The successes of the second wave of the feminist movement have included an insertion of feminist knowledge into institutional contexts. Governments and international organizations have created legal mechanisms that address issues such as equal pay and equal treatment in the workplace, sexual violence, and equal participation in politics. Organizations of all types—from private corporations to public bureaucracies—have developed institutional mechanisms, such as affirmative action, diversity management, and gender mainstreaming to counteract the reproduction of inequalities and discriminations while validating the particular skills of people considered different. These strategies have generated what Janet Halley calls governance feminism: “the incremental but now quite noticeable installation of feminists and feminist ideas in actual legal-institutional power” (Halley et al. Reference Halley, Kotiswaran, Shamir and Thomas2006, 340). Developing Halley's claim and utilizing the instruments of Michel Foucault's “analytics of government” (Dean Reference Dean2010, 30), this article argues that governance feminism should be interpreted as the governmentalization of feminist knowledge; that is, feminist knowledge has been adapted so that it becomes available for the government of conduct.

Not all feminist activism today is governance feminism—indeed there is a diversity of creative forms of feminist resistance in various social locations and around the world (e.g., Basu Reference Basu2010). Yet around the world, feminists also have sought to engage with established institutions—from governments to firms to the United Nations—and have formed organizations to facilitate such an engagement. This type of engagement has long been an object of contention among feminists, with some emphasizing the successes of state feminism and others critiquing the tendency of engagements with the mainstream to blunt radical movement demands (e.g., Incite! Women of Color Against Violence 2007; McBride and Mazur Reference McBride and Mazur2010). I suggest that a Foucaultian approach can contribute new insights when the effects of such engagement are explored. At the core of governance feminism is the development of a particular kind of knowledge—feminist legal expertise, expertise on how to mainstream gender or manage diversity. A Foucaultian analytics of government focuses the attention on such knowledge and on the various effects of power it produces.

Using the Foucaultian approach, the article explores gender mainstreaming (GM) and diversity management (DM) as two salient strategies of governance feminism. This is not to say that other strategies could not have been selected. But GM and DM lend themselves particularly well to a comparative illustration of the use of a Foucaultian approach. First, both strategies seek to achieve feminist goals through a change of organizational practices, rather than a change in laws, although they do so in different ways. Thus, the two strategies are comparable, yet illustrate different logics. Second, both strategies are salient in governments and firms internationally, which allows me to contribute to contemporary discussions about their virtues and pitfalls. My purpose is less to argue the superiority of a Foucaultian interpretation over other possible interpretations than to add an additional point of view to practical discussions about the value of pursing DM and GM.Footnote ¹

Popularized during the 1990s, in particular in the area of international development, GM was embraced initially in international organizations, such as the United Nations and the European Union. Since then, it has diffused widely throughout public administrations globally. It entails considering the differential impacts on women and men of all activities of public administration—including legislation—from the stages of planning to evaluation.Footnote ² Firms in the private sector never moved in the direction of gender mainstreaming. Their preferred strategy is diversity management. DM starts from the assumption that a diverse work force—including not only women but also people with all kinds of differences—adds to creativity and the bottom line. In order to achieve this effect, however, a diverse workforce needs to be properly managed.

In the language of a Foucaultian analytics of government, gender mainstreaming and diversity management suggest themselves as prototypical technologies of government. Yet few studies have drawn on the governmentality framework to provide an understanding of what happens to feminist knowledge when it enters mainstream organizational contexts.Footnote ³ This deficiency may be due, in part, to feminist dissatisfaction with a Foucaultian approach that seems unable to account, on the one hand, for feminist activism and, on the other hand, for the monotony of masculine domination that characterizes gender relations on a worldwide scale (Benhabib Reference Benhabib, Benhabib, Butler, Cornell and Fraser1995; Hartsock Reference Hartsock and Nicholson1990; Prügl Reference Prügl2009; 2010; Sawicki Reference Sawicki1991). But in his lectures on governmentality, Foucault introduces some theoretical instruments that can help overcome the dichotomy of arguing for an engagement with the mainstream versus fearing co-optation. The Foucaultian approach makes clear that inserting feminist knowledge into the mainstream produces both empowerment and constraints. It also shows that there are no such things as pure feminist goals outside the mainstream and untouched by the workings of power.

