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The global warming backlash, the managed care backlash, the Bush backlash, the corporate backlash, the 9/11 backlash, the Obama backlash, the Clinton backlash, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) bill backlash, the antigay backlash, the immigration backlash, the backlashes against globalization, student testing, the social, economic, and political progress of Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans, and, central to this "Critical Perspectives," the backlash against the feminist movement--these were just some of the many politically related backlashes that appeared when I performed a general Google search of the words: "backlash" and "politics" in July of 2008.
More generally, it seems that the term is used for everything political, social, economic, and cultural for which political disagreement exists--in other words, "backlash" is used nearly everywhere nearly all the time. Most relevant to our purposes, it is often used carelessly, without clear and consistent definitions or boundaries, and without critical engagement with what is arguably a centrally important concept for analyzing women's current political status and future opportunities. Because little scholarly work has focused in-depth attention on backlash, this collection of essays seeks to open a discussion of the concept by examining it from the perspectives of political theory, American politics, and comparative politics.
The overarching questions that guided these Critical Perspectives essays are the following:
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What is backlash? What are its components, both distinct and overlapping? How is it distinguished from related political and social concepts? Especially, how is it different from ordinary political opposition to specific policies or perspectives? How does backlash interact with varying and various understandings of feminism? How, if at all, does it differ from anti-feminism?
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What are the underlying social, political, economic, and cultural forces that propel it, and how do these differ across societies?
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What are examples of the manifestation of backlash in mass politics, in elite politics and in social movements in the United States and around the world?
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How can its impact be understood for groups of women as well as women as a group? That is, how does the concept differ in terms of multiple and overlapping identities (some mutable, some immutable) of class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and age, to name a few?
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How does scholarly unpacking of backlash affect our ability...