Transforming Masculine Rule

by Prugl, Elisabeth

• ISBN13: 9780472117734
• ISBN10: 0472117734
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-07-20
• Publisher: Univ of Michigan Pr

Summary

"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 Brussels 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. She identifies mechanisms of power (refusal, co-optation, compromise, normalization, silencing of difference, and empowerment) and 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.