In this article, I attempt to move beyond feminist suspicions by discussing the value of an analytics of government for generating insights on the effects of inserting feminist knowledge into different organizational contexts. I first engage in a conversation with existing literature on GM and DM to reinterpret these strategies as technologies of government that meet the characteristics identified in the literature on governmentality. Second, I explore the political rationality of the contemporary apparatus that governs gender. I examine the reasons put forward as to why gender should be governed and the ends that this should produce. Third, I analyze diversity management and gender mainstreaming as technologies in the government of gender. I show that the two strategies are similar in that both validate feminine difference but diverge in the logics they put forward to change conduct. GM employs a logic of bureaucracy and seeks to change the conduct of administrators in a way that tames the negative effects of difference. In contrast, DM employs a neoliberal logic that seeks to change the conduct of workers conceived as “entrepreneurs of the self” so that difference becomes a positive source of productivity. I conclude with an assessment of the contributions that the Foucaultian approach can make to an understanding of feminist activism in institutional contexts.

SITUATING DM AND GM IN A FRAMEWORK OF GOVERNMENTALITY

Feminist literature typically argues that gender mainstreaming emerged from an international context (the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995) and dispersed to state-based policy machineries that have been established through years of feminist advocacy (True Reference True2003; True and Mintrom Reference True and Mintrom2001; von Braunmühl Reference von Braunmühl, Braig and Wölte2002). It has been described as a logical step of “policy succession” in the market-liberalizing European Union in the 1990s, replacing an affirmative action framework that prescribed costly welfare-type programs (Mazey Reference Mazey2000). Within various forms of state, feminist insiders have struggled to ensure a more or less faithful implementation of gender mainstreaming, encountering significant obstacles: lack of political will, lack of expertise, lack of incentives, inhospitable organizational logics, underfunding, and evaporation as the strategy moved further away from administrative centers (Benschop and Verloo Reference Yvonne and Verloo2006; Hafner-Burton and Pollack Reference Hafner-Burton and Pollack2009; Moser Reference Moser2005; Woodward Reference Woodward2003).

Diversity management connects to the feminist movement in a less direct fashion. Companies adopted DM initially not because of activist pressure but, rather, because they feared lawsuits under new equal opportunity requirements and gender equality laws that came on the books in the 1970s in response to such pressure (Anand and Winters Reference Anand and Winters2008; Cornet Reference Cornet2002). Originating in the United States in the 1980s, the practice has since diffused largely through mechanisms of imitation, creating isomorphism on a global scale (see special issue of Public Manager: The New Bureaucrat 23 [Fall 1994]; Süss and Kleiner Reference Süss and Kleiner2008). As with GM, attitudes toward diversity management in corporations have been mixed and implementation has been lacking (Shen et al. Reference Shen, Chanda, D'Netto and Monga2009).

Maybe these should not be the stories we tell about gender mainstreaming and diversity management, however. Maybe these strategies are not really about activists with good intentions and rational managers seeking to advance the good of their organizations. Maybe they are not about organizational structures that limit their effectiveness. Maybe they are about governmentality, a mentality to govern (Rose and Miller Reference Rose and Miller1992). According to Foucault, governmentality is about the conduct of conduct. The term conduct is used here in its double meaning: On the one hand, it is about leading and directing, as in conducting an orchestra; on the other hand, it is about behavior, about comportment and conducting oneself (Foucault Reference Foucault and Burchell2007, 193). Foucault thus suggests that we study government as the art of putting in place the mechanisms that lead people to behave in a particular fashion. It is a strategic activity that involves a multiplicity of actors, not just those traditionally considered to be part of state agencies. Its distinctiveness lies in the fact that it is conceptualized as targeting populations and individuals, as seeking to “shape conduct by working through the desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs of various actors” (Dean Reference Dean2010, 18). In doing so, the art of government involves the deployment of a variety of techniques and apparatuses. The study of governmentality seeks to elicit the rationality behind these techniques and apparatuses and the sometimes unpredictable effects they generate.

