Ignorance of gender impoverishes policy analysis

(Mary, Prof @ Rutgers, Policy discourse as sanctioned ignorance: theorizing the erasure of feminist knowledge Critical Policy Studies Vol. 3, Nos. 3–4, October–December 2009 )

What counts as policy-relevant knowledge in this era of globalization? How are the parameters of inquiry fixed for policy analysts and policy-makers by epistemic frameworks that are seldom subjected to scrutiny? How do the prevalence of certain policy frames and the erasure of others provide insights into the politics of knowledge that structure contemporary policy studies? To shed some light on these questions, I will explore the comparative openness of the field of policy studies to neoliberal and feminist discourses on globalization. When the emergence of neoliberalism as a transformative force in policy circles is traced to the ‘Washington Consensus’ developed in the early 1970s, there is a striking parallel between the decades of neoliberal and feminist ascendance. Neoliberalism was birthed as a top-down policy strategy, which relied upon the policy-making power of nation-states and international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for its materializations. Feminisms1 erupted both within international organizations and institutions and as bottom-up mobilizations of women engaged in grass-root struggles in communities around the globe. Both neoliberalism and feminism envision a future, and combine activism, political interventions, and policy transformations to bring that future into being. Both neoliberalism and global feminism have sought profound changes in consciousness, attitudes, mentalities, expectations, not just of institutions and agencies of governance, but of individuals in their daily lives. Neoliberal globalism2 and global feminism have also devised similar multi-level formulae for success in achieving systemic changes, targeting transnational organizations, national governments, and individual consciousness as sites of transformation. At a rudimentary level, both transformative visions have required that activists who press for change ‘from the outside’ work with key government ‘insiders’ to secure changes in law and policy. Both also have involved the development of appropriate state and international policy machinery to achieve desired policy outcomes. Both have relied on transnational covenants and conventions to leverage change within particular nations. Over the past three decades, both have wrought profound changes in the world. Despite equally ambitious agendas, however, these two politically-inspired intellectual frameworks have experienced very different fates within the academy. While neoliberalism has become the hegemonic frame, feminism has been largely ignored. Neoliberal globalism has profoundly transformed the study of politics and policy over the past three decades. Whether one’s focus is domestic, transnational, or international policy, neoliberalism has changed the terms of debate, challenging the adequacy of long established policy frames and instruments. Shifting attention to global flows of capital, labor, finance and trade, economic restructuring, innovations in technology and communication, changing dynamics of national sovereignty, and ‘democratization’, neo-liberalism has disrupted established understandings of key policy actors and effects as notions of sovereignty, political determination, and national interest have been called into question. Discursive shifts introduced by neoliberalism are at once systemic and radically incomplete. They are systemic in that any ‘competent’ policy analyst (or social scientist for that matter) has to grapple with the complexities of global glows, transnational networks, fast-changing information technologies, marketization and the literatures that probe these dynamics if his/her work is to pass muster. They are radically incomplete, however, in that neoliberal discourses, like their predecessor paradigms in political science and policy studies, tend to omit gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality as categories of analysis. Policy studies within neoliberal frames routinely neglect feminist scholarship and the critical insights that accrue from consideration of the majority of the world’s population (women) and the constitutive power relations among men and women of particular races, ethnicities and nationalities across the world.3 The neglect of feminist scholarship in mainstream policy discourses is all the more puzzling because feminist scholars working in fields of political economy, international relations, development studies, policy analysis, philosophy, history, and women’s studies have spent the past four decades investigating the dramatic economic, political, and technological transformations associated with neoliberal globalism.4 They have demonstrated that globalization is a thoroughly gendered and racialized phenomenon. And they have illuminated how race and gender operate as sites of power within processes of globalization, explicating the mechanisms within traditional scholarship that ‘naturalize’ and ‘normalize’ embodied hierarchies, rendering raced and gendered power relations invisible. My goal in this essay is to sketch some of the crucial feminist policy insights that are routinely erased from mainstream scholarship and to probe that continuing erasure. Toward that end, I will advance several hypotheses to account for persistent omissions that are too pervasive and too costly to be taken as simple oversights. (268-9)