The Leverhulme Trust

Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament, a four year Research 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 Prof. Shirin Rai, together with Profs. Sarah Childs (University of Bristol), Joni Lovenduski (Birkbeck) 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 28 -29 October 2011.

Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman, MP, speaking In the Moses Room, House of Lords and Dr. Frene Ginwala speaking in the Cholmondley Room, House of Lords.

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 at the conference. Lord Giddens hosted the reception at the House of Lords.

Lord Giddens welcomes guests to the reception on the Terrace.

There were four panels - Ceremony, Ritual and Representation, Performance and Politics, Political Institutions and the Symbolic, Accountability, Deliberation and Democratization and two roundtables on Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament and Looking Forward: Politics, Performance and Representation. Speakers included Dr. Faith Armitage (Birkbeck), Bairavee Balasubramaniam, Dr.Mukulika Banerjee (LSE), Prof. Sarah Childs, Prof. Diana Coole (Birkbeck), Dr. Emma Crewe (SOAS), Dr. Alan Finlayson (Swansea), Dr. Susan Franceschet (Calgary), The Lord Anthony Giddens, Victoria Hasson (Sheffield), Prof. Niraja Gopal Jayal (Jawaharlal Nehru University), Prof. Joni Lovenduski, Rosa Malley (Bristol), Prof. Philip Manow (Bremen), Prof. The Lord Norton of Louth (Hull), Dr. John Parkinson (Warwick), Dr. Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmiths), Dr. Rachel Johnson (Sheffield), Prof. Shirin Rai, Prof. Michael Saward (Open University), Dr. Carole Spary (York) and Prof. Georgina Waylen.

Roundtable participants, from left to right, Dr. Emma Crewe, Dr. Nirmal Puwar, Prof. Shirin Rai and Prof. Joni Lovenduski and Prof. Niraja Gopal Jayal, Prof. Anne Philips, Prof. The Lord Norton of Louth, Prof. Alan Finlayson and Prof. Georgina Waylen.

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 deliberation and disruptions in parliament. We addressed these through examining the ceremonies and rituals attached to each of these as well as how they are subverted. 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:

1. 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 given.
2. 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, and the legitimacy of these states as well as reputations of state institutions.
3. 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.
4. 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 read more about this Research Programme, please visit the website: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/gcrp/