Feminist Politics in the European Parliament

The European Parliament (EP) has been considered a core gender equality actor in European Union politics. As opposed to investigating the EP as a homogenous actor, we analyse the inner settings of the parliament for feminist politics. When assessing feminist politics within the parliament, previous research has tended to focus on distinct policies, such as gender violence, economic governance, equality policies, anti-discrimination; or policy making tools, such as gender mainstreaming; or parliamentary bodies such as the Women’s Rights and Gender Equality Committee (FEMM). Key parliamentary actors such as feminist networks within political groups and parliamentary staff have fallen out of these analyses as locations for or critical actors of feminist politics. In this paper we ask, what are the conditions, spaces, and critical actors of feminist politics in the European Parliament. We analyse both traditional policies and institutions of feminist politics within the parliament as well as focus on more recent mobilisations such as the staff-driven MeTooEP campaign. The research objective of the paper is to develop a new conceptual tool to examine these complex relations extending the previous theorizations.