If we adopted the Foucaultian approach, then we would have to reconceptualize diversity management and gender mainstreaming as technologies of government embedded in an apparatus of gender. This apparatus does not have a particular intention but has only one interest: to govern. Such a reconceptualization has implications for a number of other concepts that feminists often use unthinkingly in describing the struggles of our times.

First, the governmentality approach invites us to think of the state not as an agent or institution but as an effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities (Foucault Reference Foucault and Burchell2008, 77; Rose Reference Rose1987) produced through a dispersed set of techniques (Brown Reference Brown1995) and rationalities (Rose and Miller Reference Rose and Miller1992). In this sense, it would be wrong to find the origins of gender mainstreaming or diversity management in a state, whether a particular state or the United Nations. Instead, we should locate GM and DM within a specific mentality intent on governing gender relations, a mentality that draws its rationality from a body of knowledge—feminist knowledge and gender expertise—and deploys this knowledge through various technologies in order to “reshape conduct in practices and institutions” (Dean Reference Dean2010, 27). Such a mentality clearly encompasses much more than governance feminism as reflected in gender mainstreaming and diversity management. It points to a broader discourse organized around solving a problem: the inequality between women and men and the disadvantage that arises for women from this inequality in terms of their safety, wealth, and well-being. Arguably, the mentality to govern is inherent in most feminist thought to the extent that its intention is to change conduct and to create the conditions that make possible such a change.

Thus, rather than focus on the state, we might instead focus on the practice of governing. And although state agencies participate in the practice of government, this practice is not reserved for them. Instead, it involves all kinds of “entities constituted as ‘political’ and the projects, plans and practices of those authorities—economic, legal, spiritual, medical, technical—who endeavour to administer the lives of others in the light of conceptions of what is good, healthy, virtuous, efficient or profitable” (Rose and Miller Reference Rose and Miller1992, 175). The state agencies tasked with implementing gender mainstreaming may be among these entities, but so are the firms adopting diversity management. Together with other agencies sometimes thought of as part of civil society—trade unions, nongovernmental organizations—they engage in a practice of government, the government of gender relations. What they share is a will to improve the world by applying expert knowledge to shape the conduct of individuals and populations.

The authority of these agencies does not derive from the law. Instead, it derives from their application of expertise. In the case of gender mainstreaming, this is gender expertise: feminist knowledge made useful for the purposes of practical administration. In the case of diversity management, it is specialized expertise in managing human resources. Gender experts and diversity managers derive authority from their ability to develop solutions to problems identified as political and from their ability to divine techniques that guide individual conduct to effect these solutions. They do so by pairing feminist knowledge with skills in administration and management. In this framing of the issue, feminist knowledge becomes part of a logic of government. Thus, the issue for feminist critical scholarship perhaps should be not only to examine the implementation of gender mainstreaming and diversity management. Such scholarship might also look at the operations of power that assert themselves in the deployment of gender expertise and human resource management, including the political rationalities validated, the logics set in operation, the empowerments effected, and the identities (re)produced.

Staying within a governmentality framework, I proceed to analyze two types of power—disciplinary bio-power and neoliberal bio-power. One tends to operate in the government of women, the other in the government of gender. This allows me to identify the target of what is to be governed through governance feminism, the reasons put forward as to how and why it should be governed, and to what ends. I then zero in on contemporary practices of governing gender by offering a comparison of gender mainstreaming and diversity management. Specifically, I address the logics that develop in the deployment of these technologies and what effects these techniques produce.

