The Productive Power of a Label

Over the past decade, feminism has emerged as an increasingly popular approach to foreign policy making. This has led to the establishment of explicitly labelled feminist foreign policies (FFPs) as distinct political agendas. Theorised as an extension of progressive pro-gender equality policies and politics, FFPs have been framed as radical mechanisms that are capable of/seek to transform global systems, structures and cultures of inequality and exclusion. First adopted by Sweden in 2014 and Canada in 2017 – as cultivated feminist frontrunners – FFPs have since grown in popularity with many countries around the world having adopted or expressed a commitment to adopt an explicit feminist platform. These countries include, France (2018), Luxembourg (2019), Mexico (2020), Spain (2021), Germany (2021), Chile (2022), Libya (2022), Scotland (2022), the Netherlands (2022), Liberia (2022), Colombia (2022), Mongolia (2023), Slovenia (2023) and Argentina (2023). The growth of feminism as a legitimate approach to foreign policy making is set against the rise of anti-gender/feminist politics, as well as feminism’s long-standing history of exclusion within IR and beyond. Accounting for the mobilisation of feminism and making sense of its emergence and increasing presence as a distinct foreign policy agenda requires thinking critically and intently about the rise of the ‘f-word’ as a tolerated and even valued label and corresponding practice in international politics. Existing studies on FFP have tended to either focus on determining and/or defining what an FFP is/should be, or on analysing and evaluating FFPs in practice. Despite the critical feminist work that has been done within the field, little attention has been paid to examining the meaning and thus power behind feminism as a controversial and productive label (Thomson 2020; Guerrina, Haastrup and Wright 2023). Thus, rather than merely accepting the innate ‘goodness’ of FFPs as something to be exalted, which promotes the ethical and moral superiority of FFP states, this research project analyses feminism and the adoption of the ‘f-word’ in foreign policy as a source of meaning making and identity construction asking, what is the productive power of a feminist label? To answer this question, I understand FFPs as a practice in labelling. This line of argumentation hinges on a discursive understanding of feminism as a powerful means by which subjects/objects and the realities they are emplaced within are constructed as knowable entities. It is from this perspective that this project contributes conceptually and empirically to the growing canon of research on FFP. Inspired by Jabir Puar’s concept of homonationalism (2007) and Sara Farris’ theory of femonationalism (2017), I theorise FFPs as a discursive practice made possible as a result of “feminist nationalism”, which refers to the enmeshing of feminism with a nation-state’s sense of Self as a marker of progress and civilisation. This practice of Self-making is predicated on and sustained through the (re)production of multiple and differentially positioned Others who are used to re-affirm the status and value of FFP practicing states as innately ‘good’ and ethically and morally superior global actors. The notion of Others within the context of this research refers to othered regions, states, communities, peoples, and so forth who are cast as fundamentally different from the feminist Self. As a result of this mobilisation of feminism, FFP states emerge as temporarily fixed ‘good’ states positioned at the apex of a Liberal Western international order. Thus, I conceive of a feminist label as a powerful discursive practice that is used to reproduce global hierarchies and colonial structures and systems of power as a matter of fact. Critical to this dissertation is a concern with the impact feminist identities have on the lived experiences of Others, particularly those who are already subjected to a state of precarity existing within and at the margins of society, and foreign/domestic policy making. In order to raise awareness for these troubling dynamics, I centre FFPs contrary to their transformative representations, as a source and site of discursive and state violence. However, rather than re-affirming the dominant colonial power relations produced by and through state discourse, this research project also focuses on analysing the competing discourses produced by Others as a form of resistance to the truthfulness of feminist state claims of moral and ethical superiority. As my findings show, these forms of antagonistic discourses are important as they work to contest and disrupt privileged understandings of FFP states. In doing so, they also raise critical awareness for the ongoing forms of state violence perpetrated against Others under the guise of/in spite of a feminist politics at ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ as a rearticulation of colonial power relations and extension of empire (Bergman Rosamond, Cheung and De Leeuw 2023). Thus, by drawing critical attention to alternative representations of the feminist Self and Others, this research highlights the instability of a state’s feminist identity as something that is both continually contested and in the process of being remade. To conduct my research, I use a post-structuralist informed approach to discourse analysis (Doty 1993, Shepherd 2008) that focuses on two country cases: Sweden and Canada. My decision to select Sweden and Canada as case studies is based on their dominant position as known Western gender equality leaders, who also happen to possess very different iterations of FFP. Additionally, given Sweden’s abandonment of its FFP in 2022 and Canada’s ongoing practice of feminism, both cases provide valuable insights into the past, present and future of FFP. To conduct my analysis, I begin by first examining the construction of Sweden and Canada’s FFPs through official state documents, before turning to ‘test’ and ‘trace’ how this Self is reproduced and contested at a domestic and foreign policy level by analysing what I term as two feminist encounters. In the case of Sweden, the two encounters analysed are the 2015 dispute with Saudi Arabia and the country’s 2016 enactment of its Temporary Law. Within the context of Canada, I analyse the Shuar Arutam people’s letter to the Canadian Embassy in Ecuador in 2021, as well as the launch of the country’s National Action Plan on Murdered and Missing Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ peoples (2021). Ultimately, this research project contributes to the field of FFP and feminist IR more broadly by offering new insights into how the production of a feminist identity has been made possible, as well as the violent practices that are used to constitute that identity. Additionally, the value of this research lies in the central positioning of colonialism as an enduring power structure/set of relations that is both productive and (re)produced by FFPs. Building on this colonial reading of FFPs, this research project also represents a critique of liberal feminism as the dominant feminism used to construct and define contemporary feminist policy making. Lastly, by recognising the hypocritical politics produced as a result of FFPs, this dissertation highlights the ‘hollowness’ of feminism as a label. For, despite its capacity to produce a feminist identity, the adoption of a feminist label does not necessitate a substantively feminist policy in action, nor does it realise the promise of intersectional justice at ‘home’ or ‘abroad’.

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