User:Lkondi

Mary Hawkesworth
"Hermeneutic methods are efficient at interpreting human actions." Mary Hawkesworth

Mary Hawkesworth is a Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and a member of the Graduate Faculty in Political Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Her major pieces Globalization and Feminist Activism and Feminist Inquiry have led her to become incredibly influential in feminist scholarship. She has served as Editor in Chief from 2005-2015 and in 2005 she successfully brought the leading journal in feminist academics, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, to Rutgers. Her writing and teaching is centered on women and politics, contemporary political philosophy and social policy but recently she has focused on studying contemporary feminist activism. Hawkesworth is a founding member of the International Social Science Council Research Committee on Gender, Globalization, and Democratization and has been awarded many times for her expertise in mentoring women, teaching and outstanding contributions to women.

In her article, “Engendering Political Science: An Immodest Proposal”, Hawkesworth touches on both a contemporary and critical interpretation of gendered conceptions of power by providing new insights to the male-dominated international system. Hawkesworth contrasts the limited views of mainstream political scientists by emphasizing gender as an analytical category. She presses a strong claim that masculinity is proved to be an entitlement around the world that is continually supported by international institutions which magnifies gender injustice. She sheds light on aspects that have been overpowered by masculinity by relating to power struggles in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. She has argued in many of her works, that political scientists must broaden their perspective and become involved in feminist scholarship by examining gender as an analytical category. She proved that those who choose not to learn or research about feminist scholarship violate the “Scope and Method” and ultimately the logic behind the study of politics which supports their own research as “scientific.”

By failing to examine gender as a category, Hawkesworth suggests that investigation would be unsuccessful and worthless while creating an inaccurate account for gender in politics. This article analyzes competing theoretical points of view such as the voluntarist approach where individuals seek to promote their own interests contrasted with the “hermeneutic” conception that sees power as shared within communities. She acknowledges that conditions of gender hierarchy have changed over the last three decades and continue to change within the 21st century.

--Lkondi (talk) 16:07, 10 May 2013 (UTC)