GENDER AS AN APPARATUS

Gender can be conceptualized as an apparatus (or dispositif, in Foucault's terms) that links a regime of truth about gender relations to a set of practices. The knowledge and practices of this apparatus encompass bodily forms, configurations of social space, individual comportments, and cultural and linguistic performances, as well as institutional arrangements such as divisions of labor and hierarchies. The core truth that informs the apparatus of gender is the arrangement of sex/gender in binaries of female and male, including an understanding of heterosexuality as natural and, indeed, compulsory (Butler Reference Butler1990).Footnote ⁴ This truth is enacted in individual and group identities, social practices, institutional and organizational orders, and social and political symbolism. Because of the hierarchical arrangement of gender binaries, gendering amounts to a codification of power (Scott Reference Scott1986).

Gender has long been the object of government, in particular through what Foucault calls bio-politics: “the attempt … to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, life expectance, race” (2008, 317). Ignored in the Foucaultian analysis of bio-politics is the fact that these attempts have included the production of new knowledge about women through scholarly disciplines ranging from medicine to management, but also through the emerging feminist movement. According to Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English (1978,) expert knowledge helped generate a “romantic” solution to the “woman question,” that is, the question of the proper function of women in society in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. In this solution, women were always (actually or potentially) mothers and naturally attached to households, families, and reproduction. A number of new practices emerged in this context. Scientific management generated the modern housewife, introducing into households new mandates ranging from hygiene to nonrational busy-work. Educators and psychologists deployed their expertise on child rearing to manufacture a new masochistic form of motherhood. Medical knowledge adjusted women to a new normality, in which pregnancy, menstruation, and menopause were defined as diseases. And experts on sexuality produced the figure of the hysterical woman (Ehrenreich and English Reference Ehrenreich and English1978; Foucault Reference Foucault1980). The new bio-politics was disciplinary in that it optimized women's capacities and made them docile in tune with a new political economy, including a new form of masculine domination.

The contemporary apparatus of gender has loosened (but by no means severed) the link between women and the imperative of reproduction. The massive (re)entry of women into the workforce, and the range of struggles of the feminist movement, have empowered women to take charge of their health, legitimized much greater sexual freedom, and delegitimized their relegation to the private realm in charge of hearth and home. The new apparatus has proliferated new logics and ends, together with new modes of governing. Most importantly, it has added a new target of intervention: No longer are women and their bodies the only objects to be ruled; it has become necessary to govern gender relations as well. The conduct of women and men toward each other in concrete fields of practice, the rules of the game in these fields, and the rules that govern the relationship of masculinity and femininity more broadly have become the objects of governmental interest. Together with this shift in the target of intervention have come new rationalities for intervention, rationalities broadly influenced by specific types of feminist knowledge and including questions of relative equality and difference. Women's difference is no longer limited to their reproductive capacities and the productivity of their bodies, but is now recognized for its potential to deliver a range of ends, from profit and efficiency to growth and security.

The contemporary apparatus of gender is embedded in liberalism and has linked the welfare of the population to the end of women's freedom as conceived in liberal thought.Footnote ⁵ It seeks to create the conditions of possibility for such freedom, for allowing women equal opportunities to participate in a liberal polity and market, and for producing women's equality to men however defined. These rationalities emerge from a feminist knowledge that resonates with liberal ideas and has helped define gender inequality and women's oppression as political problems that require government intervention. Gender expertise offers answers to these problems and a set of techniques for addressing them, including gender mainstreaming and diversity management, affirmative action schemes, quotas, and the multiplicity of development interventions designated by the labels “women in development” and “gender in development,” as well as equal rights legislation, including international norms such as those codified in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

