W e launch Politics & Gender with the conviction that the study of women and politics, and the gendered analysis of politics, benefit and strengthen political science. We hold the reverse conviction as well: the tools of political analysis advance and strengthen our understandings of women and of gender. Politics & Gender is the official journal of the Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association. This new journal is thus situated firmly within the

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... of political science. While we maintain extensive interdisciplinary commitments, our primary purpose is to publish research on women and politics and on politics and its gendered analysis. Gender cuts through every aspect of politics. In Politics & Gender, we seek to represent the full array of questions, issues, and approaches within the discipline. We envision each issue as a showcase of work across all the major subfields of political science, including (but not limited to) political theory, comparative politics, international relations, and U.S. politics. We invite studies that address fundamental questions in politics and political science concerning women and concerning gender, including those that interrogate and challenge standard analytical categories and conventional methodologies. The systematic study and critique of political power, however defined, is central to the discipline and enormously consequential for women and gender. We insist that it is both possible and appropriate to embrace a wide range of conceptualizations of the political, a plethora of means and methods by which to investigate the political, and a constant, ultimate focus on the political, in approaching women and gender. We proudly acknowledge the historical links that exist between research on women and gender and what was known as the women's liberation movement. We place Politics & Gender in the historical context of the political study of women and gender that derived from organized feminism. To that end, Politics & Gender publishes scholarship that re-