Moving beyond existing theory of state feminism: Introducing a typology of state feminism

In the state feminism literature, state feminism has generally been attempted to be standardized and mostly focused on developed Western countries. However, ignor-ing the other countries except the developed Western ones has caused to overlook that state feminism can manifest itself in different ways. On the other hand, in the limited number of researches about the third world countries, the uniqueness of the related country has been discussed and has not been compared with the countries that have tra-ditionally been known as the implementers of the state feminism or the state feminist implementations of these countries have been explained within the context of Western and/or Scandinavian approaches, ignoring the distinctive dynamics of these countries. In this research, it is seen that the peculiar background of the selected countries diversi-fies the implementations of state feminism. Therefore, one has considered that there is no single type of state feminism; state feminism may be varied depending on the im-plementer. It is suggested that the relationship between the state and women in each of the states adopted state feminism for different purposes differentiates state feminism. It is also offered an insight into the cases that state feminism does not aim to achieve gen-der equality and broaden women's rights directly. The characteristics of the relationship between state feminism and the implementer state are revealed through the correlation between three main and five supporting determinants, and thus, the type of state femi-nism in which the selected countries belonged is determined. Accordingly, forty-one independent countries are chosen for the analysis, and seven different types of state feminism are proposed as a result. Eventually, each type named in order to indicate their intent by practicing state feminism.