Description
This paper approaches the question of ‘what is the European Economy’ from two novel perspectives – those of race and gender. Responding to the call to understand the EU as a postcolonial entity, and incorporating work from feminist political economy of the EU, it shows how gender and race are intrinsic to the construction – discursive, legal, statistical – of the European economy. Further, it highlights how the silencing of this fact, and the maintenance of strategic ignorance of the way that gender and race act in both historical and contemporary settings, is essential to the coherence of the European economy as a governable space.
This paper uses a focus on various key examples of the ‘hidden’ roles played by race and gender to demonstrate what a more comprehensive account of the European economy would look like. These include the structure of European citizenship, the narratives of the European economy, and the mechanisms of oversight and measurement used by policy makers to both construct and govern this entity.
Overall, this paper offers a new basis for our study of European economic governance, and contributes to growing attempts to bring intersectional approaches to the fore in feminist analysis of the European Union.
