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 International Institutions and Feminist Politics

International Institutions and

Feminist Politics
ELISABETH PRÜGL
Associate Professor of International Relations
Florida International University

GENDER IS A CATEGORY OF distinction and a means of distributing power in global

society. Global discourses and international institutions are suffused with constructs
that help perpetuate gender inequality. For example, neoliberal economics and the
Bretton Woods institutions construct economic agents as androgynous, hiding women’s
care work and their work in the home, and infusing government policies and the prac-
tices of firms with persistent gender biases. Such biases coexist uneasily with global
rules on gender equality that have been institutionalized since the early 20th century. 69
These codify women’s equal nationality rights, equal access to education, equal pay and
treatment in the workplace, and denounce violence against women.
Why do some areas of global governance perpetuate gender inequality while oth-
ers combat it? How is one to judge the uneven effects of feminist activism in different
areas of global governance? What do they reveal about gender and power in global
politics? Are feminist movement actors, including NGOs, academics, and femocrats
(feminists in bureaucracies working to advance the cause of women), really influencing
global governance or are they being co-opted, ensnared in the hegemonic language of
international institutions, moderated in a politics of compromise, and marginalized?
Can international institutions promote feminist purposes?
This article mines feminist and institutional literature for conceptual tools that could
aid feminist analyses of global governance. It examines the workings of power in global
governance without losing sight of agents. It also discusses the power-laden interactions of
social movements and international institutions and explores how feminist agencies and
bureaucracies reproduce or challenge institutional hierarchies and hegemonies. Finally, the
article develops outlines of a feminist research program on global governance.

ELISABETH PRÜGL is an Associate Professor of International Relations at Florida International University.

Copyright © 2004 by the Brown Journal of World Affairs

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 ELISABETH PRÜGL
FEMINISTS ON INSTITUTIONS

While concern with gender issues in global governance is relatively new, there is a rich
body of feminist writings on domestic institutions. Perhaps the best developed in this
genre is the literature on gendered welfare states which addresses the state in its regula-
tory and distributive functions. It probes how labor laws and welfare regulations have
affected the lives of women and replaced private with public patriarchy. In the United
States, the literature explores the ways in which social welfare regulations moved patri-
archy from the private to the public sphere, weakening the power of fathers, while
cementing economic inequality through occupational segregation, the family wage,
protective legislation, and mothers’ pension laws.1 Many of these policies were meant
to accommodate women’s new roles as individual wage earners, while continuing their
construction as “moral bulwarks of the home.”2 Unpaid reproductive labor remained
the domain of women in these arrangements.
In Europe, feminists took issue with the way comparative literature on European
welfare states categorized states based on the relationship of work to welfare rules.
Instead, they suggested a categorization based on the relationship of paid and unpaid
work and grouped states according to the way labor laws constructed women’s status
and according to to their participation in the labor force. Jane Lewis identified strong
70 male-breadwinner states in Ireland and Britain, a modified male-breadwinner state in
France, and a weak male-breadwinner state in Sweden.3 Susanne Schunter-Kleemann
distinguished five categories of patriarchy based on egalitarian work and family struc-
tures, the family, marriage, the market, and agrarian-clerical structures.4 Siaroff adapted
these ideas to mainstream welfare state literature and developed a new typology based
on work and welfare incentives for women.5 Some feminists, under the neo-liberal
onslaught of the 1980s, defended the welfare state, suggesting that in providing in-
come and social security, it was a source for women’s empowerment.6 But most femi-
nist literature has treated the welfare state as an institutionalizer of inequality.
The construct of gendered international regimes parallels the notion of gendered
welfare states. There are, however, important differences. First, international rules are
largely regulative and not distributive because there is little solidarity in international
society. Therefore, international rules usually create norms of conduct instead of redis-
tributing resources. Second, rulemaking in the international realm is different from
state rulemaking. It does not primarily entail party or interest-group politics; rather it
is based on inter-state bargaining and social movement politics. Despite these differ-
ences, there are parallels in the way feminists question institutional politics. Defenders
of international institutions find in global rules and international bureaucracies a po-
tential source of women’s equality. Detractors distrust global visions of gender equality

