This paper provides a framework for studying the current economic crisis from the perspective of gender and politics. This signifies focusing on the institutional and policy changes and their gendered and racialized impacts, and on the resistances that the crisis generates. Following the financial crisis, the EU and its member states have pursued an austerity agenda, strengthening the deregulatory impetus within a new economic governance regime which has marginalized the values of gender and wider social equality within the 2020 economic strategy. Analyzing the Europeanization of gender equality politics and policies in crisis times includes both the analysis of member states’ political and institutional changes in gender equality institutions and policymaking, and the study of how austerity politics is being debated in the EU and national parliaments and constructed differently by different actors. Hegemonic discourses, for example about the primacy of macroeconomic politics, have gendered impacts. A number of countries have witnessed dramatic changes in political party systems as a result of the crisis, as for example in Spain or Greece with the rise of left populist parties like Podemos and Syriza, or strengthening of radical right populist politics in other parts of Northern and Eastern Europe, France or the UK, or revival of the civil society and social movements resisting austerity. These resistances and struggles are gendered and racialized and we ask, what is the role of equality in civil society’s anti-austerity struggles. By focusing on the political implications of the European economic crisis from a gender perspective, the paper introduces a framework of accounting for: (i) austerity policies and institutional changes, (ii) the Europeanization of gender equality policies in times of crisis and the hegemonic constructions about gender and the crisis, and (iii) understanding the gendered and racialized patterns of resistances and struggles to austerity politics.
