"The premise of mainstreaming gender is to bring equality
concerns into every aspect of policy-making, and this brave book
offers a close look at how feminists have taken up the challenge to
transform the hidden dynamics of male domination in agricultural
policy in Europe. In contrast to the automatic assumption that
(neo)liberal policy always works against women's interests, Prugl
demonstrates the potential for feminist ju-jitsu to take advantage
of multiple levels of governance to empower women in some
circumstances. Although feminists were not always successful, the
story of their efforts to remake agricultural policy should
encourage activists to look for points of leverage in this and
other contested and changing multilevel power systems."
---Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin
"Information on policy development, conflicts about improving
the status of farm women, and using rural development policies to
foster gender equality is hard to access in English and extremely
useful for researchers concerned with the specifics of gender
equality policy in the EU."
---Alison Woodward, Institute for European Studies, Vrije
Universiteit Brussel
"This book is a must-read for scholars interested in the
gendered process of global restructuring. Elisabeth Prugl succeeds
superbly in teasing out the power politics involved in European
agricultural policy. Through the lens of a feminist-constructivist
approach, she makes visible the multiple mechanisms of gendered
power within the state. This very lucid narrative is a milestone in
a new generation of feminist theoretical scholarship."
---Brigitte Young, University of Muenster, Germany
Taking West and East Germany as case studies, Elisabeth Prugl
shows how European agricultural policy has cemented long-standing
gender-based inequalities and how feminists have used
liberalization as an opportunity to challenge such inequalities.
Through a comparison of the EU's rural development program known as
LEADER as it played out in the Altmark region in the German East
and in the Danube/Bavarian Forest region in the West, Prugl
provides a close-up view of the power politics involved in
government policies and programs.
In identifying mechanisms of power (refusal, co-optation,
compromise, normalization, and silencing of difference), Prugl
illustrates how these mechanisms operate in arguments over gender
relations within the state. Her feminist-constructivist approach to
global restructuring as a gendered process brings into view
multiple levels of governance and the variety of gender
constructions operating in different societies. Ultimately, Prugl
offers a new understanding of patriarchy as diverse, contested, and
in flux.
Jacket photograph: (c) iStockphoto.com/Wojtek Kryczka
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