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 International Institutions and Feminist Politics
and gender-mainstreamed institutions, seeing in them mechanisms to co-opt feminist
agendas while cementing gender hegemonies.
Nitza Berkovitch perhaps most forcefully articulates the first position. Following
the world polity school, she argues that a broad cultural order has produced state prac-
tices, including the wrtiting into law of women’s rights in the public sphere in nearly all
countries. International organizations provided the templates for states to follow in
enacting these laws in the post-World War II era, and for the embedding of gender
issues into rationalized bureaucratic infrastructures in the context of the UN Decade
for Women. Jacqui True and Michael Mintrom support Berkovitch’s general claims by
providing evidence of the diffusion of gender mainstreaming bureaucracies via
transnational networks, particularly the transnational feminist movement.7 Margaret
Keck and Kathryn Sikkink illustrate the politics by which international advocacy net-
works have promoted human rights norms.8 While these authors stop short of suggest-
ing that equal rights legislation, rules condemning violence against women, and women’s
machineries have produced gender equality, there is much in their work to suggest a
global momentum in that direction.
Sandra Whitworth’s study of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and
the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), and Prügl’s study of ILO home-
based labor regulations, in contrast, show how international gender constructions reflect
processes of power.9 Whitworth points out that protective legislation keeps women out of 71
work and equal rights legislation obfuscates women’s unpaid care work. Prügl draws on
Nicholas Onuf’s conceptualization of social construction as a parallel process of creating
rules and rule—the Weberian concept of Herrschaft. She argues that the home/work sepa-
ration within global labor rules produces “workers” as masculine identities and “homes” as
feminine non-work spheres, both constructions substantially affecting women’s economic
and political status. In these writings institutions are broadly defined rules that spill be-
yond the boundaries of international organizations, effecting exclusion and identity-for-
mation. Whereas Berkovitch, True and Mintrom focus on the proliferation of institutional
forms (i.e., equality laws, women’s machineries), Whitworth and Prügl explore institu-
tions as an embodiment of rules and ideas—here institutions fade into broader discourses.10
Such discourses are more explicitly the focus of another body of feminist litera-
ture focusing on media productions of masculinity and hypermasculinity, a “hungry
new world order” producing anorexic female bodies undergoing “belt-tightening,” the
internationally mediated production of state identities through gender politics, and
negotiations of outside economic and political influences and demands in local con-
texts.11 This literature of global governance does not employ the language of institu-
tions, but of discourses and rhetoric. It broadens the focus from the interstate arena,
from institutions (more or less) contained in international organizations, to a global

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 ELISABETH PRÜGL
space characterized by regimes of truth, including rules of gender. It shows how rules
institutionalized through the state link to those institutionalized in the economy and
to rhetorical constructs in civil society.
Feminist literature on institutions thus raises questions of definition: What is an
institution? What are its boundaries? Where does it become visible? Furthermore, femi-
nist literature raises the question of how power operates in institutions: Can institu-
tions enhance gender equality or do they co-opt by necessity? How is power negotiated
in political processes that reproduce and change institutions?

WHAT IS AN INSTITUTION?

Institutionalist approaches make up a major strand of literature in International Rela-

tions today. Indeed, the division between rationalists and constructivists, which has
come to define the field, has ignited different approaches to international institutions.12
There is a range of understandings concerning institutions in feminist writings, many
resembling constructivist accounts in the field of International Relations.
For rationalists, institutions are structures. For example, when Robert Keohane
defines institutions as “persistent and connected sets of rules (formal or informal) that
prescribe behavioral roles, constrain activity, and shape expectations” he puts forward a
72 structuralist understanding.13 Similarly, when Douglas North defines institutions as
“the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, the humanly devised constraints
that shape human interaction,” he emphasizes structures.14 Institutions here are exter-
nal to agents, influencing behavior and defining what should be done. Conversely,
agents are external to institutions, their preferences pre-constituted outside the game.
Some feminist writings on welfare states resemble this understanding of institu-
tions as structures. Gendered welfare regimes, once formed through laws and adminis-
trative action, gain a facticity of their own and create a patriarchal reality visible in
outcomes such as women’s labor force participation or poverty rates. But a substantial body
of the welfare state literature is historical and avoids the reification of institutions and
patriarchy inherent in the concept of welfare regimes, tracing instead complex and some-
times contradictory processes that come together in the constructions of gender and wel-
fare states, and sensitive to the way in which institutions produce identities and interests.15
This is precisely Berkovitch’s sociological approach to institutions. But rather
than starting from particular socio-historical contexts, she begins from the world pol-
ity, postulating a global culture that provides a source of meaning mediated through
institutions. Institutions, then, are “cultural rules giving collective meanings and values
to particular entities and activities, integrating them into a larger scheme.”16 Institu-
tions here do not only constrain but also produce meaning. Similar constructivist un-

