Inside Feminist Foreign Policy: Hierarchies, Gatekeeping, and Feminist Knowledge in Mexico

This paper presents findings from the Mexican case study of Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP), examining how feminist knowledge is produced, negotiated, and constrained within state foreign policy institutions. Drawing on feminist epistemologies and a gender-as-power approach, I analyse Mexico’s adoption of FFP not as a linear process of feminist “progress,” but as a contested terrain shaped by hierarchies, exclusions, and strategic translations of feminist language. Based on qualitative fieldwork conducted in Mexico City between January and May 2025 - including semi-structured interviews with policymakers, feminist bureaucrats, and civil society actors, as well as policy document and discourse analysis - the paper traces how feminist claims are selectively incorporated into foreign policy narratives. While Mexico’s FFP is internationally framed as ambitious and transformative, my findings reveal persistent tensions between feminist ambitions and the vertical, state-centric logics of foreign policy-making. Civil society participation, although symbolically foregrounded, is frequently mediated through gatekeeping practices that privilege institutionalized expertise and proximity to power. The paper highlights how feminist actors within the state navigate these constraints through affective, relational, and strategic practices, often engaging in forms of epistemic compromise to render feminist knowledge legible within diplomatic spaces. At the same time, these dynamics risk depoliticizing structural critiques of gendered, racialized, and colonial power relations embedded in Mexico’s foreign policy apparatus. By foregrounding lived experiences, emotions, and relational knowledge, this contribution advances debates in Gender and Politics on feminist institutionalization, co-optation, and the politics of representation. It argues for understanding feminist foreign policy not as a coherent model, but as an ongoing process of becoming, marked by contradictions, uneven power relations, and contested feminist futures.