1 Introduction
Missing in action?
Christine Hudson, Malin Rönnblom and Katherine Teghtsoonian
Introduction
Our motivation for writing this book arises from our shared sense that some forms of feminist scholarship are ‘missing in action’ within the discipline of political science and our belief that this absence has problematic effects. In particular, we see a need to open up this scholarly field of inquiry in order to create more space for feminist post-structuralist analysis. We also want to acknowledge the contributions that this approach to research can make to addressing urgent ongoing societal and political changes related to neoliberal practices of post-democracy and post-politics, in local contexts as well as on a global scale. As we finalise this manuscript, rationalities from global capitalism are continuing to reshape the public sector in both local and national contexts, resulting in an increased insistence on individual rather than collective responsibility for health, welfare and social assistance. The wars in Afghanistan, Syria and other countries are leaving millions of people homeless and without a home country; the presidential election campaign and its outcome in the USA have demonstrated an alarming acceptance of public expressions of contempt for migrants, Muslims and women, as well as for liberal democratic politics per se. We believe that these processes, albeit in different ways, are all related to governance practices, and that developing intelligent and useful responses to them will require new analytical frameworks and tools. The chapters in this collection illustrate some of the diverse contributions to this important undertaking that can be generated through research that brings together feminist and post-structuralist approaches.
One of the starting points for this book was the experience of turning to the ‘action’ of mainstream political science and finding little space there for post-structuralist feminist engagements with governance theory:
It all started back in October 2013 with some work I (Christine) had been doing on the gendered, classed and racialised power relations of governance from a post-structuralist feminist perspective, especially in relation to the city. I was looking for a conference where I could present a paper based on this research. Searching the array of social science conferences, I stumbled across the International Political Science Association’s 23rd World Congress of Political Science, which had as its theme ‘Challenges of Contemporary Governance’ and the aim to ‘reflect upon contemporary evolutions in governance in the face of numerous challenges’.1 There was even a sub-theme entitled ‘Political Theory, Gender and Politics’. Perfect, I thought – with a title like that there is sure to be a panel where I can submit an abstract! Imagine, however, my increasing frustration and exasperation as I scoured panel after panel without finding one into which my research would fit. Governance in relation to gender seemed to be confined largely to panels presenting quantitative research on parliamentary representation, electoral quotas and group representation or measurement in relation to gender and governance. Those panels with a more qualitative orientation focused on such things as women’s movements’ strategies in the face of anti-feminist tendencies or on specific issues such as abortion.
A second trail to this volume has been blazed through experiences of trying to retain a feminist analysis while using the conceptual tools offered by post-structuralist theory:
During the late 2000s, I (Katherine) began to notice how attention to gender was marginalised in my writing as I mobilised an analytic of governmentality to consider discussions relating to the topic of depression in Canadian workplaces. There was no reason to expect that gender would have a less central place in my consideration of discourses and practices around the problem of depression in the workplace than it had in my previous work. And yet, as I wrote, I struggled to find any place in my analysis for a discussion of how the texts I was examining addressed or ignored the particular experiences, circumstances, needs and challenges confronting diverse groups of women in the workplace as compared with those of men. Analogous to practices I have criticised when they appeared in the work of others, my first published work on this topic (Teghtsoonian, 2008) included a brief paragraph at the very end noting the relevance of – but also the lack of space to fully address – the gendered and racialised dimensions of the initiatives I had analysed, deferring a consideration of these to future writing. And, despite my best efforts, I continued to struggle to ‘make room’ for these topics in writing in which I used governmentality as my principal analytical framework (Teghtsoonian, 2009).
A third, related set of experiences has involved trying to locate spaces for post-structuralist analysis within the broad field of critical feminist policy studies:
I (Malin) have come to the book from a place outside the discipline of political science: the interdisciplinary site of gender studies and also, more recently, interdisciplinary regional studies. Although I have worked outside a department of political science for more than ten years, I have always tried to stay in contact with the discipline, mostly through participating in political science conferences, especially those with a focus on feminist studies. With my research focus on critical policy studies – and an increasing interest in other post-structural frameworks, such as governmentality and critical discourse analysis – I have always had the feeling of being at the margins of feminist political science studies, mainly in relation to my analytical approaches. At the same time, when attending gender studies conferences, I have had the feeling that my empirical focus – on policy, gender mainstreaming, politicisation and de-politicisation – lies at the margins of the field of gender studies. The result: I feel like a gender studies scholar when I am at political science venues, and like a political scientist when I am at gender studies venues.
