Since the so called financial crisis in 2008, economic concepts and assumptions have come to exert a more obvious effect on the political landscape confronting gender equality activists across the EU. Women’s advocacy organisations widely report a decline in political access as ‘austerity’ has been presented as the only available policy option (Cullen 2015). In some instances this has resulted in feminist activists adopting more adversarial and direct tactics, engaging directly with highly technical economic policy processes (Addabbo et al. 2017, Elomaki and Kantoal 2017). Simueltaneously, Black feminists have instead highlighted the on-going economic marginaisation long experienced by minority women before ‘the crisis’ (Emejulu and Bassel 2017; Strolovitch 2013), challenging mainstream economic measurements and concepts and white feminists to engage with racial privilege (Eddo-Lodge 2017; Mirza 2015).
Drawing on conceptualisations of feminist knowledge transfer (Bustelo, Ferguson, and Forest 2016) and intersectionality as a practice (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016; Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; Lewis 2013) this paper draws on documentary analysis and interview data to examine the political tactics and knowledge production practices of ‘gender budgeting’ activists targeting economic policy making in the Scottish and UK’s Parliamentary context. The paper asks how do these groups challenge the very restrictive epistemic constraints presented by mainstream economic assumptions and translate the lived economic experiences of diverse women into effective political claims?