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 International Institutions and Feminist Politics
derstandings underlie Whitworth’s and Prügl’s treatments of ILO rules as producing
gendered identities. But for them, the meaning that institutions provide is suffused
with power, and institutions are not only a source of isomorphic states but also of
globally hegemonic constructions of gender.
Literatures with an explicitly discursive approach broaden their inquiry to en-
compass transnational realities beyond the realm of international organizations. In these
literatures institutions describe a broader canvas of construction, one not contained in
organizations. For example, Hooper suggests a confluence of embodiments and sym-
bolic constructions with institutional practices in the production of masculinities in
international relations.17 Ling explores Asia and the West as discursive regimes, world
orders, and identities through institutional data (on corporate strategies, government
policies and capital flows) and discursive data (from literature and popular culture).18
The focus on discourse and rhetoric allows authors of these literatures to investigate
power and link processes of gender construction at different geographical scales. This is
particularly explicit in Price’s study of metaphors of slimming down in the politics of
structural adjustment and the link she provides to local hunger.19 The Foucauldian
understanding of institutions as regimes of truth provides a means for these literatures
to relate discourses in institutional and non-institutional contexts.
The following understandings of institutions emerge from this literature: First,
international rules are largely regulative and not distributive. Second, as transmitters of 73
a world culture, institutions produce meaning on a global scale, serve as targets of
advocacy networks, and facilitate the domestic diffusion of notions of gender equality.
Third, as international regimes, institutions produce a hegemonic gender order. Finally,
as regimes of truth, institutions proliferate gendered meanings in global space. The fol-
lowing expands on these propositions. It eclectically draws on feminist, constructivist,
and post-structuralist theorizing to develop a research program on institutions.

ELEMENTS OF A FEMINIST-CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH TO INSTITUTIONS

Feminist constructivism is based on two premises: It takes gender and power as part of
its ontology and privileges situated knowledges and feminist standpoints in its episte-
mology.20 It provides the basis for my elaboration of a feminist approach to institutions
along the following lines: First, institutions are social constructs and media of social
construction. They produce gendered agency and gendered structure. Second, institu-
tions are reproducers of gender and conduits of power. They help construct gender
hegemonies and hierarchies. Third, there is a tendency for social movements, including
the feminist movement, to institutionalize and for institutions to gain their legitimacy
from social movements.

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 ELISABETH PRÜGL
INSTITUTIONS AS STRUCTURES AND AGENTS

The literature on patriarchy and welfare states has been criticized for failing to
problematize the category “woman”and for under-theorizing gender identity and
agency.21 This failure is intimately connected to its structuralist tendencies. In the work
of some theorists of the patriarchal welfare state, institutions tend to be external to
agency and identity, facing pre-constituted women and hemming in their choices. Such
an approach risks obscuring the roles agents have in perpetuating or resisting oppres-
sion. Some sociological approaches to institutions have avoided such criticism because
of their changed understanding of institutions. Thus, Berkovitch has suggested that
institutions not only constrain, but also enable. They structure action at individual,
organizational, or state levels. They show states how gender relations should be ordered
in a world culture, i.e. they suggest that women should have full citizenship rights,
effecting an understanding of women as equal in the public sphere. By institutionaliz-
ing this norm (through laws and bureaucratic women’s machineries), institutions give
new meaning to gender relations.
Constructivist and post-structuralist conceptualizations of institutions can help
flesh out Berkovitch’s approach to foreground agency. In a constructivist sense, institu-
tions both “constitute an environment within which agents conduct themselves ratio-
74 nally” (Berkovitch says meaningfully) while, at the same time, making people into
agents.22 Or, to draw on Foucault’s formulation, institutions subject while they pro-
duce subjects. Considering institutions as producers of agency moves beyond the world
polity understanding of institutions as producers of meaning. It also shifts the under-
standing of institutions as producers of gendered identity (as emphasized in many
feminist writings) to recapture notions of intentionality in a new way. Thinking of
rules and institutions as empowering people to act entails a social understanding of
agency, one that entwines agency with rules and rule. Agency is not given but socially
produced; and it is produced in part through institutions that define roles, offices, and
positions. We then gain agency by virtue of our roles as parents (as defined by the
institution of the family) or citizens (as defined by the institution of the state), by
virtue of being officers of an international institution, or by virtue of our interpellation
as feminists or environmentalists.23 Families, states, international institutions, and
movements not only produce identities but also define it as appropriate and norma-
tively right to act in a certain fashion.
Gender is an intrinsic part of agency, a source of constraint as well as empower-
ment. Institutions gender agency: families and states jointly make husbands and wives,
mothers and fathers. States have used citizenship rights and property rights to produce
gender, and market institutions construct gender through gender-coded job categories.

