Doris Urbanek, University of Vienna/Austria,

Discursive analysis, especially frame analysis, has gained increasing importance in feminist policy analysis in recent EU-wide research projects, e.g. MAGEEQ, QUING or VEIL. Exploring the meanings given to social phenomena with a focus on norms underpinning these policy frames has been a common methodological feature in these policy studies. Yet, such an analysis of gender equality policies faces the challenge of accounting for intersecting social categories in its analytical tools. But intersectionality, despite figuring as 'buzzword' and core concept in contemporary feminist theory, is still underdeveloped with regard to the question of how to operationalise it for policy analysis.

It is the aim of this paper to close this methodological gap by conceptualising an intersectional discursive policy analysis. Drawing from the study conducted in the frame of the QUING project, this article will develop the existing method further. Inspired by Myra Marx Ferree's dynamic approach to intersectionality, it will draft a processual perspective. Taking some of the insights of inter- and intracategorical approaches to intersectionality, I aim at exploring processes of structuration and within, the construction of subject positions. The lead questions of analysis are: Which intersectional subject positions are created in selected policy debates and made intelligible through which underlying norms? Which rights are negotiated in the course of these policy debates? Analysing the rights at stake answers to Carol Lee Bacchi's 'What the problem'-approach which demands that the effects of discourse be addressed in analysis.

Basically, such questions may be directed at any policy field. Applied to the issue of family reunion, discussed in the German New Immigration Act of 2007, this methodological approach exemplifies as follows: How are migrant women and men depicted in policy frames and what are the underlying rationales? How are rights to security, freedom from violence, family life and gender equality negotiated in this respect?

Elisabeth Prügl, IHEID Geneva

The 2008 financial crisis saw in its aftermath an extensive public preoccupation with the fact that most of the "culprits" in the financial sector were men, engaged in what some interpreted as typically male behavior. If women had been more present in the financial sector, this argument went, the crisis would not have happened. In this paper I outline the contours of this discourse on gender and the financial crisis. I argue that it is an exaggerated instance of making difference productive, i.e. reinterpreting the significance of gender, race, ethnic and other differences in such a way that they are considered to yield pay-off rather than problems. Thirty years of "diversity management" in corporations and administrations have sought to instill this ethic. Drawing on Foucault's insights on neo-liberalism, the paper argues that making difference productive in this sense is more than a cooptation of feminist radicalism, but an innovative inclusion of feminist ideas into constructions of the individual under neo-liberal conditions

Rahel Kunz, Universität Luzern, kunzrahel@gmail.com

Foucauldian analyses reveal how disciplinary neo-liberalism contributes to transform and create new subjectivities. Feminist theories have demonstrated how these neo-liberal subjectivities are deeply gendered. Using a combination of insights from a Foucauldian analysis and postcolonial feminist insights, the objective of this paper is to analyse the various gendered subjectivities that have been created in the context of global restructuring, the economic and the crisis of social reproduction, focusing on the context of Mexico. Bringing together various current discourses on gendered subjectivities, I argue that gender-specific subjectivities have been created, based on a number of gendered dichotomies that oppose the male migrant remittance-sending hero to the remittance-receiving non-migrant woman; the entrepreneurial investor migrant man to the producer non-migrant women. Finally, the paper also analyses the broader implications of these gendered subjectivities in terms of gender-specific rights and access to resources. 

Gülay Caglar and Helen Schwenken,

The gendered effects of different policies have been thoroughly examined in the past decades. However, the reasons for the gendered effects still remain underexposed. In the paper we will put the focus on the reasons and scrutinize the normative foundations of policy designs which lead to gendered effects. The argument put forward is, that these interpretations are deeply rooted in the actors' background knowledge, which comprises both scientific and normative knowledge about the material world. Referring to the concept of "gender knowledge" ("Geschlechterwissen") we further argue that interpretations are made against the background of assumptions about gender relations. Indeed, all policies are based on certain gender knowledge. The concept of gender knowledge refers to different types of collective and individually appropriated knowledge, which co-exist in society about the difference between the sexes and the 'correct' relations and divisions of labor between men and women (Andresen/Dölling 2005). This knowledge can reaffirm hierarchical gender orders (example: "women are the better care-givers than men"), openly question them (example: "women are socially constructed as better care-givers") or range somewhere in between these two poles. The aim of the paper is to systematize existing concepts on gender knowledge and gender orders in order to develop a conceptual framework to systematically analyse gender knowledge in policy making.