Real Science or Witchcraft? Doing Feminist Research in the European Parliament

In this paper, we explore the tensions around doing feminist research in and on the European Parliament. The article is based on a large-scale research project where we gathered an extensive data set on policies and practices of the political groups of the European Parliament. We conducted 139 interviews with MEPs and staff and undertook parliamentary ethnography. We analyse this AtlasTi coded data along with extensive interview notes recording the research process. We analyse how gender of the researchers and gender equality as a research topic shaped the research process. We look at intersectional hierarchies of age, gender, class, race, and ethnicity. The European Parliament presents an elite setting where the expert/elite interviews and parliamentary ethnography conducted are rife with power relations. On the one hand, we were confronted with persistent gendered inequalities in the parliamentary context. On the other hand, the impact of anti-gender and radical right populism on the European Parliament is shaping the discursive and affective contexts and can intensify the meaning of these inequalities for doing feminist research too.