Governance Feminism Research Articles

When a “Feminist” Government Tackles Gender-Based Violence: A WPR Approach to the Speeches of Canadian Cabinet Ministers (2015–2019)

Abstract Ending gender-based violence was a central promise of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's self-declared feminist government. Executive speeches about gender-based violence provide clues about what types of feminist ideas undergird the 42nd Parliament. Was carceral feminism advanced, by focusing on punishment? Or neoliberalized feminist ideas, by focusing on the market? Or social justice feminist ideas, by focusing on systemic change? Applying the concept of governance feminism and using Bacchi's WPR approach, this article investigates how gender-based violence is problematized in English- and French-language House of Commons debates in the 42nd Parliament by the cabinet. The speeches problematize gender-based violence as preventable and caused by systemic issues, but this transformational discourse is undermined by a focus on strengthening carceral responses and limiting human potential to economic productivity. Feminist ideas about gender-based violence were adopted, relying on carceral and neoliberalized feminist ideas. The Trudeau Liberals’ campaign for change was discursively undermined.

White feminism and the governance of violent extremism

ABSTRACT Initiatives to prevent and counter “violent extremism” (P/CVE) are often highly individualised and individualising, and function to reinforce negative racialised and gendered stereotypes. Recently, some feminist and other critical scholars have argued that sexist and misogynistic beliefs are inter-related with other drivers of “radicalisation” and “extremism”, which may lead to the securitisation of forms of sexist and misogynistic violence. There has not yet been, however, a systematic examination of the ways in which even some of these critical and feminist interventions are complicit in the reproduction of the logics of gender and race that structure the oppression and violence they take as their target. In this paper I argue that there is a powerful brand of governance feminism informing P/CVE global governance initiatives that has little consideration of the distributed effects of this move on the operation of racialised and gendered power. I position governance feminism as a sub-category of white feminism and show that it is specifically white feminism that is dominant in the institutions of liberal governance relevant to P/CVE. I draw on Black, decolonial, and intersectional feminist theory to show how the gendered subjects of P/CVE governance are often presented as race-neutral, in deeply problematic and limiting ways.

The State in Feminist Theory: Hopes and a Critique of Governance Feminism

Contemporary feminist theory rarely engages with the discussion of political strategies and the issue of the state. Feminist philosophers tend to interpret the state as an omnipotent institution continuously governing women’s lives and bodies, while defining women as rather passive objects of state politics. The new global wave of feminist protests against domestic violence and sexual harassment that has erupted in the last four years inspired a new cycle of theoretical debates about the meaning of gender equality and the role of the state in the feminist liberation project. The increasing power of feminist movements coupled with new feminist attempts to infuence political institutions raise new questions about the dominant feminist political strategies and engagements with the state. How should feminist movements view the state? What does the state mean, and what role do women play in it? The article discusses the state as a major feminist theoretical issue. It argues that feminist thinkers and activists need to engage with state issues if we are to achieve such large scale and structural changes as gender equality, the end of female poverty, or abolition of unpaid reproductive labor. The paper reconstructs the political theory of carceral feminism, i.e., the dominant form of political feminism in today’s world, developed by Catherine A. Mackinnon’s reviewing its recent critique formulated by Janet Halley. It concludes by posing the question about other alternative and non-carceral forms of feminist governance.

Respond and Resolve: A Critical Feminist Inquiry for Technologies of Sexual Governance

From higher education to workplaces, institutions are increasingly adopting data-driven and semiautomated technologies to facilitate, manage, and arbitrate sexual affairs. These largely US-based systems, which I term “technologies of sexual governance,” are encoded with and reify particular ideologies about sexual (mis)conduct, and thus call for a critical feminist inquiry about their cultural, political, and moral implications for advancing a feminist sexual politics. Drawing from Halley et al.’s “governance feminism” framework, this article makes the case that a critical feminist inquiry into technologies of sexual governance must take into account the co-constitutive nature of feminist sexual politics and technology. Specifically, I argue that critical inquiries must begin by interrogating which feminist ideologies about sex and power gain purchase with and through particular computational logics and form. To demonstrate this approach, I offer two ways of reading feminist scholarly and popular responses to “antirape technologies” that capture both readings’ shortcomings, and I propose a third approach that captures the cultural work that particular feminist ideologies and technologies mutually perform. This article concludes by demonstrating how the third approach can advance a feminist analysis of workplace misconduct management softwares.

