How to Apply a Feminist Governmentality: Including, Transforming, Re-Conceptualizing

The feminist engagement with Foucault’s governmentality approach is typically discussed in terms of consistency and usefulness. This is not our concern. Ours is a methodological concern arising from a dissatisfaction with most feminist applications of governmentality. Based upon an analysis of feminist governmentality, we notice that the feminist element is often reduced to the object of investigation e.g. studying policies of gender mainstreaming or feminist, social movements. Instead we seek to explore new ways of doing feminist governmentality where feminism has implications for how the object of investigation is studied. Re-reading existing literature, we outline a methodological scale of two main, feminist approaches to governmentality: a) including and transforming a gender perspective b) Introducing additional analytical concepts. In the latter version, we re-conceptualize feminist govermentality through additional, analytical concepts such as ‘politization’, ‘care’ and ‘affect’, and where gender is not necessarily present. Honoring the feminist methodology of continuous self-reflexivity, we perform an exercise in joint reflexivity through vignettes written on two of the suggested concepts and answering back in a dialogue arising from a reflection upon what others have written and what we ourselves are doing.