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A comparative analysis of gender relations incorporates and goes beyond a "women and politics" approach by focusing on the organization of political life, illuminating the systematic way that social norms, laws, practices, and institutions advantage certain groups and forms of life and disadvantage others. In order to illuminate the various ways that women and men are advantaged and disadvantaged as women and men , gender analysis must incorporate analysis of race, class, sexuality, and other axes of disadvantage, and explore interactions among them. These axes are defined differently in different national contexts, and so examining variation across national borders illuminates the variety of social arrangements that are consistent with human biology: This type of analysis thereby denaturalizes and politicizes gender, racial/ethnic, and class relations (among others). The wide variety of modes and degrees of resistance to these forms of social organization, and success in challenging them, illuminate and inspire new strategies of resistance for people in other countries.
Gender Structures and Women and Politics
A women and politics approach has generally been understood to mean a recovering of women's perspectives and experiences. Such perspectives and experiences are generally neglected in comparative political science, even now when excellent scholarship on women abounds (Mazur 2003). Gender analysis includes--and even requires--efforts to identify and revalue women's political activity, but it goes beyond such efforts in that it places them in a broader social context. Gender relations, by definition, shape the lives of women and men. Conversely, the cumulation of everyday actions of women and men of all races and classes constitutes social structures of gender. The pervasive character of gender norms and roles is what makes gender such a valuable category of political analysis. Any complete analysis of gender relations, then, must consider the many different ways that gender norms and practices shape and are shaped by the actions of all people, including women and men of all races and classes. So studying gender is not just about studying or revaluing women and the feminine. It is also about, for example, understanding how ideas about masculinity shape male behavior, about how gender norms construct relations between and within the sexes, and how our institutions and social practices privilege or value forms of...