Prostitution and Moral and Sexual Hygiene in Mandatory Palestine: The Criminal Code for Palestine (1921–1936)

This article argues that at the turn of the twentieth century British feminists’ expertise on hygiene, sexuality and morality projected an early prototypical form of governance feminism in Mandate Palestine by producing a common language and a governmental apparatus which reflected racialised and orientalist assumptions, and limited indigenous women’s rights through tropes of progress and civilisation. The article analyses women’s contributions to penal reform in Mandatory Palestine, focusing on the regulation of sex work/prostitution, treatment of prisoners and adultery as proposed for the draft Criminal Code for Palestine between 1921 and 1933. It relies on the correspondence between transnational organisations (such as the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene), women’s groups and charities active on gender and women’s rights to reveal how penal reform was discussed nationally and internationally in women’s debates. It offers an analysis of the history of feminist advocacy in criminal justice on the regulation of prostitution and trafficking, adultery and treatment of prisoners, and adultery in mandate international law on Palestine during the interwar period. It contributes to the scholarship reassessing women’s engagements in criminal justice from a postcolonial perspective by highlighting processes of silencing and marginalisation within the geopolitical space of the mandates and the Empire.

Precarious bodies: The securitization of the "veiled" woman in European human rights.

This article examines how judicial human rights in Europe have adopted the security politics that have swept across Europe in recent years and how, through the European Court of Human Rights' (ECtHR)decision-making over the veil they have contributed to the precarity of the Muslim woman's body. While suffering from stigmatization through securitization of the veil (I am using 'veil' to describe various garments such as the hijab, niqab and burqa. For the purposes of this article, this is a useful shorthand), covered Muslim women's (The concept of Muslim women is a misnomer because it suggests that Muslim women constitute a homogeneous group when they are not. Without denying their heterogeneity, its use here is suggestive of the way it is used by securitizing agents and narratives) attempts at strategic human rights litigation against bans on their clothing, including landmark cases such as SAS v. France, have failed. Institutional human rights in Europe have hijacked national governments' security narratives and thus been complicit in furthering the bodily vulnerability of covered Muslim women by sanctioning the public stripping of their clothing. This transgresses human rights' fundamental, normative, commitment to preventing bodily wounding. It exposes the conditionality and limitation of judicial human rights and endorses an idealized version of the exposed woman as free and equal. Moreover, by abandoning its role as neutral arbiter or audience, the ECtHR exposes human rights' ongoing link with neo-colonialism. The Court's decision-making raises the question of how veiled women might mobilize to desecuritize the veil. I suggest a return to the politics of rights combined with the "rebellious cosmopolitanism" resonant with Camus' politics to mount relentless protests against governance feminism and the Eurocentrism of institutional human rights for a return to "normal politics".

El feminismo de la gobernanza en la CEDAW: la cuestión sobre el trabajo sexual y la prostitución*

Resumen A partir del debate sobre el feminismo de la gobernanza, este artículo investiga las recomendaciones generales del Comité de la Convención sobre la Eliminación de Todas las Formas de Discriminación contra la Mujer (CEDAW) y las observaciones finales de los informes de los Estados parte presentadas ante el mismo. El objetivo consiste en analizar el enfoque que este órgano ha incorporado para abordar la comercialización del sexo desde una perspectiva crítica. En este sentido, se encuentra que el Comité de la CEDAW ha promovido un enfoque de descriminalización parcial o abolicionista que pretende penalizar a aquellos que participen en el comercio sexual, salvo a la mujer en prostitución, la cual es considerada primordialmente como una víctima. Así, el artículo provee hallazgos empíricos que permiten entender las aproximaciones a la sexualidad que predominan en la regulación y organismos internacionales y sus posibles implicaciones para el feminismo de la gobernanza.

Security unbound: spectres of feminism in Trump-time

ABSTRACTWe open with a reflection on the sense of incredulity that marked the election of Donald Trump, encapsulated in the question - how could that have happened? How could hard-fought-for rights thought secured by (global governance) feminism be so quickly lost? What we short-hand as Trump-time, a time of the re-materialisation of an unbridled and globalised re-securing of virulent (white) patriarchy of the type many thought dead and gone, has brought renewed attention to dystopian fictional works, such as Frankenstein and The Handmaid’s Tale, as cautionary tales of the worst of what was, is, and will be. In this destabilizing moment, we turn to theoretical work on the spectral to assist in not rushing to diagnoses that would return us to sureties about secure feminist futures, but instead to trouble notions of ‘past/future/present’ secured lives through thinking about and with the ghosts that always haunt them. We move through examinations of the ghost-bodies of fictional Handmaid Offred, Hillary Clinton, and Trump himself to a consideration of unbound feminisms in the form of ‘killjoy’ spirits and (trans) bodies that unmoor feminism from ‘women’ and direct us to incoherence and fluidity that resist the re-securing of both feminism and resurgent (white) patriarchy.

