In this special issue, we address what we refer to as 'perversity of the political' or 'perverse politics': namely, the assumptions political theory and movements, and in our specific case feminism, often make on behalf of their subjects, and how their subjects, in return, perform individual and collective contrariness, unruliness and resistance to what is expected or desired from their 'subjectivity'. Specifically focusing on the themes of 'false consciousness', multiplicity, and uneasy alliances, the papers collected here seek to empirically lay out a number of such 'perverse' moments, and offer anti-imperialist feminist alternatives to second wave feminism's often reductive understandings of freedom; emancipation; oppression; empowerment and democracy.

The 1990s have seen dramatic restructuring of state social provision in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. This has occurred largely because of the rise of market liberalism, which challenges the role of the state. This important book examines the impact of changes in social policy regimes on gender roles and relations. Structured thematically and systematically comparative, it analyses three key policy areas: labor markets, income maintenance and reproductive rights. Largely driven by issues of equality, it considers the role of the state as a site for gender and sexual politics at a time when primacy is given to the market, developing an argument about social citizenship in the process. Eminent scholars in the field, Julia O'Connor, Ann Orloff and Sheila Shaver make a landmark contribution to debates about social policy and gender relations in this era of economic restructuring and deregulation.

The state is central to social scientific and historical inquiry today, reflecting its importance in domestic and international affairs. States kill, coerce, fight, torture, and incarcerate, yet they also nurture, protect, educate, redistribute, and invest. It is precisely because of the complexity and wide-ranging impacts of states that research on them has proliferated and diversified. Yet, too many scholars inhabit separate academic silos, and theorizing of states has become dispersed and disjointed. This book aims to bridge some of the many gaps between scholarly endeavors, bringing together scholars from a diverse array of disciplines and perspectives who study states and empires. The book offers not only a sample of cutting-edge research that can serve as models and directions for future work, but an original conceptualization and theorization of states, their origins and evolution, and their effects.

Three leading figures in the field make this important contribution to debates about social policy and gender relations in an era of economic restructuring and market liberalism. Structured thematically and systematically comparative, the book analyzes three key policy areas: labor markets, income maintenance and reproductive rights. It explores the question of whether liberal states should intervene in workplaces or families to guarantee the rights and welfare of all individuals within them. The experiences of Canada, the UK, United States and Australia are the focus of the book.

This volume places the welfare debates of the 1980s in the context of past patterns of U.S. policy, such as the Social Security Act of 1935, the failure of efforts in the 1940s to extend national social benefits and economic planning, and the backlashes against "big government" that followed reforms of the 1960s and early 1970s. Historical analysis reveals that certain social policies have flourished in the United States: those that have appealed simultaneously to middle-class and lower-income people, while not involving direct bureaucratic interventions into local communities. The editors suggest how new family and employment policies, devised along these lines, might revitalize broad political coalitions and further basic national values.

The contributors are Edwin Amenta, Robert Aponte, Mary Jo Bane, Kenneth Finegold, John Myles, Kathryn Neckerman, Gary Orfield, Ann Shola Orloff, Jill Quadagno, Theda Skocpol, Helene Slessarev, Beth Stevens, Margaret Weir, and William Julius Wilson.

The state is central to social scientific and historical inquiry today, reflecting its importance in domestic and international affairs. States kill, coerce, fight, torture, and incarcerate, yet they also nurture, protect, educate, redistribute, and invest. It is precisely because of the complexity and wide-ranging impacts of states that research on them has proliferated and diversified. Yet, too many scholars inhabit separate academic silos, and theorizing of states has become dispersed and disjointed. This book aims to bridge some of the many gaps between scholarly endeavors, bringing together scholars from a diverse array of disciplines and perspectives who study states and empires. The book offers not only a sample of cutting-edge research that can serve as models and directions for future work, but an original conceptualization and theorization of states, their origins and evolution, and their effects.

By offering a comparative, institutional analysis of how state-supported pensions for the elderly developed in Britain, Canada and the United States, Anna Shola Orloff aims to make a contribution to understanding the growth of modern social welfare policies. It is not enough, Orloff demonstrates, to simply examine socioeconomic factors in the growth of the welfare state. She argues that welfare policies are also shaped by the political institutions and processes that are the legacy of state formation and expansion in particular nations. Orloff explains why, when and how poor relief was replaced by modern social insurance legislation and pensions for the elderly in the first three decades of the 20th century. She analyses the long-term social and political transformation that laid the basis for modern social politics: the spread of waged work, the development of new liberal ideologies and the expansion and transformation of state administrative capacities. Combining original historical research with the analysis of secondary sources, Orloff's work is an example of the use of comparative and historical methods in answering questions about macropolitical transformation, such as the origin of the welfare state. ""The Politics of Pensions"" outlines an original, interdisciplinary approach that should appeal to a wide variety of readers: political sociologists interested in the state, social workers and specialists in old age policy, and comparative researchers of all disciplines engaged in research on the welfare state.