How ideas travel: Mexico’s Feminist Foreign Policy as part of a hegemonic global project

Foreign policy has been one of the most male/masculine dominated areas of study and practice of international politics. Hence, the adoption of a feminist foreign policy (FFP) by a growing number of countries may seem to have a transformative ambition, as it proposes to eliminate structural differences and promote gender equality through new practices and frameworks at both national and international level. However, these policies could be used as a tool of national identity and exceptionalism that maintain global hierarchies and create a new standard of “civilized nations”.

In my research, I focus on analysing the Mexico’s Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) as part of a global project. My aim is to trace the origins of this proposal, understand how dominant ideas of gender and foreign policy travelled to Mexico, and identify who are the subjects of this policy. I argue that FFPs, instead of disrupting the global hierarchies that exclude women and feminised subjects —i.e., the patriarchal, and heterosexual biological organisation of social relations that are co-constituted with race/ethnicity, class, and sexuality— are (re)producing normalised regimes of power and concealing them through a feminist discourse due to their colonial underpinnings. Mexico’s FFP, as part of this “universal” project, can be used as a colonial technology of gender.

• Decolonial theory
• Feminism(s)
• Foreign Policy
• Critical Theory