Feminist analysis and governmentality scholarship have each offered significant challenges to mainstream political science and, in so doing, have generated important theoretical and practical insights regarding knowledge, power and politics. While feminist analysis is now well-established within the discipline, and scholarship building on Foucault’s discussion of governmentality is increasingly so, it is much less commonplace to encounter research by political scientists that draws on both analytic frameworks. Such work has a growing presence in some areas of political science, including the subfield of international relations and the emerging field of “governance feminism,” but it is less visible in other subfields, such as comparative politics and policy analysis. The purpose of this paper is to develop a better understanding of critical policy scholarship both within and outside the discipline of political science that brings together in some fashion these two conceptual frameworks for research. Through our review of relevant literatures, we identify exemplars of such work, consider its distribution within and across different disciplines, and discuss the potential for, and potential contributions arising from, further development of this hybrid approach to critical policy studies.