Liberal rationality adds to the governmental techniques of the turn of the nineteenth century a new kind of power. Governing women's bodies at the end of the nineteenth century required disciplinary power that in Europe and North America molded women into sacrificing mothers and productive housewives. In Foucault's words, this power “centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls” (1980, 139). The new apparatus of gender does not do away with disciplinary power, but it activates, in addition, legal and liberal bio-power geared toward the production of new selves. Legal power emerges, for example, in laws prohibiting sexual harassment or in the proliferation of codes reining in (usually male) “misconduct.” In addition, liberal bio-power entails regulatory controls that under neoliberalism have been largely delegated to the market. In the words of Foucault (Reference Foucault and Burchell2008, 259 f), this leads to a clear result:

Gender mainstreaming and managing diversity produce this kind of neoliberal bio-power, seeking to shape incentives and ways of doing within organizations, focusing on changing the rules of the game and on activating diversity and difference as assets.

In sum, conceptualizing gender as an apparatus brings into view the rationalities and logics inherent in bio-political gender construction and the kinds of dispositions that these rationalities produce. It makes visible diverse targets of such construction and highlights the various ways in which power operates to generate particular ends, from the disciplinary bio-power creating docile women to the neoliberal bio-power creating the conditions of possibility for a form of women's freedom. Gender mainstreaming and diversity management are concrete techniques that operate in different ways to produce these conditions.

TECHNOLOGIES OF GOVERNING GENDER: DM AND GM

Managing diversity and gender mainstreaming are technologies in the contemporary government of gender and, as such, share a number of characteristics but differ on others. Both DM and GM draw their authority from the knowledge of experts—diversity managers in the case of DM and gender experts in the case of GM. Their expertise consists of feminist and cultural studies knowledge, pragmatically adapted to governmental ends and paired with knowledge about administration and personnel management. For both, this expertise entails a validation of difference: In the case of DM, the emphasis is on race, gender, and—increasingly, with the globalization of production and consumption—the cultures of migrants and foreigners; by contrast, in the case of GM, the emphasis is almost exclusively on gender. There is, however, an effort in the European Union to move from GM to diversity mainstreaming and to begin to consider a range of vectors of difference, such as race, ethnicity, disability, age, and sexual orientation.

Both strategies are geared toward recognizing the existence of difference and dealing with it strategically. Thus, DM pushes back against a view that people are basically the same underneath a varied exterior. Instead, it advocates for an acceptance of difference “which involves the ability to discern cultural patterns in one's own and other cultures” (Anand and Winters Reference Anand and Winters2008, 366). Similarly, GM argues against the view that policy interventions—such as macroeconomic policies or research and technology policies—are gender neutral. Instead, it assumes that all government actions affect women and men differentially because women and men are differently positioned. The goal of gender equality requires that we recognize this difference (UN General Assembly 1999).

Despite this important similarity, the two techniques vary in the logics they emphasize to make difference productive. DM sees difference as productive in a positive sense; that is, human resources managers are enjoined to “harness” the potential of workforce differences, to “harvest” the fruits of diversity, to “unleash the potential of a diverse workforce,” and, in the process, to generate the conditions for a company's success (Shen et al. Reference Shen, Chanda, D'Netto and Monga2009: 238, 242, 246). The envisaged benefits encompass improved communication and information flow, as well as the fostering of creativity and a better ability within a globalized economy to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse customer base. Disadvantages that could potentially emanate from a diverse workforce—such as tendencies to discriminate—require prudent management so that difference can release its positive potential. By validating the hereditary and innate portions of human capital previously considered drawbacks, diversity management removes the tax on difference and recognizes that difference brings a dividend.

By contrast, GM frames difference as productive in a largely negative sense. The argument for GM focuses on the fact that seemingly gender-neutral policies and programs often have quite dissimilar effects on differently gendered individuals. As such, they tend to privilege men's experiences over women's. The result is often pervasive (if unintended) discrimination and injustice toward women. The solution is to make such failings conscious and to incorporate corrective measures into bureaucratic practices. Thus, in the logic of GM, equality cannot be accomplished unless difference is recognized and its unequal effects are tamed.

