Masculinist Agency and the politics of the European Debt Crisis: The Gendered Political Economy of Restructuring

The harsh impact of the economic crisis and its management in Europe on gender equality politics and policies are becoming more and more apparent in the academic debate. Not least, the ability of feminist actors to influence policy making in the EU is in decline. Too often, however, this decline is conceptualised as the consequence of a change in structural conditions, rather than as a consequence of gender politics. In particular, this process is attributed to a loss of legitimacy of the EU vis a vis national institutions. This is depicted as a challenge for feminist actors because often the EU is seen as a “champion of gender equality” (Locher and Prügl 2008, 8), so that a loss of agency of the EU equals a loss of a comparatively generous terrain for feminist struggles. While the aim is not to deny the degree of agency that the EU institutions made available to feminist actors, this paper problematises understandings of the EU as generous for gender equality per se. It argues that in order to understand the gender politics at work in the crisis in a more complex and contingent way, we need to conceptualise masculinist agency as well as feminist agency within the political economy of the European Union. This is because, in most feminist theorising of the political economy, masculine rule is equated with “structure”, and feminist contestations with “agency”, even in highly differentiated theoretical understandings of the EU as a decentered state (e.g. Prügl 2011). Such understandings of gendered power assume that masculinism operates within the logic of reproduction, whereas feminism operates within the logic of change. This understanding, however, leaves us unable to conceptually grasp another form of change: that of a backlash in gender policies and politics, a sudden increase in gender inequality. This conceptual paper will argue, instead, that if we want to understand the politics of gender in the context of the economic and institutional crisis of the EU, we need to conceptualise both feminist and masculinist agency. It will thus attempt to offer a different perspective on the impacts of the crisis on gender equality. It will analyse how the context of the economic crisis gave rise to the impact and legitimacy of masculinist agency, from within and outside of the EU's institutional ensemble. From a political economy perspective, it will locate one of the decisive, yet discursively constructed sources of the power of masculinist agency in economistic conceptualisations of crisis management, which function to legitimise ways of governance based on claims of technocratic mastery which are symbolically coded as masculine, yet have socially adverse effects not least for gender equality. Locher, Birgit, and Elisabeth Prügl. 2008. “Gender and European Integration.” ConWEB 2008 (2): 1–25. Prügl, Elisabeth. 2011. Transforming Masculine Rule : Agriculture and Rural Development in the European Union. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press.