Feminisms Meets Post-Structuralist Approaches

Feminisms meets post-structuralist approaches Section chairs: lecturer Jemima Repo (Newcastle), Professor Malin Rönnblom (Karlstad) and Professor Hanne Marlene Dahl (Roskilde). Building on the panel Feminist governmentality: Old and new issues, that took place at the ECPR General Conference in August 2020, this section seeks to bring together feminist scholars with an interest and engagement in post-structuralist analysis and methodology. Feminist research on politics has increasingly been inspired by different post-structuralist approaches, like Michel Foucault’s governmentality framework or Carol Bacchi’s critical take on policy analysis. To a large extent, feminist scholars have been invited to show how feminist perspectives could bring in new and important dimensions to post-structuralist research. This panel has a different point of departure, with the aim of creating a space for the critical encounter between feminist thinking and post-structuralist approaches, inspired by Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze etc. A key issue for the section is to explore challenges and possibilities for those of us using concepts and ways of thinking inspired by post-structuralisms e.g. governmentality, silence/absence and assemblage. Challenges that include issues of consistency, applicability, complexity and usefulness of new concepts and approaches within feminist research. Thus, this section provides an analytical space for not only adding a feminist take to post-structuralism but also to challenge mainstream post-structuralist approaches. Here, we are following a tradition of critical feminist research, but aiming to also turn the critique into new feminist analytical frameworks. The section is open for exclusively theoretical and methodological panels and papers where theoretical issues emerge in the analysis of various empirical phenomenon. The section pin-points challenges for feminists studying key aspects of contemporary politics e.g. democracy, the state, populism, affects, violence, care, race, public health and sexuality.