The European Union is often considered to be one of the most gender-friendly governance bodies in the world. Women occupy positions of institutional leadership, gender mainstreaming has been adopted in all areas of EU decision-making, and a number of women’s policy agencies have been established which allow for the participation of women’s civil society organisations and NGOs. In the face of the increased fragmentation of the “women’s movement” in favour of intersectionality and transversalism, however, and the varied and often confronted positions that can be found among women and feminists on a wide number of issues, the ability of the EU’s (gender) institutional structure to represent this plurality of identities and viewpoints has been questioned. This paper builds on these lines of inquiry in order to cast further light on the uneven distribution of political power that takes place in EU gender politics by reflecting on the types of actors and claims that EU governance empowers in relation to a paradigmatic case of feminist controversy: Prostitution.
It will argue that the EU’s institutional structure, and the “rules of engagement” it establishes for the participation of civil society organisations with regards to funding, consultation and claim-making, work as “advocacy filters” that ascertain some actors and claims as more “representative” than others, and consequently as more legitimate. Moreover, it will argue that this informal process of institutional and substantive inclusions and exclusions privileges an understanding of “gender equality” and “womanhood” that is compatible with governmental rationalities, thus marginalising more contestatary groups and demands. Through this analysis, and the analysis of the claims and advocacy strategies of sex workers’ organisations in Europe, the paper argues that the absence of sex workers’ organisations from the EU’s policy-making process is not an absence, but an exclusion.
