Importing gender: the challenge of feminism and the analysis of the EU legal order

The article reviews feminist approaches to the analysis of European Union (EU) law and the EU as a legal order. It suggests that feminist analysis can make a broader contribution than hitherto to the understanding of EU governance. It employs a method of 'importing gender' derived from social constructionist strands of feminist thinking in order to identify key areas of EU law for further empirical and conceptual analysis. These concern the reconceptualization of the 'state' in the EU context, where feminist problematization shares some concerns with constructivist analyses and the challenge of the EU as a reformist entity.