The scholarly context within which these experiences have unfolded has not, of course, been static. Post-structuralist approaches, particularly those building on the work of Michel Foucault, have come to occupy a prominent place within the social sciences and, since the mid-2000s, have increasingly informed critical engagements with mainstream accounts of governance (see, for example, Bröckling et al., 2010; Walters, 2012). However, work that draws on both feminist and post-structuralist analysis is still less common in mainstream or feminist conferences or journals within the discipline of political science as a whole, although there are exceptions. It is, for example, more visible within the international relations and political economy fields, where the work of scholars such as de Goede (2004), Griffin (2007, 2009, 2015) and Peterson (2003, 2005) on political economy and neoliberal governmentality and Hudson (2005), Shepherd (2007, 2015) and Zalewski and Runyan (2013) on techniques of security governance has been published in both mainstream and feminist journals. This volume aims to follow this lead and contribute to the developing research literature that is slowly effecting a change even in the mainstream disciplinary landscape. It presents work that in various ways combines feminist analysis with the conceptual tools offered by post-structuralism in order to consider governance as an analytical construct, as a set of practices and as a political problematic.
Governance, post-structuralism and feminist analysis
The visibility of ‘governance’ as a theme running through this collection reflects the starting point for the book. Many of the chapters were originally presented as part of a panel session at the 2014 IPSA conference which, in the absence of a suitable placement for her own paper, Christine ended up organising for that event. Yet, as the three of us discussed how to situate the volume and the work it contains for readers of this introductory chapter, we found ourselves increasingly uneasy about the prospect of using governance as a reference point. Of course, as the vast literature that has grown up around it attests, this is a contested concept that is taken up in many different ways and has generated a valuable critical literature (see, for example, Bedford, 2013; Griggs et al., 2014; Hunter, 2015; Levi-Faur, 2012; Newman, 2005, 2014; Sauer, 2011). However, as is the case within any discursive field, some conceptual practices relating to governance are hegemonic:
When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
For us, Humpty Dumpty’s question is a crucial one since, in our experience, the ‘master’ discourse of governance within the discipline of political science has constrained rather than enriched a feminist analysis that seeks to engage with conceptual frameworks deriving from Foucault’s work. Rather than abandoning the concept to the disciplinary mainstream, however, we want to consider its potential when taken up through an analysis that draws on both feminist and post-structuralist conceptual frameworks, and also respond to what we see as its shortcomings.
Mainstream governance literature has, for example, drawn attention away from the state, towards actors and processes beyond the domain of institutional politics. However, this literature largely ignores the operation and effects of power within practices of governance. It tends to overlook important sites through which these are exercised, such as individuals, households, workplaces, and neglects key dimensions of relevant practices, such as the social, cultural and affective (Newman, 2005). Much of this literature either assumes or argues that this ‘new’ way of enacting policy and politics constitutes an improvement. However, it often fails to address the effects of gender, racialised identity and other dimensions of difference and/or marginalisation within particular governance strategies, or the manner in which dominant conceptualisations of governance work to exclude such considerations. Post-structuralist and feminist conceptual frameworks each address these absences, in various ways.
What we have learnt from mainstream accounts is extended in important ways through post-structuralist analyses of governance. This is achieved through a strong analytical focus on both the operation of power and its effects. Post-structuralist approaches offer important insights into the ways in which subjectivities are both constituted by governance practices and mobilised against them. In addition, a post-structuralist framework introduces the potential for an analysis of the political, of processes of de-politicisation and re-politicisation – something that is commonly absent in mainstream approaches to governance.
Post-structuralist conceptual frameworks that draw upon, but also extend beyond, Foucault’s concept of governmentality are important in developing critical analyses of governing practices that differ in significant ways from accounts built on mainstream conceptions of governance and power. However, they tend not to focus attention on gender or use feminist analyses (for example, Bröckling et al., 2010; Walters, 2012; Bevir, 2016). In order to scrutinise how processes of representation and subjectification enhance specific forms of privilege through different rationalities, we emphasise the need to bring in (different forms of) feminist analysis.