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 International Institutions and Feminist Politics
International institutions participate in these constructions, for example, in formulat-
ing international labor standards that prescribe the treatment of female workers, home
workers, or temporary workers. They help create gendered agents empowered to act
out gender roles.
While the process of individual self-making is not limited to institutional agen-
cies, these agencies are powerfully suggestive. Agency is circumscribed in addition by
the fact that individuals draw on the
rules of many institutions, rules that
may or may not support each other.
Feminist politics can be conceptualized
In this sense, some institutions, such as an effort to change institutions.
as the legal system, for example, can
become a resource for the challenge of other institutions, e.g., the military or the church.24
Or, to formulate this in a more agential way: Individuals are empowered to resist by
drawing on the rules of different institutions. There is an element of human freedom in
choosing which rules and institutions to draw on.
Institutions not only produce individual agency but also collective agency, and
they do so through the formation of organizations. In the international realm, regimes
have included the formation of multi-lateral organizations. These organizations can be
understood as the agents of the regime, doing its business in the world to help spread
75
its rules and adapt them to new challenges. The use of gender and other status catego-
ries in order to distribute rewards and produce loyalties make organizations a particu-
larly pernicious reproducer of gender inequality.
Feminist politics can be conceptualized as an effort to change institutions, i.e. to
change the structure that defines oppressive forms of gendered conduct as rational or
meaningful and to change the identities and agencies that these structures produce.
Feminists have accomplished this by proposing new rules of identity (e.g., women and
men are similar/different), new rights (e.g., women’s rights are human rights), and new
means of enforcement (e.g., laws, anti-harassment policies). They have helped create
new agencies within institutions, women’s machineries, gender focal points, and status
of women commissions, empowering femocrats to act on behalf of the feminist move-
ment. Yet, their power to change the institution is hemmed in by institutional core
commitments and needs to be regarded in the context of institutional power politics.25

INSTITUTIONS ARE CONDUITS OF POWER

Institutional literatures typically are concerned with power as the capacity to influence.
This capacity comes from the law and from capabilities of enforcement. The extensive
feminist literature on power often downplays a conceptualization of power as a re-

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 ELISABETH PRÜGL
source that agents have, and treats power as a social phenomenon, a phenomenon that
is exercised. Amy Allen employs Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Hannah Arendt
to develop a “feminist conception of power” that combines understandings of power as
domination (“power-over”), empowerment and resistance (“power-to”), and solidarity
(“power-with”).26 She argues that a definition of power as “the ability or capacity of an
actor or set of actors to act” encompasses all three understandings of power: “Power-
over is the ability or capacity to act in such a way as to constrain the choices available to
another actor or set of actors; power-to is the individual ability or capacity to act so as
to attain some end; and power-with is the collective ability or capacity to act together
so as to attain some common or shared end.”27 Allen’s synthesis offers the basis for a
theory of agency attuned to the multiple operations of power.
A focus on institutions helps to account for the routinizations of these agential
forms of power. The routinizations of power in institutional contexts are expressed as
hierarchies and hegemonies. Hierarchy describes power in organizations (e.g. in firms
and bureaucracies); hegemony describes power in institutions (e.g. in international
regimes or welfare state rules). The production of organizational hierarchies is based on
the ability of the powerful to command compliance as a result of their disproportion-
ate access to resources regardless of the will of the subordinate. The production of
hegemonies, on the other hand, entails the consent of the ruled, indeed their adoption
76 of the ideas of the rulers.28
Gender operates differently in organizations and institutions. In organizations it
appears most persistently as a structural dualism of categorical difference. Indeed, Charles
Tilly has defined organizations as networks that combine hierarchy with paired catego-
ries (such as gender, race, age).29 These categorical inequalities do crucial work for orga-
nizations: they reduce transaction costs associated with the organizational need to allo-
cate rewards. Categorical inequality thus enhance organizational efficiency. Gender
becomes a tool for exploitation, empowering men while limiting women’s agency. But
gender hierarchies also give women agency. They enable “opportunity hoarding,” i.e.
efforts on the part of the underdog to take advantage of categorical inequalities. In this
way gender hierarchy in organizations “empowers” subordinates and enables a form of
resistance. Tilly argues that the hierarchical networks that characterize organizations
have been widely dispersed through emulation and adaptation, making inequality a
durable feature of society.
If the perpetuation of categorical gender inequality is driven by organizational
needs, it is also supported by institutional constructs of gender hegemony. Mary Dou-
glas has suggested that institutions are pervasively implicated in the work of classifica-
tion.30 Institutions stabilize through the naturalization of social classification, by con-
necting social categories to bodily analogies and to analogies of nature. Notions of

