Abstract
In this paper, we explore the post-truth era as a contextual factor in how gender expertise is constituted, challenged, and defended in policy discourse in Canadian context. Using post-structural policy analysis to explore the contours of media scrutiny and the resulting debate about gender-based analysis plus (GBA+), Canada’s approach to gender mainstreaming, we reveal that it was ultimately a debate about the role of gender/intersectional expertise within government. We demonstrate that GBA+, and the gender expertise informing it, was often represented in mainstream media as either a “political intervention” or as a “technical tool”, both of which reinforce traditional representations of policy expertise, including political neutrality and professional competence, which, in the past, have been used to justify the exclusion of “other” forms of knowledge. In unpacking these representations, we suggest that, even among critics of post-truth claims, post-truth discourse offers a new vocabulary, anchored in what Ringrose (2018, 653) refers to as “post-truth anti-feminism”, which emphasizes not simply identity politics, but also potential harm resulting from interventions based on feminist knowledge. We also suggest that such claims have resulted in a distancing between gender expertise and feminism, thus contributing to the erasure of feminist knowledge in policy contexts.
Highlights
Appearance on a government agenda (e.g., Murray 2007)
We suggest that such claims have resulted in a distancing between gender expertise and feminism, contributing to the erasure of feminist knowledge in policy contexts
37 In the previous section, we identified the subtle ways in which post-truth anti-feminist discourse shaped media representations of GBA+ and gender expertise as political, emphasizing the harms they produce for policymaking and democratic governance
Summary
Gender Expertise and Feminist Knowledge(s) in the Canadian and Post-Truth Contexts. 10 Despite these challenges, there is no doubt that gender expertise plays an important role in policymaking, as governments and international organizations, such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the OECD, increasingly rely on gender experts to produce knowledge for action and to help guide them in decision-making (e.g., Hoard, 2015). Hoard (2015) suggests that gender expertise emerged just as governments’ monopoly on policy expertise was declining and as expertise itself was fragmenting, forces which opened the possibility for a variety of experts, including feminist experts, to compete for a role in policymaking. How GBA+ and gender expertise are represented in media discussions is important in terms of ‘what’ is represented, and ‘how’ those representations implicate a whole host of social relations that underlie contemporary Canadian governance, including how feminist knowledge is de/legitimized in policy contexts. GBA+ and gender expertise were represented as the politicization of the bureaucracy, where identity politics and virtue signalling undermine the neutrality of the civil service It is here where post-truth anti-feminism arguments are most apparent, used to undermine gender expertise, though in ways that re-affirm the “old ways” of doing policy. While post-truth anti-feminist arguments are not immediately obvious in this representation, we suggest that it works in less direct ways, prompting an anticipatory and defensive framing of GBA+ as neutral competence We argue both representations juxtapose GBA+ with “policymaking as normal”, invoking particular ideas about the “proper” place of the bureaucracy and bureaucrats in political life. In an article on the use of GBA+ in Environmental Impact Assessments, The National Post observed: In a report on the legislation, the law firm Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP said the new gender provision makes “the role of an impact assessment more of a policy-setting exercise than focused on the merits of a specific project, which is likely to increase the scope of studies the proponents will need to engage in and contribute to overall project uncertainty” [...] The law firm Dentons flagged the gender language as a source of uncertainty, “since it is not clear how these factors, which are subjective and difficult to assess, will be applied.” (Hamilton, April 3, 2018, emphasis added)
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