The happy and anxious lives of (feminist) legal scholarship: an interview with Prabha Kotiswaran

This interview with Prabha Kotiswaran, Professor of Law and Social Justice at King’s College, London focuses, among others, on the many dimensions of postcolonial feminist legal education and scholarship; her own scholarly journey across three continents; insights into the gendered nature of academic labor; the lived dimensions of her feminism, the limitations and possibilities of emerging forms of feminisms in the wake of #MeToo; on her own scholarship on sex work; the misreading of governance feminism; the tradition of materialist feminism; her current project on law and social reproduction; and the imperative for strengthening solidarity between the women’s and labor movements in India.

Affective virtuosity: Challenges for governance feminism in the context of the economic crisis

This article explores the possibilities and constraints for feminist knowledge production and diffusion, and its influence over policy making and public debate in the context of austerity and neoliberal governance. By analysing the process in which a group of Finnish academic feminists used their expert position to influence government policy in 2015–2017, the article illustrates the strategies they adopted to engage in political debates and how they negotiated the new political landscape. The research material was derived from two years of action research and participant observation and is considered through the theoretical lens of governance feminism. The article makes a distinctive contribution to extant theories of governance feminism, by drawing upon theories of affects and ambivalence as a complement to governance feminism's focus on discourses and co‐optation. We coin the term affective virtuosity to highlight the importance of affect in feminist knowledge production and diffusion, and in shaping the various perspectives available to feminist scholars in encounters with politicians and policymakers.

Feminism and Penal Expansion: The Role of Rights-Based Criminal Law in Post-Neoliberal Ecuador

This article analyses feminist discourses on the criminalisation of violence against women in Ecuador, after the enactment of a “post-neoliberal” constitution. It responds to arguments in feminist legal theory, which affirm that penal expansion thrives through neoliberal globalisation, and that certain feminists have sponsored this carceral-neoliberal alliance, over and above redistributive concerns. However, in Ecuador, many feminists who participated in a recent criminalisation process also endorsed the post-neoliberal government’s social redistribution programme. Ecuadorian feminism therefore complicates current discussions on carceral and governance feminism, which link penal expansion with neoliberalism and an absence of redistributive concerns. Ecuadorian left-leaning feminists use rights-based frameworks to reconcile penal interventions with potential abuses of coercive power. This allows them to regard criminal justice as minimally problematic within the redistributive agenda they endorse. At the same time, the penal approach of Ecuadorian feminists runs the danger of marginalising legally pluralistic approaches to justice.

Feminism Against Crime Control: On Sexual Subordination and State Apologism

AbstractIts critics call it ‘feminism-as-crime-control’, or ‘Governance Feminism’, diagnosing it as a pernicious form of identity politics. Its advocates call it taking sexual violence seriously – by which they mean wielding the power of the state to ‘punish perpetrators’ and ‘protect vulnerable women’. Both sides agree that this approach follows from the radical feminist analysis of sexual violence most strikingly formulated by Catharine MacKinnon. The aim of this paper is to rethink the Governance Feminism debate by questioning this common presupposition. I ask whether taking MacKinnon’s analysis of sexual violence seriously might, in fact, itself give us reason to be critical of political strategies that embrace the punitive state. By raising this question, I hope to persuade radical feminists to listen to critics of carceral politics rather than dismissing them as rape apologists, and critics of carceral politics to listen to radical feminists rather than dismissing them as state apologists.

