12. The Thorny Path to a More Inclusive Discipline

This chapter explores the extent of feminist institution-building within national and international political science associations and what it has achieved. We compare the initiation of gender and politics specialist groups and the strategies adopted for promoting recognition of feminist scholarship. We then use bibliometric data to show the limits to the integration of gender perspectives into core areas of the discipline. We examine factors such as the hierarchy of knowledge and its conflict with the approaches and methodological preferences of many gender scholars. We conclude that while gender and politics scholars have consolidated an epistemic community within political science and contributed to normative and policy change outside, the goal of transforming the discipline has proved difficult.