Feminist Discursive Institutionalism - what's discursive about it? (original) (raw)

During the last ten years there has been a discussion among feminist political science scholars on the usefulness of different strands of institutionalism. Recently several scholars have started to elaborate what is called ‘feminist discursive institutionalism’, having among other things an aim of destabilising the definition of institutions. The goal of this paper is to clarify the different positions on discourse presented in the context of these discussions. Our main interest in undertaking this clarifying exercise is that we want to highlight what is at stake in different discourse traditions – both analytically and politically. In other words we argue that methodology matters, that all positions have political implications and that, in order to further a feminist analysis and critique, there is a need to be reflexive on the positions that you put forward. We are interested both in acknowledging the achievements in the field of feminist discursive institutionalism and in further developing our own position – that the political reality produced by feminist poststructural analysis offers useful ways to re-conceptualise social/political relationships. Finally we place the discussion on feminist discursive institutionalism and the different conceptualisations of discourse in relation to the more overarching question of the boundaries imposed by conventional political science and the difficulties feminists face when trying to inhabit such an ‘occupied territory’.