Governance Feminism's Others: Sex Workers and India's Rape Law Reforms (Introduction)

In Governance Feminism: An Introduction (University of Minnesota Press 2018), I used the concept of governance feminism (GF) to analyse one of the most significant new Indian legislations to address violence against women (VAW), the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 (CLA) passed by the Indian Parliament in the wake of the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pande in 2012. I argued that Indian feminism has entered a governance mode and is today a crucial part of the law-making process even if significant feminist demands of the state have not materialised. However, GF is not limited to tracking feminist influence in the corridors of state power; state power extends well beyond the juridical into the discursive or governmental realm. How then do feminists relate to or reconfigure feminism given the shift in the state’s political functions from government to governance whereby the state uses both its juridical and discursive powers to govern its political subjects? I consider this question by examining the Indian legal regimes on sex work and trafficking, because these regimes took birth in the crucible of feminist governmentality and have been cultivated by GFeminists ever since. Moreover, since the 1990s, sex workers have been subjects of the state’s governmental power exercised through myriad public health initiatives. By comparing the politics of criminal law reform which informed the strategies of feminists (on rape, sex work and trafficking) versus that of sex workers’ groups (on sex work), I argue that it is only by studying GF’s ‘others’, namely, sex workers that we can fully grasp the political possibilities and futures of GF.

Governance Feminism in the Post-Colony: India's Rape Law Reforms of 2013

Against the backdrop of the phenomenal successes of governance feminism in the US, Israel and internationally, this paper will consider governance feminism in the post- colonial context of India. In particular, the paper uses the wide-ranging law reforms on rape and trafficking in India in the wake of the rape and murder of a Delhi student in December 2012 to make two arguments. First, that Anglo-American governance feminism has a rather limited and contingent influence on postcolonial feminism. Second, that a mapping of Indian feminist interventions on the law of rape over the past three decades suggests that Indian feminism displays key characteristics of governance feminism. Viewing the 2013 reforms as the culmination of decades of feminist lobbying of the state for rape law reform, this paper argues that Indian governance feminism is deeply committed to a highly gendered understanding of sexual violence. Further, that Indian feminism has increasingly resorted to the use of the criminal law to address sexual violence even as its historical suspicion of postcolonial state power has reduced considerably and is now mostly evident in its opposition to the death penalty for rapists. This paper thus tells a highly contextual story of fragmentation, partial reception, partial rejection, and the local production of feminist ideas and stances towards governance. It provides answers, in the Indian framework, to the key questions of this collection on governance feminism.

FFminisme Et Droit International : Le FFminisme De Gouvernance LLLpreuve Du FFminisme Critique (Feminism and International Law: 'Governance Feminism' Put to the Test of 'Critical Feminism')

FFminisme Et Droit International : Le FFminisme De Gouvernance LLLpreuve Du FFminisme Critique (Feminism and International Law: 'Governance Feminism' Put to the Test of 'Critical Feminism')

Crisis, Austerity and Gendered Governance: A Feminist Perspective

Feminist scholars have been highly attentive to the ways that crises have become an everyday technique of global governance. They are particularly sensitive to the mechanisms through which ‘crisis management’ entrenches the power of particular economic orders and constrains the possibilities, and space, for contestation and critique. This paper seeks to contribute to but also to extend existing feminist research on financial crisis by arguing that, over the course of what has commonly been labelled the ‘global financial crisis’, the emergence of ‘crisis governance feminism’ has enabled existing structures and mechanisms of gendered privilege, such as the global financial industry, to suppress calls for their overhaul and to re-entrench their power in the global political economy. Adopting a discursive approach to gender and governance that situates gender centrally in understanding governance discourses and their reproduction of common sense (about what people do, how they labour, where they invest and so on), this paper argues that the governance of crisis in the contemporary era, in particular the various actors, institutions, policies and ideas that have sought to describe and ‘contain’ the global financial crisis, are gendered. Gender has become, in the contemporary global political economy, a technique of governance, and with deleterious effects. Despite inciting more discussion of ‘gender’ in economic systems than ever before (particularly in terms of discussions of ‘economic competitiveness’), this paper argues that the ‘global financial crisis’ has precipitated and continues to reproduce techniques of governance that trivialise feminist concerns while further embedding a masculinised, white and elitist culture of global financial privilege.

