by Sarah Brown, Senior Journal Manager
In our first highlights collection of 2024, we are delighted to feature three topical open access articles illuminating several different perspectives on feminist politics. All three emphasise the importance of considering intersectionality in politics and policymaking, which we’ve underlined in our previous spotlight features, for example with Professor Julia Jordan-Zachary and Dr Tiffany Manuel.
In the first article, Charlène Calderaro explores the racialisation of sexism, looking at how race frames shape anti-street harassment policies in her case studies from Britain and France.
To introduce her research, Calderaro points out that, while gender-based violence is increasingly addressed through public policy, it also follows a process of ‘othering’ marked by racialisation in many European contexts. This racialisation process is particularly evident when examining the problem of gender-based violence in public spaces, for example, street harassment, where sexism is often attributed to migrant men or men from ethnic minorities. However, the extent of this racialisation process varies significantly across national contexts.
The findings show that the racialisation of sexism in policy-making against gender-based violence can be exacerbated by nationally embedded ideas on race and racism. It also suggests that, by extension, these different conceptions of race can affect the ability to prevent “femonationalism”, which refers to the increasing use of women’s rights to foster nationalism in the form of racial exclusion.
By comparing the cases of France and Britain through data on policy-makers and activists intervening in policy-making against street harassment, the findings suggest that, even though French state actors claim their colour-blindness allows them to avoid a racist framing of the problem, it’s actually shown to enable it. This, in turn, leads to an inability to address the potential risk of racial targeting in the criminalisation of street harassment. Conversely, the acknowledgment of racism in Britain favours an intersectional framing of street harassment and leads to greater consideration of the risk of racial targeting. The article therefore suggests that nationally embedded assumptions about race have a significant impact on the framing of anti-gender-based violence policy and, in turn, on femonationalism.
Our second article conducts an intersectional analysis of contestations within women’s movements focusing on a case study of Scottish domestic abuse policymaking.
Here, author Leah McCabe, highlights that, although policy scholars have elaborated on the ways in which social movements operate through discursive struggles over meaning-making to generate policy change, less attention has been paid to contestations within social movements. She argues that this oversight is remarkable, given that the process of shaping shared understandings and framings of policy problems is political and, thus, a site of epistemic power struggles.
Her article offers us an incisive analytical framework with which to study internal framing politics, by advancing a feminist institutionalist approach. It empirically demonstrates the merits of this approach by applying it to a so-called ‘feminist policy success’ case: Scottish domestic abuse policymaking. Domestic abuse experts often hail Scottish domestic abuse policies as ‘world-leading’ due to their gendered and feminist policy constructions, which can be credited to successful feminist mobilisation around devolution. However, this article disrupts the dominant narrative by teasing out for whom the framing of policy has been a success within the movement, uncovering points of contention.
Drawing on policy analysis and elite interviews, the study identifies and traces an enduring intra-movement contestation around the dominance of gendered frames and the subsequent marginalisation of intersectionality. McCabe argues that, while the women’s movement has made considerable gains in integrating feminist concerns in policy, framing opportunities have not been equally shared, marginalising some actors. The Scottish case demonstrates how and why we should not underestimate the real and (un)intended consequences of intra-movement contestations. Beyond the Scottish context, this article calls for scholars to account for diversities in identity, agency and claims-making within movements.
Our final article in this collection, by Paloma Caravantes and Emanuela Lombardo, investigates feminist democratic innovations in policy and politics. Here, the authors examine the potential of such innovations for policy and institutional politics ‘to end sexist oppression’ (hooks 1984: 24) and transform unequal gender and intersectional hierarchies through an ‘analysis of injustice’, ‘a vision of an alternative’, and actions to redress injustice (Dean and Maiguashca, 2018: 386). Reimagining and deepening citizens’ role in governance and policy processes by embedding intersectional inclusion and participation are important concerns here.
So by drawing on a range of theories, they conceptualise feminist democratic innovations as those oriented at transforming (a) knowledge, (b) policymaking and public funding, (c) institutions, and (d) actors’ coalitions.
Through analyses of municipal plans and interviews with key actors, the article examines feminist democratic innovations in Barcelona’s local government from 2015 to 2023. Emerging from the mobilisation of progressive social movements after the 2008 economic crisis, the findings uncover a laboratory of feminist municipal politics, following the election of a new government and self-proclaimed feminist mayor. Critical actors and an enabling political context play a pivotal role in the adoption of this feminist institutional politics.
The article concludes by arguing that feminist institutional politics at the local level contribute to democratising in innovative ways, in particular encouraging inclusive intersectionality and participatory discourses and practices.
We hope you enjoy reading this collection on feminist politics. As always, we’d welcome your thoughts and feedback on any of the research featured, so please do leave your comments on this blog!
The articles featured in this collection are free to access via the links below:
The racialisation of sexism: how race frames shape anti-street harassment policies in Britain and France
by Charlène Calderaro
An intersectional analysis of contestations within women’s movements: the case of Scottish domestic abuse policymaking
by Leah McCabe
Feminist democratic innovations in policy and politics
by Paloma Caravantes and Emanuela Lombardo
