What motivated you to edit this special issue?
It is an outcome of a research project that I started in 2012, with funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, and in which my co-author Rahel Kunz participated. In the course of the project we conducted several workshops and also presented findings at different conferences. These were opportunities for debates with colleagues from around the world, many of whom also did research on the issue of gender experts and gender expertise. The special issue brings together part of this research. Some contributions examine gender expertise in the organisational context of the United Nations (UN) and explore the impacts achieved through the application of different types of expertise. Others shift the focus to national contexts, approaching gender expertise as a market-mediated field, and conceptualising gender experts as consultants. A final set of contributions showcases feminist reflexivity in the practices of gender experts and in the research encounter between experts and academics.

What are the central contributions of your introduction and your article in the special issue?
Our introduction seeks to problematise what gender expertise is. It is on the one hand specialised expertise, but it is also everyday knowledge that people use to go on in their lives. It is policy expertise, telling us how gender equality could be accomplished, but also political expertise that disciplines our performances of gender so they correspond to normative expectations. Finally, we suggest that gender expertise is best understood as a performance and a practice. It requires social recognition and is embedded in a social field of contestation. Gender expertise thus is an object of intense negotiation at the boundary of academia and politics. 

The article co-authored with Rahel Kunz and Hayley Thompson spells out the implications of this. Drawing on a survey and qualitative interview data with individuals doing gender work in various national and international contexts, we show that the field of gender expertise is shaped by a range of power relations and that boundary-drawing practices are central to establishing and maintaining it. The article illustrates contestations over the boundary between gender expertise and feminism; over scientific epistemologies and authority; and over the logics of (post)colonial politics surrounding gender expertise.  

Based on the contextualisation and literature review of gender expertise and experts, what do you think about the roles that policymakers would (or should) play?
The study of expertise blurs the boundaries between what scholars do and what policymakers do. The idea that scholarship is non-political and value-free does no longer hold water. Nor can we think of policymaking as purely practical and free of theory – we all have in our minds frameworks that orient our actions. This does not mean that the fields of policymaking and scholarship collapse into each other. However, we need to get away from the idea that scholarship provides instruction for what policymakers should do. Both scholarship and policymaking need to open themselves up to reflexive thinking, allowing their core ideas to be disrupted and made strange, and for unfamiliar or silenced ideas to become a part of the engagement. This requires new forms of encounters between scholarship and praxis. Gender expertise provides fertile grounds for such encounters, especially because questions of politics and methodology are so central to feminist theorising. 

Lastly, how do you see the future of gender experts’ activities in shaping feminist policies?
It is interesting that you pose the question this way. We used to think of feminist politics influencing expertise rather than vice versa, of feminist politics guiding the feminist inquiry that responds to the needs of women, of feminist scholars as “organic intellectuals” in Gramsci’s sense. Gramsci also envisions that this scholarship then could provide political guidance to the movement. However, I am afraid that gender expertise is not exactly what he had in mind. This expertise more often than not responds to visions and missions defined by governments and international organisations and often fits smoothly into hegemonic discourses ranging from counterterrorism strategies to neoliberal orthodoxy. There is a lot of disquiet in feminist circles about this co-optation of feminist agendas. I think that you are right to suggest that the activities and knowledges of gender experts are shaping gender equality policies. But many also fear that they might tame feminist politics, make it less radical, becoming part of the problem rather than the solution. 

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Full citation of Prof. Prügl and Dr. Kunz’s introduction:
Kunz, Rahel, and Elisabeth Prügl. “Introduction: Gender Experts and Gender Expertise.” European Journal of Politics and Gender 2, no. 1 (February 2019): 3–21. doi:10.1332/251510819X15471289106077. 

Full citation of Prof. Prügl’s co-authored article:
Kunz, Rahel, Elisabeth Prügl, and Hayley Thompson. “Gender Expertise in Global Governance: Contesting the Boundaries of a Field.” European Journal of Politics and Gender 2, no. 1 (February 2019): 23–40. doi:10.1332/251510819X15471289106112. 

Read also in the same volume “Exploring Privilege through Feminist Gender Training” by Lucy Ferguson, research associate at the Graduate Institute’s Gender Centre.

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Interview by Buğra Güngör, PhD candidate in International Relations and Political Science. Edited by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.
Illustration by Bakai / Shutterstock.com.