The Power of Gender Perspectives: Feminist Influence on Policy Paradigms, Social Science, and Social Politics

Feminist scholarship changed the study of welfare states; influential policy experts have taken off from the feminist critique, incorporating it as they crafted their own social investment strategy, (mis-)translating (and transforming) feminist arguments into an economic rationale. Social science mattered as well: it helped to create a new policy paradigm that is influential across a number of political spaces. Public policy analysis thus needs to pay attention to intellectual processes, emphasizing the role of knowledge in politics; in policy-making, there is puzzling, not only powering. But nobody masters her ideas, or her political actions: actors can deploy “frames,” or discourses, but cannot control what happens to them politically.