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 International Institutions and Feminist Politics
femininity and masculinity play a central role in this process. In the field of Interna-
tional Relations, the meanings of masculinity and femininity have been the object of
extensive exploration, linked to institutional as well as discursive analysis. Writers have
relied on Connell’s theory of gender and power to identify historically specific forms of
“hegemonic masculinity” in the institutionalized study and practice of international
relations and in the insti-
tutionalized study and International institutions are implicated in the
practices of political
economy. 31 Dominant
reproduction of hegemonic masculinity while
models of explanation and constructing various femininities as subordinate.
practice suggest certain
masculine character traits and images as the ones producing truth and worth emulat-
ing. International institutions are implicated in the reproduction of hegemonic mascu-
linity while constructing various femininities as subordinate. In these contexts, the
understanding of institutions as sets of rules or sources of meaning veers into an under-
standing of institutions as regimes of truth.
Hierarchies and hegemonies produce domination but also empower. Hierarchies
effect unequal distributions of rewards and create structures of inequality while defin-
ing superior and subordinate agencies. Subordinate agents submit to the will of others.
But they also take advantage of opportunities that arise from their categorically bounded 77
status in an organization. For example, in households, housewives are unpaid laborers
but also gain access to household resources. In international organizations, women are
underrepresented in professional positions but have been able to take advantage of new
mandates to “mainstream gender” and sell themselves as experts on the matter.32
Hegemonies similarly enable both subordination and agency. They produce speak-
ing subjects that navigate hegemonic and subordinate constructions of gender and
negotiate selves at the intersection of such constructions. The narratives of Czech women
seeking an identity within the competing discourses of liberal capitalism, socialism,
Western feminism, and Eastern European egalitarianism provide an example of this
process. Existing discourses provide the threads for their narratives of identity based on
notions of freedom conveyed by liberal capitalism combined with the egalitarian values
of socialism. While rejecting Western feminism, the women Julie Beck interviewed
weave their own strand of “gender humanism” and inspire a uniquely Czech spirit of
feminist resistance.33
Feminist politics that seek to affect power in institutions need to start from agen-
cies. Because organizations constitute a form of agency produced by institutions, orga-
nizations should be a key target of feminist activism. In the West, equal opportunity
policies have sought to modify organizational hierarchies. Gender mainstreaming takes

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 ELISABETH PRÜGL
equal opportunity approaches one step further because it combines attacks on organi-
zational gender hierarchies with attacks on institutional gender hegemonies. While
theorists have argued a relationship between hierarchies in organizations and gender
hegemonies, it is not clear that a change in hierarchies will produce a change in organi-
zational outputs and influence institutional hegemonies. Indeed, the relationship be-
tween what international organizations do and the global impact of their activities is a
fertile field of current feminist research on effects of gender mainstreaming.34

INSTITUTIONS NEED MOVEMENTS

Organizational strategies such as gender mainstreaming are only one type of feminist
politics. Another is movement activism. Allen’s third understanding of power, based on
Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of power as the ability to act in concert, brings into
relief the movement aspect of change and connects movements to institutions. Move-
ments typically target institutions in their activism with demands of institutional change.
Many institutions, whether welfare state regimes or gender equality regimes, are the
outcomes of social movement demands. Arendt’s understanding of power as people
acting in concert goes beyond such an oppositional conceptualization of movements
and institutions. In her view, institutions emerge from the power of the people, which
78 can be conceptualized as the power of movements. Approaching institutions as exten-
sions of movements may be heuristically useful for theorizing the encounter of femi-
nism with the state. State-sponsored institutions, such as equal opportunity rules and gen-
der mainstreaming could be considered institutionalizations of the feminist movement.
The institutionalization of movement goals yields contradictory outcomes.
Whereas power, understood as solidarity, is always legitimate, this legitimacy comes
into question once power is institutionalized—power then appears “in the guise of
authority, demanding instant, unquestioning recognition.”35 Power-with becomes power-
over. As institutionalized power, Arendt argues, authority is vested in “offices” (senator,
priest) or in “persons” (parents, teachers). Their authority dissipates as soon as “the living
power of the people” no longer upholds them and their institutions. Thus, “the greatest
enemy of authority . . . is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.”36
This is the challenge that femocrats in charge of gender mainstreaming face to-
day. The power they gain as agents of an institution needs support from feminist move-
ments in order to retain legitimacy. Indeed, femocrats gain agency not only from their
institutional roles, but also from their identities as movement participants. Their loca-
tion at the intersection of institution and movement allows for a unique kind of agency
as translators. They translate movement goals into institutional missions and institu-
tional constraints into movement strategies. As translators they are in a privileged posi-

