Feminist Epistemic Justice and the Decolonial Challenge to European Union’s Gender Governance: Learning from the Jungle?

This paper critically examines the European Union’s (EU) gender equality policies through a decolonial feminist lens, exploring how the EU constructs itself as a normative global actor while reproducing epistemic hierarchies. Despite its image as a global champion of gender equality, the EU’s discourse and policy frameworks often reflect a top-down, Eurocentric logic that positions non-European feminist movements as peripheral. Drawing on existing critiques of the EU’s instrumental and neoliberal approaches to gender, the paper analyses forty-two texts adopted by the European Parliament during its 9th parliamentary term (2019–2024). The analysis identifies three recurring patterns: the instrumentalisation of gender equality, the monopolisation of feminist knowledge, and the managerialisation of equality through technocratic procedures. While acknowledging the EU’s important contributions to gender equality, the paper argues that its approach often reinforces rather than redistributes epistemic authority. Moments of epistemic resistance such as references to intersectionality and structural inequality remain limited by institutional and procedural constraints. The paper calls for greater epistemic reflexivity and relational accountability, urging the EU to engage in reciprocal knowledge exchange and centre the perspectives of those most affected by gendered and racialised inequalities. This paper is part of the project, Pluriversal Excellence in EU Studies (PLURIEX-101240978) co-funded by European Commission.