Feminist scholars have claimed that from the late 1980s onwards, demographic fears combined with economic interests were crucial factors in pushing gender equality onto the agenda of the EU. Indeed, by the 2000s, policies of gender equality, reconciliation and gender mainstreaming were seen not only as important social policy, but first and foremost as playing a vital role in raising the employment rate. The failure of gender equality policies to meet their goals, however, have been explained through, for instance, the lack of political will, the triumph of neoliberalism and institutional constraints. This paper takes a biopolitical approach to the problem and instead of measuring whether or not governments are ‘good’ implementers of gender equality or not, I examine gender itself as an apparatus of biopower. Gender, I argue, is an extension of the apparatus of sexuality as analysed by Michel Foucault, enabling a more complex grip on the possibilities of reproduction. Gender equality, by aiming to ‘reconcile’ work and family life, holds the biopolitical promise of increasing both women’s fertility and worklife participation; to simultaneously reproduce and produce the biopolitical. Moreover, thus conceptualised, gender equality policy can be observed to deploy gender through the logics of human capital theory, where it is figured as an invisible hand through which sexed subjects, as neoliberal subjects, make life decisions based on investment, costs and profit. Finally, the paper considers this biopoliticisation of gender and its implications for (especially Anglo-American) feminist theory that continues to be reliant on the gender concept.
