What are we mainstreaming when we mainstream gender?

Abstract

This chapter explores the proposition that how gender is conceptualised has implications for the efficacy of gender mainstreaming and gender analysis as change processes. It makes the case that gender is a contested concept, that it can be defined in ways that reproduce male, white, able-bodied privilege, or in other ways that reduce certain inequalities. In particular it develops in some depth our suggestion that both gender analysis and gender mainstreaming be conceptualised as always incomplete, thus ‘unfinished business’, rather than as fixed categories of analysis. The goal here is to shift attention from the idea that we may ‘have’ either a gender or a gender mainstreaming policy/program to the continual effort involved in fixing or ‘doing’ the gendered subject or in giving ‘content’ (meaning) to gender mainstreaming. The chapter begins with a brief history of ‘gender’ as a political concept within feminist theory. It explains how the theorising of masculinities and the growing attention to differences among women put the utility of the concept in dispute, and how the 1970s idea of a sex/gender distinction was found wanting. We make the case that part of the problem with the category ‘gender’ is the common way in which it is conceptualised as a part of a person rather than as a process that is ongoing, contested and incomplete. Thinking about gender as a verb, or as a gerund (gendering), we suggest, is more likely to capture how gender differentiation is continually ‘done’ through discursively-mediated institutional and organisational processes, including policymaking.