ABSTRACT
Carol Lee Bacchi has turned our attention to the use and construction of political categories in the process of gender equality policymaking. She shows that categories always represent a political choice, regardless of whether they embody an analytical or a political mobilization category (Bacchi 1996: 2, 7). Although often discursively constructed in the process of academic communication, contests and battles over meanings, political categories depend less on ‘ontological disagreements’ than on their deployment in a specific context. This is why they can both structure understandings of social and political ‘problems’ and set their boundaries at the same time (Bacchi 1996: 5-6). Political categories are thus not only the base for interpretation and understanding of ‘what is’, thereby enabling the adequate ‘capturing’ of the presumed ‘reality’ of the phenomena and lived experiences. They can also display an important potential for transformation, opening space allowing for contestation, questioning and interpretation of their meaning in concrete circumstances. Contests over meanings are therefore always contests over the political potentials of concepts and over desired political outcomes (Bacchi 1996: 5-6). In this chapter, I discuss some of the challenges of the political uses of the ‘gender’ category in policymaking. More specifically, I explore the various meanings of the category of gender and their concrete placement into the locus of ‘gender equality’ policies, and how they affect the envisaged transformative political potential of the latter.
