ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the contributions of feminist institutionalism (FI) to the study of gender and the European Union (EU). It outlines the premises and central concepts of both new institutionalism (NI) and of FI to highlight how feminist scholars have borrowed and built upon concepts they found insufficient to elucidate the gendered nature of the EU and its policies. The chapter provides specific examples of FI research to highlight some key contributions and to show the depth of analysis generated through FI. It considers some of the potential directions in which FI could evolve, and the ways in which this could further a collective research agenda in EU studies. Path dependency has become central to FI scholars seeking to explain how and why gendered norms are so deeply embedded into institutions. By the mid-1990s, NI approaches were fairly common in EU studies and, by the early 2000s, they arguably had taken on a dominant position in the field.
