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Karen Beckwith

Karen Beckwith is a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Earning her B.A at the University of Kentucky and her M.A and Ph.D at Syracuse University, Beckwith studies political parties, political movements, representation, and women, gender, and politics with a special focus on the United States and Western Europe. Beckwith is the founding editor the journal of the Women and Political Reseach Section of the American Political Science Association entitled Politics & Gender and the co-editor of the Gender and Politics Series of the Oxford University Press. She has also served as President of the American Political Science Association’s Women and Politics Research Section1.

Beckwith's article A Common Language for Gender? highlights an essential challenges to empirical and theoretical political research; the lack of a explicitly defined common language for gender. Beckwith argues that such a common language does in fact exist, and moreover can be employed to further our understanding and knowledge in the field of political science. This common language, Beckwith argues, “not only distinguishes gender from sex but also serves as a tool for mapping gender to sex in carefully, fully specified contexts”2.

Beckwith proposed two ways in which gender can be established in empirical political research, namely gender as a category and gender and a process. By gender as a category, Beckwith refers to the socially established identities, norms, beliefs and rituals which are conventionally perceived as feminine our masculine (which need not necessarily correspond with the “male” or “female” gender). Gender as a process, on the other hand, is understood by Beckwith as the “behaviours, conventions, practices, and dynamics engaged in by individuals, organizations, movements, institutions, and nations”, and its employment is political science research is a necessary result of the ambiguity of gender as a categorical definition. The advantages of employing gender and a process for political research can be seen both in its ability account for the ways in which political structures and institutions affect men and women differently, and to expand the category of “women” to entail the complexities and differences in women as a group in general, and moreover to include women (and men) of colour3.

1. Case Western Reserve University. "Karen Beckwith – Flora Stone Mather Professor of Political Science and Director of Curriculum Review." 2013.Web. . 2. Beckwith, Karen. "A common language of gender?." Politics & Gender 1.01 (2005): 128-137. 3. Beckwith, Karen. "A common language of gender?." Politics & Gender 1.01 (2005): 128-137.