Gendering the Comparative Analysis of Welfare States: An Unfinished Agenda», Colloque RC19 Social Policies: Local Experiments, Traveling Ideas, Université de Montréal, août, consulté le 7 mars 2010

Can feminists count on welfare states—or at least some aspects of these com-plex systems—as resources in the struggle for gender equality? Gender analysts of “welfare states ” investigate this question and the broader set of issues around the mutually constitutive relationship between systems of social provision and regula-tion and gender. Feminist scholars have moved to bring the contingent practice of politics back into grounded fields of action and social change and away from the reification and abstractions that had come to dominate models of politics focused on “big ” structures and systems, including those focused on “welfare states. ” Concep-tual innovations and reconceptualizations of foundational terms have been especially prominent in the comparative scholarship on welfare states, starting with gender, and including care, autonomy, citizenship, (in)dependence, political agency, and equality. In contrast to other subfields of political science and sociology, gendered insights have to some extent been incorporated into mainstream comparative scholarship on welfare states. The arguments between feminists and mainstream scholars over the course of the last two decades have been productive, powering the development o