THE “NAKED FACE” OF SECULAR EXCLUSION: BILL 94 AND THE PRIVATIZATION OF BELIEF

This article will consider the case study of Québec’s Bill 94 (An Act to establish guidelines governing accommodation requests within the Administration and certain institutions), introduced in March 2010, one of many recent bans imposed on the wearing of the niqab in the West. Citing the importance of “the right to gender equality and the principle of religious neutrality of the State,” Bill 94 emphasizes the necessity of “un visage découvert” or “naked face” when giving or receiving a broad range of public services in Québec, including all government services, childcare centres, hospitals, and health and social service agencies. According to section 6 of the Act, “If an accommodation involves an adaptation of that practice and reasons of security, communication or identification warrant it, the accommodation must be denied.” While quasi-neutral, this bill clearly has a disproportionate impact on religious women who wear the niqab. In fact, as a direct result of the legislation, Muslim women will likely disappear from the public sphere and be restricted to the private home where they might effectively be dependent on male family members to navigate the “market place” on their behalf. Borrowing from Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, this paper will consider the distributive consequences of the niqab ban, a critical juncture of “religion-state relations” in which belief is more and more relegated to the private sphere in Quebec. The article will use Bill 94 to explore this peculiar manifestation of “secularism” with the concurrent existence of “governance feminism”— how the privatization of belief goes hand in hand and is perversely reinforced by a colonial discourse on gender equality, leaving some already marginalized women out of the public gaze. Is this legislated demand for a “naked face” truly the logical outcome of a successful feminist movement (as some have asserted) or isthis erasure of religious women in fact the latest veil of patriarchy?

Diversity Management and Gender Mainstreaming as Technologies of Government

Diversity management and gender mainstreaming can be considered technologies of government in the Foucaultian sense; that is, they are technologies that guide people to conduct themselves in a particular manner; their purpose is the “conduct of conduct.” This article illustrates the value of applying a Foucaultian “analytics of government” to generate insights on the effects of inserting feminist knowledge into institutional contexts through the practices of gender mainstreaming and diversity management. I first reinterpret these strategies as technologies of government that meet the characteristics identified in the literature on governmentality. Second, I explore the liberal rationality of the contemporary apparatus of gender by juxtaposing it to the disciplinary rationality underlying efforts to govern women at the turn of the nineteenth century. Third, I tease out similarities and differences in the way in which diversity management and gender mainstreaming operate, emphasizing, in particular, the way in which they make difference productive and outlining how one deploys a neoliberal logic and the other a bureaucratic logic. Ultimately, I argue that governance feminism should be interpreted as the governmentalization of feminist knowledge; that is, feminist knowledge has been adapted so that it becomes available for the government of conduct.

‘I don't even know what gender is’: a discussion of the connections between gender, gender mainstreaming and feminist theory

AbstractIn this article I discuss some of the connections between gender, gender mainstreaming and feminist theory. As a global initiative, gender mainstreaming is now well established; but the role of feminism and feminists in achieving this success is questionable. Some, including Harvard Law Professor Janet Halley claim that feminists, particularly in the realm of governance feminism, have been extremely successful. Yet despite this success Halley invites us to ‘take a break from feminism’. I consider this political and intellectual invitation in this article in order to shed some light on the relationship between gender mainstreaming and feminism but also to probe what Robyn Wiegman refers to as a ‘critical incomprehension’ around feminism. My discussion includes a brief analysis of the imagery used in documentation relating to the United Kingdom's Gender Equality Duty Legislation; the latter a contemporary example of a legislative attempt to properly mainstream gender. In conclusion I return to the Halley's invitation to ‘take a break from feminism’ and introduce, by way of contrast, Angela McRobbie's recent discussion of post-feminism ultimately suggesting that we might see Halley's call, as well as the popularity (and ‘failures’) of gender mainstreaming as examples of post-feminist practice. Image 1.Pop-art images advertising the ‘Gender Agenda’ on the Internet {http://www.gender-agenda.co.uk/} which is part of the UK's legislation on gender equality produced by the UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission (formerly the Equal Opportunities Commission).If you look around the United States, Canada, the European Union, the human rights establishment, even the World Bank, you see plenty of places where feminism, far from operating underground, is running things.1Any force as powerful as feminism must find itself occasionally looking down at its own bloody hands.2

Plying the Trade Freely: Prostitution and European Union Trade Agreements in the Case of Aldona Malgorzata Jany and Others

The international debate over sex trafficking has been mired in the debate over prostitution itself. The European Court of Justice’s recent Jany decision represents a laissez faire reading of European Union trade agreements. However, by employing a model of Governance Feminism, one may explore the realist consequences of the case for sex workers. Application of the model enables one to examine these shifts in sex workers’ bargaining power without deciding whether prostitution is simply work or inherent oppression. The author concludes that such an examination may lead to possibilities for prostitutes to ply both international borders and their trade freely.