Feminism, like any globally dispersed and historically long-lived social movement, is intricately intertwined with local specificities of opportunity in how it develops and where and how it succeeds. By looking at both the discursive opportunities institutionally imbedded in texts with power and the movement’s discursive strategies to frame its claims effectively, I explore differences in how “gender”becomes politically meaningful in three different contexts: Germany, the US and the European Union. I argue that rather than a “master frame”there are competing “webs of meaning”about inequality that have different and changing resonances across contexts.
MYRA MARX FERREE is the Alice H. Cook Professor of Sociology and Director of the European Union Center of Excellence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to her recent book Varieties of Feminism: German Gender Politics in Global Perspective (Stanford University Press 2012) on which this talk is based, she has recently edited Global Feminism: Women’s Transnational Activism, Organizations and Human Rights (2006) and Gender, Violence and Human Security: Feminist Perspectives (forthcoming) and co-authored Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the US (2002). Two of her articles on theorizing intersectionality have won Race, Class and Gender section awards from ASA.