Constructing Feminist Epistemic Justice by Deconstructing Eurocentrism in the EU’s Gender Equality Regime and Europeanisation Mechanisms

This paper presents a theoretical framework that delves into the concept of feminist epistemic justice, with the primary objective of addressing and remedying systemic injustices and biases prevalent in knowledge production. Specifically, it examines how the reliance on historically privileged perspectives and knowledge, notably malestream knowledge, contributes to gender-insensitive approaches in the policymaking processes of third countries. The analysis focuses on unpacking the EU’s endeavors to “promote” gender equality through its trade and development aid initiatives, as well as the gendered and radicalized knowledge underpinning the EU’s influence mechanisms vis-à-vis third countries. By scrutinizing these aspects, the paper aims to shed light on the implications of such knowledge dynamics and their impact on gender-related policy outcomes in third countries. It launches a critique against the influence mechanisms used by the EU for exporting gender equality policies and norms abroad, problematising the knowledge hierarchies and norm constructions at the EU level whilst challenging the epistemic positioning and the theoretical underpinnings of Europeanisation from a feminist and decolonial perspective. We locate epistemic power in the centre of these discussions and illustrate how Europeanisation as a content, a process, and a research field remain oblivious to their colonial, parochial, and exclusionary discourses, and their identity-based judgements, such as seeing women from third countries as entities to be liberated. The feminist politics and the decolonial critique we embark upon in this paper envisions an epistemically more inclusive process based on three principles: opening epistemic spaces for the less trained voices and the praxis of living; rethinking the unproportionate epistemic authority of the EU; and epistemic reconstitution of knowledge claims and authority. As its contribution is mainly theoretical, it relies on a (re)interpretation of the EU’s documents on trade, the enlargement policy, and development aid as well as on the data presented in the secondary literature. In doing so, it aims to single out the colonial narratives and mentalities present within the gender equality policies of the EU, within its influence mechanisms on third counties, and within the Europeanisation research agenda which has often given legitimacy to these narratives.