Feminist Political Economy, a Welcome Addition to Feminist EU Studies?

Feminist EU studies has witnessed an expansion in attempts to theorise EU integration (see Abels and MacRae 2016, Kronsel 2005) and the profound institutional and political shifts brought about since the ‘financial crisis’ which have re-shaped the EU’s gender normative impacts (Kantola and Lombardo 2017). Surprisingly however, insights from Feminist Political Economy (Acker 2004, Elson 1994, Enloe 1989, Maier 2011, Young, Bakker and Elson 2011), have not yet been extensively applied to EU Integration, in an explicit way, despite frequent assertions that the EU’s market-making premise and economic logics limit the transformative potential of its gender equality policies ( Hoskyns 2008, Jacquot 2015, Walby 2004). This paper argues that a Feminist Political Economy (FPE) approach to EU integration enables us to render the EU’s role in the maintenance of a ‘strategic silence’, which constitutes and obscures unequal economic relations between men and women (Bakker 1994; Enloe 1989, Gill and Roberts 2011), explicit. This strategic silence denies the relationship between the ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’ economy; the subsidy which reproductive labour provides (Rai et al 2014); and the (hierarchical) relationship between economic policy and other areas. Mapping these and other theoretical insights from FPE onto shifting EU institutional configurations, this paper aims to opens an agenda for feminist analysis of EU integration exploring the processes through which the EU maintains highly classed, racialised and gendered economic relationships (Gill & Roberts 2011; Perrons 2005; Maier 2011) whilst also re-scaling the opportunities to disrupt and influence their regulation (Lang and Sauer 2016).