Between a rock and a hard place: The EU's gender regime in times of crisis

Abstract

This article applies Walby's Gender Regime Theory to examine the EU's role as a gender actor in the context of crisis. We build on Walby's analysis of the EU as a public gender regime to understand continuity and change as the European Commission sought to lead the EU and its Member States through one of the most existential crises faced by the organisation: the Covid-19 pandemic. Gender Regime Theory provides a useful way to think about the impact of multiple and overlapping crises on the European gender acquis and the way it contributes to the development of a European gender regime. In order to understand the way the EU gender regime has evolved, and is continuing to evolve, we bring together two distinct bodies of literature, GRT and Feminist EU Studies in order to understand the interaction between national and EU gender regimes and the ways in which these are intertwined in the EU's Covid recovery plan.