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 International Institutions and Feminist Politics
tion, able to operate both in the institution and in the movement. But they also are
prone to compromise, susceptible to cooptation, and in danger of losing the legitimacy
they draw from the movement.
The normalizing power of institutions is the stuff of legends. The institutions of
modernity rationalize, imposing their logic through standards of efficiency. They en-
croach upon public space, taking over spheres of democratic participation and making
them the objects of expert knowledge. “Bureaucratic discourse,” according to Kathy
Ferguson, serves to control social relations, regimenting human life while rationaliz-
ing.37 Technical language depersonalizes society, making people into objects of admin-
istration. These normalizing tendencies of institutions threaten social movements, their
ability to question taken for granted truth, to juxtapose novel discursive frames to
institutionalized and widely accepted frames, to engage in contentious activity based
on such contestations.
While institutionalized feminism thus risks absorption into the language of tech-
nique, it also may give feminists access to expert languages. In contemporary global
politics, perhaps the most powerful such language is neo-liberal economics with its
construction of economic agents as androgynous objects to be administered and of
economic processes as systemic and largely outside of human control. The critique of
global restructuring in transnational women’s movements has been relatively weak and
organizations whose ideologies embrace neo-liberal principles have been particularly 79
resistant to feminist critique and gender mainstreaming.38 In order to penetrate the
barrier between feminism and economic liberalism, feminists within the World Bank
have adopted economic expert language and made an argument for women’s equality
based on the principles of institutional economics.39 This may be interpreted as a
cooptation into neo-liberal “truths,” but also has gained feminist economists increased
attention within the institution.
Together, Arendt and Ferguson remind us of the ambiguous character of institu-
tionalization, on the one hand realizing the power of the people, on the other hand
turning it into domination. Feminist politics must recognize the dangers in navigating
this terrain. While institutionalization adds to the feminist tool chest the power of
femocrats, agents of an institution, a vibrant movement is crucial if institutionalization
is to benefit feminist goals, from women’s equality to overcoming domination and
enhancing participatory forms of politics.

STUDYING INSTITUTIONS AND FEMINIST POLITICS

This discussion has yielded the following propositions about institutions and gender
politics. First, institutions are producers of both agency and structure. Second, hierar-

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 ELISABETH PRÜGL
chy and hegemony are distinctive expressions of power that tend to be associated with
organizations and institutions respectively, realizing domination and empowerment in
different but mutually supporting ways. Finally, there is a link between institutions and
movements, and power mutates in complex ways in the interactions between move-
ments and institutions, in processes of institutionalization and contestation. We can
now specify more tightly the question posed at the outset: Can international institu-
tions promote feminist purposes? And we can identify topics for further feminist re-
search on the institutions of global governance.
If institutions are ongoing social constructions that both constrain and produce
agency, and that both subordinate and empower, then the question of whether they
advance feminist purposes is likely to be a matter of continuous contestation. We should
not ask whether engaging with institutions is promising or pernicious. Rather, the
relevant questions for feminist research and practice will focus on the types of engage-
ments between feminist movements and international institutions, the kinds of agen-
cies they make possible, the way in which hegemonies and hierarchies are being ques-
tioned or reproduced in these engagements, the way in which institutions are being
radicalized and movements tamed.
A relatively well-studied area of feminist engagement with institutions focuses on
international campaigns, on the role of social movement organizations and advocacy
80 networks in institutionalizing new rules on women’s human rights at the international,
regional and national level.40 This literature is particularly effective in outlining the
construction of global norms of equality and the agency that NGOs derive from such
norms. It has focused less on the constraining effects of institutionalizing women’s
rights. Critical legal theorists have made a beginning in analyzing power in gender-
neutral rights discourse.41 Empirical analysis can build on these critiques. What new
agencies have emerged from the formulation of human rights as women’s rights, at
international, national, and local levels? What powers do these agencies have? What
kinds of hierarchies exist within human rights organizations – both intergovernmental
and non-governmental? What kinds of hegemonies are implied in rights discourse?
What have been the effects of these constructions? What kinds of exclusions do they
produce? What has the institutionalization of women’s human rights discourse meant
for the feminist movement? In what ways have institutionalized human rights become
a tool for struggle? In what ways have they limited movement visions?
Another area of feminist engagement with institutions is the discursive critique
of international economic governance, an area where campaigns have been less effec-
tive. Feminists have criticized hegemonic gender constructs and the model of a market
economy devoid of society, and they have documented the local effects of such con-
structions.42 But there is considerable need for more research on the way in which

