This paper explores the European Integration process and recent economic governance measures such as the Fiscal compact and the Six-pack legislation from a theoretical perspective following Foucault’s insights on power as governmentality. A governmentality approach investigates the ambivalent and power-laden processes of governing, focussing on political rationalities, discursive constructions of norms, knowledge, subject formations and other technologies of government such as expertise and benchmarking. In this vein, the paper investigates recent processes of economic governance during economic crisis in the EU and draws particular attention to ambivalent material effects of technologies of power used to govern European space. Retracing economic governance from a governmentality perspective, the paper shows the limiting effects of employed austerity policies for women and men in two member states especially, Spain and the Republic of Ireland, highlighting coercive power in economic governance and the gendered symbolic order this implies.
