The Constitutive Representation of Gender: Extra‐parliamentary Re‐presentations of Gender Relations1

This paper extends the focus of research on representation within the women and politics literature in two ways: firstly, by introducing the notion of 'the constitutive representation of gender' to complement the notion of the substantive representation of women, as a distinct facet of the representative process; and secondly, by extending the spheres of representative practices under consideration to include not only the parliamentary but also the extra‐parliamentary arenas of women's policy agencies and feminist NGOs.