Lise Rolandsen Agustin

(Re)defining women’s interests? Political struggles over women’s collective representation in the context of the European Parliament

The Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) of the European Parliament is one of the key actors within the European Union (EU) institutional framework for gender equality policies. In the context of this Committee, women’s interests are continuously being (re)defined by discursive and deliberative processes. Civil society actors are being included into these processes of policy-making through institutional funding and public hearings. Through the inclusion of particular organizations and the selection of experts for hearings, existing meanings are being reproduced and/or challenged. The article argues that battlegrounds have been (re)opened in recent years as dominant discourses are questioned by the inclusion and legitimation of new civil society actors. Both the FEMM Committee, as a feminist stronghold, and the established women’s organizations at the EU level are being challenged. It becomes contested who the gender experts are, and diverse understandings of gender equality and women’s interests are being articulated.The Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) of the European Parliament is one of the key actors within the European Union (EU) institutional framework for gender equality policies. I...

Women, Participation and the European Parliament

This chapter inscribes itself in the debate in this book about women’s participation in an emergent European Public Sphere (EPS) (see Chapter 1). In this connection, the European Parliament (EP) as an institution can be understood as having the potential to become ‘a strong public’ which is undergoing a process of building a wider general public: ‘The EP can be conceived of as an incipient transnational public sphere’ (Liebert 2007: 268). This makes the EP an apt institutional setting for analysing both women’s descriptive representation within it, as well as analysing the debates about women’s representation, in politics and business, which are taking place in the EP. Therefore, we will conduct a two-pronged analysis of the who of public sphere participation (Ferree et al. 2002) by looking both at the gender composition of the EP and the framing of debates about women’s representation in the EP and its Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) during the period 2000–11. Without implying any causality between the two dimensions, we do consider both questions important elements in the overall assessment of women’s participation in an emergent EPS, which might in future increase its importance as a locus of opinion-formation in a democratising EU.

Gendered Identity Constructions in Political Discourse: The Cases of Denmark and Hungary

Politics and policies develop and are (re) produced in a constant struggle between competing notions or understandings of identity, issues and society overall (Dryzek 2005), which taken together form a political discourse. Political actors and their political discourses interact in public debates and public spaces and (together with other actors) shape common understandings in a process that can be characterised as intersubjective construction of meaning (Christiansen, Jorgensen and Wiener 1999), which in turn predetermines the options available for political action.

Transnational Collective Mobilisation: Challenges for Women’s Movements in Europe

To an increasing extent, women organise collectively at the transnational, European level. They are, however, challenged in their efforts to combine gender equality concerns with diversity. Different organisations and networks address this challenge in different ways. The transnational panorama of European women’s organisations shows that the field is characterised by one strong majority organisation, the European Women’s Lobby (EWL), and an increasing number of minority organisations. In this chapter, I compare transnational women’s organisations’ strategies for combining and accommodating gender-and-diversity demands and analyse the relationship between different kinds of women’s organisations at the European, transnational level.

Intersectionality in European Union policymaking: the case of gender-based violence

Inclusiveness of different social groups and responsiveness to the needs of increasingly diverse societies are key criteria for policy analysts to assess the quality of public policies. We argue that an intersectional approach attentive to the interaction of gender with other inequalities is particularly apt to deal with equality and diversity in policymaking. By analysing a selection of European Union policy documents on gender-based violence in the period 2000–2014, we attend to the question of what intersectionality can bring to policymaking in terms of strengthening inclusiveness and address the methodological question of applying an intersectional approach to policy analysis.

Gender Diversities: Practising Intersectionality in the European Union

This article analyses the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion (2010) (EY 2010) with the aim of identifying the nature of gender diversities in European Union policies. We argue that the European Union handles issues related to gender and diversity in particular ways; this approach is characterised by non-citizen/citizen and redistribution/recognition divisions. Employing intersectionality as the methodological approach to gender diversities, the article shows how gender and ethnicity are articulated in the policy-making process which led to the adoption of EY 2010, the activities undertaken during EY 2010 and the evaluation of EY 2010. The case study is suitable for developing a dynamic multi-level model for analysing gendered diversities at the transnational level: It illustrates how the EU policy framework interacts with particular national contexts in promoting or hindering the advancement of policy contents which pay attention to the intersection between gender and diversity.

Dilemmas in the Danish Approach to Gender Equality: Gender Equality without Gender Quota

The paper addresses the dilemmas, contradictions and paradoxes in the Danish approach to gender quotas and gender equality and discusses the intersections of citizenship, democracy and gender justice. Gender research understands gender quota as a means to achieve equal rights, gender equality and gender parity. Gender theory has conceptualized gender parity as one step towards achieving gender justice in all arenas of social, political and economic life. The Danish cases illustrate that context matters and question gender quota as a universal strategy to achieve gender equality. The empirical focus of the paper is placed on three arenas: 1) gender quota in political governance; 2) gender quota in parental leave policies; and 3) gender quota in economic governance. The paper is primarily concerned with analyses of Danish discourses and policies in relation to the three policy areas and only to a limited extent addresses the impact of these policies and their implications for lived practice. One issue concerns the paradox of the relatively high female representation in politics without the adoption of gender quotas. A second issue concerns the gap between gender equality policies. Denmark lacks behind the other Scandinavian countries’ discourses and policies about gender quota but in practice the picture is much more complex. A third issue concerns the European perspective. In relation to women’s labour market participation and gender parity in politics Denmark is ahead of other European countries but lacks behind in relation to equal representation on corporate boards.

Rethinking Sisterhood: Strategic Bridges Between Majority and Minority Women's Organizations?

The FEMCIT project (2007–2011), Gendered Citizenship in Multicultural Europe: The Impact of Contemporary Women’s Movements, engaged, among other things, in the historical and political analysis of the interaction between gender equality, citizenship, andmulticulturalism by addressing women’s movements across a number of European countries. Nyhagen Predelli and Halsaa’s 2012 book,Majority-Minority Relations in Contemporary Women’s Movements: Strategic Sisterhood, is based on some of the findings of the wider FEMCIT project (for which the authors were key researcher and scientific director, respectively). The book deals with the timely issue of the relations, interactions, and mutual perceptions of minority and majority women mobilizing in civil society organizations in three different national contexts, namely: Norway, the United Kingdom, and Spain. The selection of countries is based on differences in terms of the organizations’ mobilization patterns, varieties of state feminism and gender equality machineries, and histories of migration and citizenship policies. Empirically it is a comprehensive study based around policy document mapping and numerous interviews, primarily with activists, but also with civil servants and politicians. It analyses discourses within women’s movements on minority/majority relations and the potential for co-operation and alliances among them (how gendered citizenship is practised within movements) as well as the strategies and claim-making they make use of in their attempts to influence policy (vis-à-vis the government). This is mostly done through a critical (and partly self-reflective) analysis of majority women’s organizations: “[W]e ask whether minoritised feminist claims have been rejected and resisted, or embraced and accepted by the majoritised feminist movements” (p. 104). The key puzzle here is howminority andmajority organizations deal with the challenge produced by the encounter between majority women’s organizations and the new mobilizing collectivities that have emerged with multicultural society, i.e. how majority women’s organizations deal with minority