The Politics of Feminist Knowledge Transfer

Gender Training and Gender Expertise

María Bustelo, Lucy Ferguson, Maxime Forest, María Bustelo, Lucy Ferguson, Maxime Forest

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781137486851
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Politics of Feminist Knowledge Transfer draws together analytical work on gender training and gender expertise. Its chapters critically reflect on the politics of feminist knowledge transfer, understood as an inherently political, dynamic and contested process, the overall aim of which is to transform gendered power relations in pursuit of more equal societies, workplaces, and policies. At its core, the work explores the relationship between gender expertise, gender training, and broader processes of feminist transformation arising from knowledge transfer activities. Examining these in a reflective way, the book brings a primarily practice-based debate into the academic arena. With contributions from authors of diverse backgrounds, including academics, practitioners and representatives of gender training institutions, the editors combine a focus on gender expertise and gender training, with more theory-focused chapters.

Part I

Key Issues in Feminist Knowledge Transfer

1

How to Wield Feminist Power

Elisabeth Prügl

Feminism means engaging with power. Feminists have rallied against patriarchal power in order to undermine it, but they also have come together to empower themselves and challenge existing arrangements. Indeed, like all human agents, women have wielded power in various feminized roles throughout history. What is new in the contemporary era is the fact that there is not just women’s power, but feminist power. That is, power that has been generated from, and is wielded through, feminist activism.

This power encompasses, on the one hand, the ability of feminist politics to produce change. On the other hand, it increasingly also comprises institutionalized power resulting from the way in which feminism has enlisted the state for its purposes. Feminists have achieved changes in laws to bring about gender equality. They also have institutionalized practices of affirmative action and, more recently, gender mainstreaming.

Such institutionalization entails a feminist knowledge transfer that meets the criteria outlined in the Introduction to this collection to different degrees. I have argued elsewhere that, for the most part, it can be interpreted as a “governmentalization” of feminist knowledge in the Foucauldian sense (Foucault, 1991, 2008); that is, feminist knowledge has been turned into expertise so that it becomes available for the government of conduct (see also Everett, 2009; Prügl, 2011a). In a related manner, scholars have suggested that the application of expertise has de-politicized feminist struggles, posturing as objective, neutral, and above the fray, while gutting feminism of its partisan passion (see, for instance, Wetterer, 2002). Yet others have taken governmental feminists to task for failing to reflect on the ethics of their practices. For example, in her assessment of the application of gender expertise in training, Bunie Sexwale (1996, p. 59) has suggested that “one of the most disturbing aspects of dominant ‘gender training’ is the utter refusal and lack of responsibility in adhering to any ethics and a complete disregard for ethical questions which have been debated, negotiated and by now broadly established within Women’s Studies.” In other words, the knowledge transfer we observe in much existing gender expertise has entailed a loss of feminist commitments.

Research summarized in this book shows that Sexwale’s lament and the one-sided framing of gender expertise as a form of governmentality may be more pessimistic than warranted. Feminist ethics motivate many gender trainers; yet, gender expertise is only weakly professionalized. As a result, there are few explicit standards that orient the deployment of gender expertise, and the extensive debates about ethics in feminist research and teaching, that have animated scholars in the field of Women’s/Gender studies, rarely make it into the practices of gender experts. Sexwale’s warning is a reminder of the importance of thinking about gender training – and indeed of any effort to produce social change – as an exercise of power with ethical implications. And like any profession, gender experts and trainers need to develop standards of professional ethics that guide their exercise of power.

In this chapter, I take up shifting standpoints. On the one hand, I adopt the standpoint of gender experts in governmental contexts in order to explore what it would mean for them to wield power in a feminist way. In other words, I shift from the position of an observer of power as a productive force in the Foucauldian sense to that of an “empathetic cooperator” (see Sylvester, 1994) who recognizes gender experts as competent agents able to reflexively engage with their environment. In this understanding, power is not only a generative principle embedded in discourse but also a resource for agency. This orientation allows me to become normative and ask not only “how do feminists use their newly-found power?” but also “how should they use such power?” Following Sexwale, I recall that feminist expertise has a home in an academic discipline, that is Women’s Studies or Gender Studies. I shift my standpoint to that of an academic, teaching and researching in this field, which allows me to draw on the feminist knowledge produced therein. While a minority of gender experts today have degrees in Women’s or Gender Studies (Bergmann, 2006; Thompson, 2014), there is a substantial body of feminist thinking about ethics and methodology that has been developed there, and experts that self-identify as feminist often draw on such thinking. Here, I employ feminist ethics and merge this with theories of deliberative democracy to suggest a set of principles to guide the application of gender expertise.

