home. Moreover, even where women win full citizenship rights, their continuing
oppression and subjugation in the private sphere hinders their exercise and enjoy-
ment of these rights. A third area of feminist criticism focuses on the links between
warfare, masculinity, and the state. In general terms, as Connell ( 1987 ) notes, ‘‘the
state arms men and disarms women.’’
In short, feminist research reveals basicXaws in much malestream theorizing.
Thus an adequate account of the state must include the key feminist insights into
the gendered nature of the state’s structural selectivity and capacities for action as
well as its key role in reproducing speciWc patterns of gender relations (for attempts
to develop such an approach, see Jessop 2004 ).
7 Discourse Analysis and Stateless
State Theory
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Some recent discourse-analytic work suggests that the state does not exist but is,
rather, an illusion—a product of political imaginaries. Thus belief in the existence
of the state depends on the prevalence of state discourses. It appears on the political
scene because political forces orient their actions towards the ‘‘state,’’ actingas ifit
existed. Since there is no common discourse of the state (at most there is a
dominant or hegemonic discourse) and diVerent political forces orient their action
at diVerent times to diVerent ideas of the state, the state is at best a polyvalent,
polycontextual phenomenon which changes shape and appearance with the politi-
cal forces acting towards it and the circumstances in which they do so.
This apparently heretical idea has been advanced from various theoretical or
analytical viewpoints. For example, Abrams ( 1988 ) recommended abandoning the
idea of the state because the institutional ensemble that comprises government can
be studied without the concept of the state; and the ‘‘idea of the state’’ can be
studied in turn as the distinctive collectivemisrepresentationof capitalist societies
which serves to mask the true nature of political practice. He argues that the ‘‘state
idea’’ has a key role in disguising political domination. This in turn requires
historical analyses of the ‘‘cultural revolution’’ (or ideological shifts) involved
when state systems are transformed. Similarly, Melossi ( 1990 ) called for a ‘‘stateless
theory of the state.’’ This regards the state as a purely juridical concept, an idea that
enables people todothe state, to furnish themselves and others with a convenient
vocabulary of motives for their own (in)actions and to account for the unity of the
state in a divided and unequal civil society. Third, there is an increasing interest in
state and state-building 123