Studying symbolic representation is not only relevant, but also challenging. Hanna Pitkin (1967: 97) already warned us that ‘w]e can never exhaust, never quite capture in words, the totality of what a symbol symbolizes: suggests, evokes, implies.’ We will discuss the opportunities and challenges we encountered in our study of symbolic representation from a discursive politics approach, where we took gender as the principal and political discourse as the agent. While a discursive approach has allowed us to unpack the relation between agent and principal in symbolic representation by revealing the activity of constructing meanings and the existence of contested gender norms, a number of questions arise: what makes a symbol a symbol? What makes symbolic representation different from simply discursive politics? How to link symbolic representation back to descriptive and substantive representation? What empirical developments of discursive symbolic representation beyond the political arena can there be? And what empirical and methodological challenges does the broadening of the concept of political representation include?