Gender experts face highly contradictory demands that result from their position in governmental agencies, on the one hand, and their relationship to feminist movements, on the other. They gain authority by adopting a veneer of neutrality, of standing above politics, of adhering to traditional scientific standards of objectivity, of being able to provide rational solutions and offering techniques that accomplish results. They are effective as administrators and have authority as advisors precisely because they adopt these tools and style themselves as technical and detached (Abbott, 1988; Evetts, 2003; Wilensky, 1964). But, despite appearances to the contrary, expertise is inherently political as it affects people and populations profoundly and in ways that are not always predictable. Judging the effects of gender expertise, therefore, needs an ethical yardstick, and wielding feminist power requires ethical guidelines.

I argue that principles for the ethical conduct of gender experts can be derived from theories of deliberative democracy and from feminist methodology. Theories of democracy lead me to suggest that wielding feminist power should be approached as engaging in debate and struggle (see Ahikire, 2007, p. 40) that respond to principles of rational and un-coerced deliberation among equals and should produce institutional spaces where such deliberation is possible. Principles of feminist methodology and ethics complement these because they provide additional attention to hierarchies and difference and append to the democratic demand of inclusiveness a demand for reflexivity with regard to power relations.

The chapter is structured as follows: I first problematize the role of expertise in the policy process, illustrating the way in which both administration and expertise defy the image of political neutrality and are suffused with power. Second, I draw on the theory of deliberative democracy, its critiques by feminists, and insights from feminist methodology in order to develop four sets of principles for feminist conduct in government. Finally, I discuss the way in which gender mainstreaming can become an institutional site for fostering democratic deliberation and put forth a plea for more empirical research on the way gender experts already incorporate feminist principled conduct in their work.

Experts and politics

The idea that expertise can be separated from politics is intrinsic to an attitude of philosophical realism that postulates a reality beyond perception and social construction. In a policy context, this attitude translates into the understanding that expertise provides objective background knowledge which allows policymakers to take informed decisions. It assumes that the problem precedes the policy, that experts find solutions, and that policy adopts these solutions in order to respond to the problem. Critical policy studies have contested these assumptions on various grounds. Mary Hawkesworth (1988) has shown that much policy analysis relies on empiricist commitments which separate facts from values, and perception from observation, leading to a de-politicized scientism in the service of technocracy. She pleads instead for a policy science in the service of democracy. Similarly critical of positivist attitudes, Carol Bacchi (1999) has proposed that the formulation of policy problems is not neutral. The way problems are defined is already political, and the framing of the question imposes a particular solution. In this sense, the solution precedes the problem as much as vice versa, and it makes sense to approach policy processes as constant negotiations over the meaning of the policy problem.

If knowledge is an intrinsic part of the policy process, and if this knowledge is indeed constantly negotiated, then it makes little sense to hermetically separate processes of policymaking from those of policy implementation, as is the practice for part of the field of Political Science. Here, policymaking is imagined as an aggregation of private interests (in liberal theory) or an assertion of the public good (in republican theory). Democracy is imagined to reside in the quality of policymaking processes. But once a policy or law has been formulated, this apparently leaves the realm of policymaking and becomes an object of implementation, carried out by bureaucracies in a more or less rational fashion. Policy moves from the realm of democratic decision-making – and thus the play of politics – into the realm of public administration. Here, in the Weberian ideal type of bureaucracy, politics is suspended in favour of the rational application of rules. And if a distortion of rational administration is diagnosed – such as in the unthinking application of standard operating procedures or in bureaucratic politics (see Allison, 1972) – this is portrayed as an aberration from the rational ideal.

But Bacchi’s Foucauldian approach to government tells us that administration is intrinsically political, that it is a site of the play of power. This is so because administration is embedded in discursive commitments that produce specific rationalities and elicit the application of certain technologies of government. Governmentality, the art of governing through the application of knowledge, produces a range of power effects including, for example, the fixing of objects, the authorization of subjects, the hemming in of options, and the normalization of identities. In this understanding, knowledge in the form of expertise constitutes the core of government, and it unfolds its power through a range of technologies, of which gender training is an example.

In the Foucauldian conceptualization of the place of knowledge in administration, the rule of experts tends to produce a self-referential logic of governmentality that cannot be captured through the language of democracy (Ferguson, 1994; Kennedy, 2005). And indeed, the expectation that experts will be objective implies that they treat scientific knowledge as a positive reflection of reality, blinding them to its political effects. For gender experts, the question thus becomes how to negotiate power in a discursive environment wedded to methodological positivism.