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 International Institutions and Feminist Politics
global economic regimes enable gendered international agencies and constitute gendered
structures. What is the role of the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO in perpetuating
gendered economic regimes? How does the international trade regime help construct
gender in different countries and different economic sectors? How do transnational
corporations, another set of regime agents, participate in gender constructions? What
kinds of gender and other status hierarchies operate within international organizations
and transnational corporations? To what extent do status hierarchies in these organiza-
tions correlate with gender hegemonies reproduced through global economic institu-
tions? Why has the feminist movement had so little success in changing neo-liberal
rhetoric and in breaking through organizational glass ceilings? Are institutional strate-
gies in the organizations of economic governance more prone to cooptation than in
other organizations?
A final, and relatively recent strategy of feminist engagement with institutions is
gender mainstreaming. This strategy foregrounds the role of feminists within organiza-
tions, some operating as gender entrepreneurs seeking to make feminist concerns an
issue, others delegated by the organization to function as a link to movement activists
and becoming part of an advocacy network. They have received attention from femi-
nist academics, focusing in particular on the degree to which organizations have taken
on the mandate of gender mainstreaming.43 There is considerable room for more re-
search along these lines as international organizations have made gender mainstreaming 81
their tool of choice for advancing gender equity. Some organizations internally evalu-
ate the efficacy of their efforts to mainstream gender. There is a need for outside re-
search to complement these evaluations, to probe the successes and failures of gender
mainstreaming from a movement perspective, to hold organizations accountable. Re-
search needs to address not only the degree to which organizations have adopted the
tools of gender mainstreaming but also reflect on the way in which it is being executed
and the degree to which it has affected the regime that the organization is charged to
maintain. What makes femocrats successful, i.e. how do they gain agency? What re-
sources, status, and managerial tools do they need to be effective? Does a change in
organizational gender hierarchies affect institutionalized gender hegemonies? What has
been the effect of gender mainstreaming on institutional practices and policies? In
which way have institutional strategies tamed feminist visions and changed feminist
goals? What is the relationship between femocrats and movement activists? How does
the relationship affect their effectiveness?
International institutions are an important part of an emerging global polity and
a necessary target of feminist engagement. In addition to states, they rely on global civil
society to gain agency and legitimacy and thus are susceptible to the influence of social
movements and international advocacy networks. Theorizing international institutions

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 ELISABETH PRÜGL
as crossroads of agency and structure makes room for an exploration of the operations
of gender and power. Positioning them in conjunction with organizations brings into
view the agency of organizations, femocrats, and NGOs in global gender politics. The
study of these phenomena is key to knowing how global governance processes can be
harnessed for feminist goals. WA

NOTES

1. Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935 (New
York: Free Press, 1994); Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social
Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1992).
2. Eileen Boris and Peter Bardaglio, “Gender, Race, and Class: the Impact of the State on the Family
and the Economy, 1790-1945,” in Families and Work, eds. Naomi Gerstel and Harriet Engel Gross (Phila-
delphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 132-151.
3. Jane Lewis, “Gender and the Development of Welfare Regimes” Journal of European Social Policy 2
(1992): 159-173.
4. Susanne Schunter-Kleemann, “Wohlfahrtsstaat und Patriarchat – Ein Vergleich europäischer Länder,”
in Herrenhaus Europa- Geschlechterverhältnisse im Wohlfahrsstaat, ed. S. Schunter-Kleemann (Berlin: Ed.
Sigma, 1992), 141-327.
5. Alan Siaroff, “Work, Welfare and Gender Equality: A New Typology,” in Gendering Welfare States, ed.
Diane Sainsbury (London: Sage. 1994), 82-100.
6. Frances Fox Piven, “Women and the State: Ideology, Power, and the Welfare State,” in Families and
Work, eds. Naomi Gerstel and Harriet Engel Gross (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 512-
82 519.
7. Nitza Berkovitch, From Motherhood to Citizenship: Women’s Rights and International Organizations
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Jacqui True and Michael Mintrom “Transnational
Networks and Policy Diffusion: The Case of Gender Mainstreaming,” International Studies Quarterly 45
(March 2001): 27-57.
8. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International
Politics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998).
9. Sandra Whitworth, Feminism and International Relations: Towards a Political Economy of Gender in
Interstate and Non-Governmental Institutions (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); Elisabeth Prügl, The
Global Construction of Gender: Home-based Work in the Political Economy of the 20thCentury (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999).
10. Keck and Sikkink also employ the language of discourse, but do so without exploring the way in
which power operates through discourses. They find that the violence against women campaign resulted
in “discursive change,” as evident in the positions of government representatives at international meetings,
making possible various international instruments condemning violence against women.
11. L.H.M. Ling, Postcolonial International Relations: Conquest and Desire between Asia and the West
(New York: Palgrave, 2002).
12. Patricia Price, “No Pain, No Gain: Bordering the Hungry New World Order,” Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 18 (2000): 91-110; Friedrich Kratochwil and John Gerard Ruggie, “Inter-
national Organization: A State of the Art on the Art of the State,” International Organization 40, 4 (Au-
tumn 1986): 753-775; Robert O. Keohane, International Institutions and State Power: Essays in Interna-
tional Relations Theory (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989).
13. Keohane, 163.
14. Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1990).
15. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, Mothers in a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of the

