6 Feminist Approaches

While feminists have elaborated distinctive theories of the gendering of social relations and provide powerful critiques of malestream political philosophy and political theory, they have generally been less interested in developing a general feminist theory of the state. […]

Some radical feminist theories simply argued that, whatever their apparent differences, all states are expressions of patriarchy or phallocracy.
Other feminists tried to derive the necessary form and/or functions of
the patriarchal state from the imperatives of reproduction (rather than production), from the changing forms of patriarchal domination, from the gendered nature of household labor in the “domestic” mode of production, and so on. Such work denies any autonomy orcontingency to the state. Others again try to analyze the contingent articulation of patriarchal and capitalist forms of domination as crystallized in the state. […] The third wave feminists and queer theorists emphasized the instability
and socially constructed arbitrariness of dominant views of sexual and gender identities and demonstrate the wide variability of masculine as
well as feminine identities and interests.

The best feminist scholarship challenges key assumptions of “malestream” state theories. First, whereas the modern state is commonly said to exercise a legitimate monopoly over the means of coercion, feminists argue that men can get away with violence against women within the confines ofthe family and, through the reality, threat, or fear of rape, also oppress women in public spaces. Such arguments have been taken further in recentwork on masculinity and the state. Second, feminists critique the juridical distinction between “public” and “private.” For, not only does this distinction obfuscate class relations by distinguishing the public citizen from the private individual (as Marxists have argued), it also, and more fundamentally, hides the patriarchal ordering of the state and the family.

In short, feminist research reveals basic flaws in much malestream theorizing. Thus an adequate account of the state must include the key feminist insights into the gendered nature of the state's structural selectivity and capacities for action as well as its key role in reproducing specific patterns of gender relations (for attempts to develop such an approach, see Jessop 2004).

7 Discourse Analysis and Stateless State Theory

Some recent discourse-analytic work suggests that the state does not
exist but is, rather, an illusion—a product of political imaginaries. Thus belief in the existence of the state depends on the prevalence of state discourses. It appears on the political scene because political forces orient their actions towards the “state,” acting as if it existed. Since there is no common discourse of the state (at most there is a dominant or hegemonic discourse) and different political forces orient their action at different
times to different ideas of the state, the state is at best a polyvalent, polycontextual phenomenon which changes shape and appearance with the political forces acting towards it and the circumstances in which they do so.

This apparently heretical idea has been advanced from various theoretical or analytical viewpoints. For example, Abrams (1988) recommended abandoning the idea of the state because the institutional ensemble that comprises government can be studied without the concept of the state; and the “idea of the state” can be studied in turn as the distinctive collective misrepresentation of capitalist societies, which serves to mask the true nature of political practice. He argues that the “state idea” has a key role
in disguising political domination. This regards the state as a purely juridical concept, an idea that enables people to do the state, to furnish themselves and others with a convenient vocabulary of motives for their own (in)actions and to account for the unity of the state in a divided and unequal civil society. Third, there is an increasing interest in specific narrative, rhetorical, or argumentative features of state power. Thus case studies of policy making suggest that state policies do not objectively represent the interests located in or beyond the state or objectively reflect “real” problems in the internal or external environments of the political system. Policies are discursively-mediated, if not wholly discursively- constituted, products of struggles to define and narrate “problems”which can be dealt with in and through state action. The impact of policy- making and implementation is therefore closely tied to their rhetorical and argumentative framing. Indeed, whatever the precise origins of the different components of the modern state (such as the army, bureaucracy, taxation, legal system, legislative assemblies), their organization as a relatively coherent institutional ensemble depends crucially on the emergence of the state idea.[…]