphasis on the voluntary nature of civil society, which contrasts with the ascriptive nature of relations within the family. 10. This is an interesting and valuable chapter but it details the positions of feminists on political theory, and in particular the gendered nature of the public-private divide, rather than specically interrogating the concept civil society from a feminist perspective. In his review of three books on global civil society, Waterman (2003, p. 304) comments on the remarkable lack of engagement of international relations theory with feminist writing on globalization and international relations. 11. It should be noted that Jane Jenson (1997) draws attention to the role of the non-prot sector as a market provider in the provision of child care and care of the elderly. She thus introduces the non-prot sector into feminist discussions of gender and welfare regimes, so moving beyond analytic approaches centered on states, markets and families. 12. This builds upon but diverges from Elsons analysis in some respects. Thus, with the concern of politics with association, the dynamic of the state includes both coercion and regulation. Although the term provisioning used by Elson refers to those activities concerned with supplying people with what they need to thrive, including care and concern as well as material goods (1998, p. 207), here we highlight the distinct affective nature of association in the household as compared with the market or state. Of course, this is not to say that affective relations also do not exist in the sites of the market, state or civil society or that households are never devoid of affection, but merely that affection and intimacy feature more prominently in the household. 13. In Elsons analysis (1998) the mode of operation of the sectors and circuits is constructed upon the prevailing gender order. Elson does not develop further the idea of the gender order; here we propose instead a circuit of gender relations.

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