Feminist methodology may provide one path out of this conundrum. Feminist critiques of the pervasive biases and silences in presumably objective scholarship have led to an extensive questioning of positivist methodologies. Feminists have developed alternative approaches that distinguish themselves by the kinds of questions asked, by recognizing the positionality of the knower, by problematizing the constellation of power in research encounters, and by being explicit about the purpose of knowledge creation (for overviews, see Naples, 2003; Ramazanoglu and Holland, 2002; and Tickner, 2006). These methodological imperatives recognize the normative content of knowledge creation, generating a kind of “strong objectivity” (Harding, 1993) that problematizes the role of the knower – the academic scholar as much as the policy expert. Loath to abandon its emancipatory project to a Foucauldian imaginary of self-referential processes, feminist methodology thus postulates a responsible agent held to account by the methodological standards of the profession.

If one looks at processes of policy implementation through the lens of feminist methodology, the meaning of expertise changes. It no longer holds the status of conveying a singular truth, but encompasses a recognition and interpretation of a multiplicity of situated truths – including of truths emerging from social movements – and making them the subject of deliberation. Putting expertise at the service of deliberative processes thus requires a reformulation of the role of experts. Writing on policy processes in the environmental sphere, Frank Fischer (2009) has suggested that the role of the expert should not be that of a one-time translator of technical knowledge, but of a mediator who interprets knowledges precisely in order to facilitate public deliberation. In his understanding, the policy process should be conceived of as an ongoing cycle of deliberation, which offers an opportunity to advance democracy by providing space for authentic engagement between different political forces and discourses (see also Hawkesworth, 1988).

If one accepts Fischer’s proposal, the gender experts’ conundrum of exercising governmental power while conducting themselves ethically may be looked at in a different light. As facilitators of deliberation, gender experts may contribute to enhancing the democratic legitimacy of government more broadly. I am thus proposing that the work of gender experts be judged not only by the quality of its outcomes but also by the quality of the processes experts engage in and make possible. Such an approach is justified because, in complex systems, it is invariably difficult to control the way ideas proliferate and morph to produce outcomes that may or may not approximate those that were intended. Yet, such systems can be configured in ways that allow experts to conduct themselves in a principled fashion. That is, to teach, conduct research, analyse, and foster change in a way that conforms to feminist ethics and ideals of deliberative democracy. The assumption is that the democratic quality of inputs, paired with the application of principles from feminist methodology, will improve the quality of outputs.¹

This approach can address Sexwale’s complaint about the dearth of ethics in the application of gender expertise. However, it is unlikely to respond to the charge that the governmentalization of feminist knowledge de-politicizes feminist movements and/or amounts to an exercise of power. All it can do is to make the exercise of such power more conscious by recognizing the political character of expertise. Moreover, it may make the exercise of such power more legitimate by contributing to a democratization of government. My proposal is addressed to gender experts who identify as feminists, and who look to feminism to provide them with guidance in their wielding of power. Not all gender experts share this interest – many identify as professionals in a different field, such as, for example, development economics, law, or public health. In this sense, this proposal is a political intervention in a contested space. My purpose is to develop a set of specifically feminist principles for gender experts to follow.

Principles of conduct for feminist gender experts

The meaning of democracy has become intensely contested in the context of an increasingly complex and interdependent world. Does the image of a sovereign people governing themselves still capture social reality when global constraints – from economic imperatives to political commitments – hem in political choices? How can governments remain legitimate when they appear captured by powerful interests, while failing to solve the urgent problems of our times – from climate change to financial stability? These doubts and questions have led to an extensive discussion of the meaning of democracy in an interdependent world, and of the way in which government should be reorganized to regain both effectiveness and legitimacy. The theory of deliberative democracy has proven popular in this context. On the one hand, it promises to unlink democracy from the conceptualization of a political community, the basis of a republican notion of democracy. On the other, it offers respite from the liberal idea of democracy that prescribes putting in place political institutions to achieve a compromise among individuals and interest groups.

John Dryzek describes deliberative democracy’s core notion as follows: “outcomes are legitimate to the extent that they receive reflective assent through participation in authentic deliberation by all those subject...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword by Myra Marx Ferree and Mieke Verloo
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Key Issues in Feminist Knowledge Transfer
• Part II: Critical Case Studies of Feminist Knowledge Transfer
• Conclusions
• Appendix: Madrid Declaration on Advancing Gender+ Training in Theory and Practice
• Index