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 International Institutions and Feminist Politics
Welfare State (New York: Routledge, 1993).
16. Berkovitch, From Motherhood to Citizenship, 6.
17. See Hooper, 2001.
18. See Ling, 2002.
19. See Price, “No Pain, No Gain”: 91-110.
20. Locher, Birgit and Elisabeth Prügl, “Feminism and Constructivism: Worlds Apart or Sharing the
Middle Ground?” International Studies Quarterly, 45 (March 2001).
21. See Hooper, 2001: 24-25.
22. Nicholas Onuf, “Constructivism: A User’s Manual,” in International Relations in a Constructed
World, eds. Vendulka Kubálková, Nicholas Onuf, and Paul Kowert (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998):
58-78.
23. Note the affinity between movements and institutions.
24. Mary F. Katzenstein, Faithful and Fearless: Moving Feminist Protest inside the Church and Military
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
25. Ann Therese Lotherington, and Anne Britt Flemmen, “Negotiating Gender: The Case of the Inter-
national Labour Organization, ILO,” in Gender and Change in Developing Countries, eds. Kristi Anne
Stølen and Mariken Vaa (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1991), 273-307.
26. Amy Allen, The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity (Boulder: Westview
Press, 1999).
27. Ibid., 127.
28. Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989): 74-77.
29. Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
30. Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse University Press, 1986).
31. J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpart, eds., The “Man” Ques-
tion in International Relations (Boulder: Westview, 1998); R.W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the 83
Person and Sexual Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987); Catherine A. MacKinnon, Toward a
Feminist Theory of the State, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1989); Prügl, The Global Con-
struction of Gender; Ling, Conquest and Desire.
32. Christa Wichterich, “From Passion to Profession? Mehr Fragen als Antworten zu Akteurinnen,
Interessen und Veränderungen politischer Handlungsbedingungen der neuen internationalen
Frauenbewegung,” Zeitschrift für Frauenforschung und Geschlechterstudien 19/1+2 (2001): 128-137.
33. Julie A. Beck, “(Re)negotiating Selfhood and Citizenship in the Post-Communist Czech Republic:
Five Women Activists Speak about Transition and Feminism,” in Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings,
Sites and Resistances, eds. M.H. Marchand and A.S. Runyan (London and New York: Routledge, 2000),
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34. Rounaq Jahan, The Elusive Agenda: Mainstreaming Women in Development (London: Zed Press,
1995); Jacqui True, “Mainstreaming Gender in Global Public Policy,” International Feminist Journal of
Politics 5, 3 (Forthcoming 2003); Josette Murphy, Mainstreaming Gender in World Bank Lending: An
Update (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1997).
35. See Arendt, 1969: 46.
36. Ibid., 41, 45
37. Kathy E. Ferguson, The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1984).
38. Deborah Stienstra, “Dancing Resistance from Rio to Beijing: TransnationalWomen’s Organizing
and United Nations Conferences, 1992-6,” in Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites and Resis-
tances, eds. M. H. Marchand and A.S. Runyan (London and New York: Routledge, 2000): 209-224.
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York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Robert O’Brien, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte, and Marc
Williams, Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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 ELISABETH PRÜGL
40. Jutta Joachim, “Framing Issues and Seizing Opportunities: The UN, NGOs and Women’s Rights,”
International Studies Quarterly, 47 (June 2003): 247-274; Alice Miller, “Realizing Women’s Human Rights:
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on Theory and Practice, eds. D. A. Fuchs and F. Kratochwil (Munich: LIT, 2002): 181-202.
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in Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives, ed. R.J. Cook (Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1994): 39-57; Hilary Charlesworth, “What are ‘Women’s International Hu-
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delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994): 58-84; Celina Romany, “State Responsibility Goes Pri-
vate: A Feminist Critique of the Public/Private Distinction in International Human Rights Law,” in Hu-
man Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives, ed. R.J. Cook (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press 1994): 85-115; Natalie Hevener Kaufman and Stefanie A. Lindquist, “Critiquing
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Andrea Wolper (New York: Routledge, 1995): 114-125; Donna Sullivan, “The Public/Private Distinction
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ed. Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper (New York: Routledge, 1995): 126-134.
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