There is a strong body of feminist scholarship within the discipline of political science that, unlike the mainstream literature on governance and the post-structuralist scholarship discussed above, offers important insights into the gendered dimensions and effects of governance practices. It considers how these are intertwined with those revolving around race, class and other categories of marginalisation. Important contributions have been made through comparative studies of women’s policy agencies and parliamentary committees, and through collaborative research projects on multi-level governance (see, for example, Haussman et al., 2010; Outshoorn and Kantola, 2007; McBride and Mazur, 2010; Grace and Sawer, 2015). While it does make a crucial contribution, this literature itself produces analytical presences and absences. Like the rest of the discipline, it tends to privilege the state as a focus of inquiry even though feminist analysis, broadly conceived, builds on the central idea that power is exercised in and through diverse sites that are often some distance from formal political institutions (although there are important examples of a post-structuralist analysis of the state; see Kantola 2006). Wendy Larner and her co-authors, in reflecting on the related field of feminist social policy scholarship, have argued for the value of an expanded empirical focus in combination with a broader repertoire of conceptual frameworks and tools. They argue that our understanding of governance, the economy and citizenship will be extended in useful directions through an engagement with ‘the ideational and cultural turns in social science’, particularly ‘if we focus explicitly on new gendered sites, spaces, and networks and consider how and why they have come to take the forms that they do,’ rather than focusing solely on macro-level processes (Larner et al., 2013, p. 158).
There is a growing body of scholarship that applies this type of approach by drawing on both post-structuralist and feminist analyses to consider governance practices, particularly within the subfields of political economy and international relations (IR). Post-structuralist and feminist analyses are used as the lenses through which to view political economy and IR, and to identify not only their exclusions, silences and marginalisations but also their openings and potential. As Janet Newman in Chapter 2 in this book points out, feminist scholars within political economy are making interventions into what are male-dominated theoretical canons with regard to the production and meaning of, for example, ‘crises’ (Griffin, 2015) and economic policy (Pearson and Elson, 2015). Peterson (2003) reconceptualises neoliberal globalisation and the nature and functioning of the global political economy, showing the interaction of reproductive, productive and virtual economies and integrating analyses of gender, race, class and nation with other axes of difference. Similarly, within IR, Shepherd (2007) scrutinises the violent reproduction of gender and of the international and provides a feminist reworking of the concepts of security and violence.
Feminist analysis has also been brought together with an analytic of governmentality to study gender mainstreaming initiatives and practices. Scholars exploring such topics have focused critical attention on how feminist analysis has itself become a governing programme within which not all of the resulting effects have been intended, foreseen or welcomed by activists (see, for example, Kronsell, 2012; Prügl, 2011; Woehl, 2011). Their analysis points, among other things, to the de-politicising effects of rendering feminist knowledge into the technical terms in which gender mainstreaming initiatives or gender indicator projects are constituted, and how this can disavow gender as a critical analytics for disruption and contestation (Kunz, 2014). Feminist scholars have also drawn on the conceptual tools offered by governmentality to consider how gender operates as a vector of governing within particular policy areas or gender-equality initiatives (for example, Bacchi and Eveline, 2010; Lombardo et al., 2009; Repo, 2016). Other feminist political scientists have combined feminist and post-structuralist analyses in a way that does not situate ‘gender’ or ‘women’ as empirical anchoring points. Hoppania and Vaittinen (2015), for example, build on the work of Foucault and Annemarie Mol to bring feminist theorisations of bodies and of care together with an analysis of neoliberal governmentalities and post-structuralist conceptualisations of care practices. They do so in order to develop an argument that care needs and practices constitute a key site for ‘the political’ that produces disruption and contestation within a neoliberal space that might otherwise be understood in totalised terms.
In common with these scholars and others within the discipline of political science (see, for example, Reed and Saukko, 2010; Allan et al., 2010), we see a strong productive potential in bringing feminist and post-structuralist approaches to the analysis of governance into dialogue. Certainly there are interesting resonances between them. They share a broad understanding of politics and power as complex, multi-faceted and practised within and across diverse sites. Both offer conceptual tools that scholars have found useful in developing analyses of silences, absences and subjugated knowledges, as well as of the relationship between governing and resistive practices (counter-conduct). Feminist analysis and post-structural scholarship have each offered significant challenges – empirical, epistemological and ontological – to mainstream political science and, in so doing, have generated innovative theoretical and empirical insights into practices of governing in, and between, diverse sites. In light of the many points of contact between these two research approaches, it is somewhat surprising that such work is not particularly prominent within the broad discipline of political science or among feminist scholars working within it. This raises a crucial question for us: Why has there not been a stronger movement in a post-st...
