Exploring Gendered Policy Knowledge: The Case of Family Migration in Germany

Migration is a politically salient issue with high potential for conflicts and polarization. This paper examines the dynamic linkages between gender, knowledge, and policy-making in the field of migration, deploying the analytical framework of feminist political epistemology. While feminist scholarship on expertise-research-policy relations has grown, studies on migration remain limited. The paper focusses on family migration – key to controlling international movements – in Germany, that has experienced major transformations with regard to its political knowledge regime and migration policies. Despite Germany’s position as an immigration destination since the 1960s, its long-standing policy frame was that it was not an immigration country. Significant restructurings took place since the late 1990s. The coalition of the Social Democratic and Green parties passed a new Immigration Act in 2004, accompanied by an “integrationist turn”. A shift in the production of policy-relevant knowledge increased the significance of academic knowledge in immigration and gender policies. Family migration has become a major terrain for the “civic turn” in integration policies, emphasizing “obligations” and “deservingness”. In 2007, Germany was among the first countries to institute language requirements for non-EU spousal immigration. The role of the remodeled knowledge policy relations for the “civic turn” has not yet been analyzed. The paper elaborates on Kulawik’s (2020) framework of feminist political epistemology and deploys a constitutive analysis of policy expertise: investigating how knowledge is assessed and selected in political processes. Political epistemologies are understood as nationally specific ways of public knowing, as configurations in which sedimented, discursive styles of thought interact with institutional patterns of decision-making. This analytical perspective is embedded in two strands of feminist theorizing: political discourse analysis and feminist institutionalisms. The German context provides vital insight into the contradictory dynamics involved in modalities of governing with knowledge from a gender and intersectional perspective. The analysis shows that the major motivation for the pre-entering language test as preventing forced marriages rested on narratives from the 1970s and ignored scientific evidence. It illustrates that the recognition of evidence is largely based on its resonance with existing popularized and regulatory knowledge. Changes are possible, but the process is not linear.