Women, Gender, and Politics

N19 - Representations of Women

Date: Jun 1 | Time: 01:30pm to 03:00pm | Location: Classroom - CL 417 Room ID:15740

Chair/Président/Présidente : Linda Trimble (University of Alberta)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Melanee Thomas (University of Calgary)

Women in the House: The Substantive Representation of Women in the Canadian House of Commons Since 1968: Erica Rayment (University of Toronto)
Abstract: Feminist political science theorizes the importance of the presence of women in politics for the substantive representation of women’s interests (Phillips 1995; Mansbridge 1999). While many studies have shown that gender is relevant in shaping the patterns of substantive representation of women in legislative activity, the impact of gender is mediated by the institutional arrangements that structure politics. This study aims to test and refine the theory of the politics of presence by asking whether and to what extent the presence of women matters for the substantive representation of women in parliamentary debate in the Canadian House of Commons – a parliamentary system in which the impact of gender on parliamentary speech is likely to be overshadowed by partisan affiliation. Using computational text analysis methods, the study will analyse the complete corpus of parliamentary debate from the 28th to the 41st Canadian Parliament (1968-2015) and measure the proportion of speeches about women made by male and female MPs and by MPs of each party. Using regression, the study will isolate the impact of gender and party on the substantive representation of women in parliamentary speech. It will also use supervised machine learning methods to identify which issues women and men prioritize in parliamentary speech. These patterns are tracked over time in relation to broader contextual factors. The use of new methodological tools enables a more comprehensive analysis of the substantive representation of women in parliament than has previously been undertaken in Canadian studies of women in politics.

974.Rayment.pdf

Positionality and Theorizing Silence as a Legacy of Political Repression: Celia Romulus (Queen's University)
Abstract: My research aims to assess how trauma caused by Duvalierist (specifically in the 1970s) repression has affected the lived experiences of Haitian migrants and of subsequent generations, including their exercise of citizenship in Canada. This project also collects and analyzes, previously unrecorded and undocumented Haitian accounts of intergenerational experiences of repression in Haiti and Canada. Many dominant theories present as value-free and concerned with descriptive depictions of political phenomenon, though an increasing number of scholars are now problematizing power relations in the discipline and in knowledge production. Sara Ahmed (2017) reminds us how becoming feminist cannot be separated from experiences of violence and that what brings us to feminism is potentially shattering. Following and expending on Ahmed's analysis on how theory is generated from everyday life and experiences of being a feminist. I have attempted to map how my positionality has informed my methodology, shaped my interactions and the co-production of narratives in the interview process and ultimately my understanding of meta-data. Meta-data, such as silences, indicates how current conditions shape what people narrate about violence in the past, it should be an integral part of data-collection and analysis and will be crucial for the robustness of researchers’ theories and knowledge about political violence and other political phenomena (Fujii, 2010: 231). This presentation will thus focus on using reflexive methodologies to theorize silences as a form of memory of political repression.