GENDERED CEREMONY AND RITUAL IN PARLIAMENT

By Professor Shirin M. Rai, Politics and International Studies

Why does ceremony and ritual in parliament matter? In this article, Prof Shirin Rai outlines the thinking behind the four-year Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament programme, which concluded last month with a conference at the House of Lords.

Why does the study of ceremony and ritual in parliament matter? Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament, a four-year programme funded by the Leverhulme Trust (2007-2011), addressed this question. It was a multi-site programme based at the University of Warwick and led by myself, together with Profs. Sarah Childs (University of Bristol), Joni Lovenduski (Birkbeck College) and Georgina Waylen (University of Sheffield). The programme developed comparative research, which included India, South Africa and Westminster. The substance of the research was presented at the closing conference of the programme on October 28th to 29th 2011.

At the conference Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman, MP, gave the opening keynote address. Dr Frene Ginwala, the first Speaker of the post-apartheid South African parliament gave the second keynote address. Lord Giddens hosted the reception at the House of Lords.

The premise of the programme was that in order to understand representative institutions we need to understand not only their institutional form, but also the way a particular form takes shape – through modes of behaviour, negotiating the political and physical space and creating an institution-specific culture which socialises members in their participation. Through the performance of ceremony and ritual such institutions create and maintain powerful symbols of power. These are, however, also challenged through the mobilisation of alternative modes of performance.

The programme focused on three comparative themes – opening ceremonies of parliament, the Speaker of parliament– and addressed these through examining both, the hyper-visible ceremonies as well as everyday rituals attached to each of these. The programme also studied disruptions in parliament and asked questions about whether and how this disruption reflects changes in the wider society. Issues of membership, representation, performance, the symbolic, deliberation, authority, and legitimacy were central to concerns of the programme. This was a multi-method, interdisciplinary programme involving both qualitative and quantitative research that built on sociological, anthropological, historical and political literatures on ceremony and ritual, state and state institutions, representation and gender to understand how power is reproduced in parliamentary politics.

Four major insights emerged from the work of the programme:

• That the state and its performance through ceremony and ritual are co-constitutive. Ceremony and ritual have affect, which is important in the development of institutions – citizens respond to, contest, neglect or reject aspects of ceremonial and ritualistic forms of power that is performed and in doing so are in turn able to affect change, reform or at least review rules and norms that had hitherto been taken as a given.
• That gendered ceremony and ritual are an integral part of the everyday performance of institutional politics and through analysing these we can read the changes in political systems, processes and events. Ceremony and ritual are historical performative moments that through repetition and authorisation show us the continuity, change and ‘invention of tradition’, which is such an important part of representation of sovereign states, of legitimacy of these states as well as reputations of state institutions.
• That both descriptive and substantive representation become visible in and through ceremony and ritual – bodies in and out of place, debates and disruptions, regulation and its subversion in parliament all work together to create a representational affect. Legitimacy of representation is built in part on the acceptance of these performative moments.
• That space, architecture and the symbolic need to be studied more than studies of parliaments generally do – the theatre of representation is performed in particular historical venues to which affective meaning can be and is attached, through the shaping and re-shaping of which state norms become sedimented, but also contested and challenged.

To find out more about the work of the programme, please visit the website. You can also watch video highlights from the GCRP Conference 2011 here on the Knowledge Centre.

Shirin M. Rai is the author of Gender and Political Economy of Development (2002, Polity Press). Her latest works are Feminists Theorize the International Political Economy, Special Issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (co-ed. With Kate Bedford) Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament, Special Issue of Journal of Legislative Studies; The Gender Politics of Development (2008, Zed Books/Zubaan Publishers) and (co-ed) Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives (2008, Palgrave).

Her articles have appeared in journals including: International Feminist Journal of Politics, Global Networks, New Political Economy, Hypatia and Signs.

She has consulted with the United Nations’ Division for the Advancement of Women and UNDP. She is a member of the Editorial Boards of International Feminist Journal of Politics, Politics and Gender, Global Ethics and Indian Journal of Gender Studies and Political Studies Quarterly. She is the co-editor (with Wyn Grant) of Perspectives on Democratic Practice.