In setting up an expectation that difference is pervasive and cannot be escaped, both DM and GM contribute to the production of selves. This is perhaps most salient in training activities, which make up a major part of both DM and GM in practice. Diversity and gender training aim at building new selves that have internalized a sensitivity to difference to such an extent that external controls, oversight, and incentives no longer are necessary. They do so in more or less sophisticated ways, on the one hand pervasively stereotyping, on the other hand seeking to generate within individuals a new competence to deal with difference.

Thus, training activities sometimes suggest categorical identities to describe “cultures” or the experiences of “men” and “women” as fundamentally distinct, uniform, and static. A training manual of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization is typical when it states that “men and women act differently, because of their socially ascribed roles,” that “rural women are the most knowledgeable about patterns and uses of local biodiversity,” that “women know traditional rice varieties, men know improved varieties,” and “men and women have different livelihood strategies” (Building on Gender 2005, 12–15). Similarly, diversity training manuals reify cultures in statements such as: “In some cultures, people prefer a very direct style, saying exactly what they mean; in others, people prefer to be more indirect and speak between the lines,” or “In certain cultures, conflict is highly desirable; in others, harmony is the utmost goal,” or “Exact time is an absolute priority in some cultures, but not everywhere in the world” (Wildermuth Reference Wildermuth and Gray2005, 82). Because the British queue to wait for the bus, they are thought to have a “deep cultural desire to lead neat and controlled lives.” Confucianism, in another example, leads Koreans to “not question strict chains of command” (citations in Egan and Bendick Reference Egan and Bendick2008, 389).

More sophisticated training materials carefully avoid this type of stereotyping and instead—in the case of DM—seek to develop “cultural competence,” “diversity competence,” and “self-efficacy” in dealing with diversity (Combs and Luthans Reference Combs and Luthans2007; Egan and Bendick Reference Egan and Bendick2008; Lee and Bertera Reference Lee and Bertera2007). In the case of GM, they emphasize the malleability of gender constructions. Unlike the materials that teach stereotypes, they allow for an element of reflexivity among the trainees. Conduct is changed through an internalization of understanding and of being able to deal with difference. Individuals are hailed for establishing their difference and becoming skilled at behaving in desired ways in a context of difference.

Yet DM and GM adopt distinct logics in their efforts to change conduct. DM embraces a neoliberal logic. It approaches trainees as entrepreneurs of the self whose main asset is their human capital. It seeks to increase this capital by generating in them an appreciation of diversity. It imagines these entrepreneurs of the self as coming together in a context resembling a market: The synergy of diverse selves expressing their difference produces a superior outcome that advances the interests of both the individual and the group. In order for this logic to be able to assert itself, diversity management needs to generate the right set of rules and a conducive context, from senior level commitment to robust metrics and accountability procedures. The confluence of this context with dissimilar selves generates the ends of government. Governing, in other words, becomes an art exercised at a distance (Rose Reference Rose1999, 49).

Diversity-competent selves function because they are embedded within a set of regulations external to the apparatus of gender. The regulations enable a self-regulating “free” market, which makes it possible to validate diversity management. In Foucault's words (2008, 32), the market is a site of “veridiction.” Market results verify that increasing and managing diversity is, indeed, good for business. While the evidence on the matter is inconclusive and contradictory (Bell and Kravitz Reference Bell and Kravitz2008; Foster Curtis and Dreachslin Reference Foster Curtis and Dreachslin2008; McVittie Reference McVittie2008; Vedder Reference Vedder2005, 39), a proliferating discourse about the superior performance of companies with a substantial representation of women in management supports the claim (Adler and Conclin Reference Adler and Conclin2009; The Bottom Line 2004; Women Matter 2007).

Gender mainstreaming develops a significantly different logic. Because it approaches difference as negatively productive, its purpose is not to foster such productivity but, rather, to counteract it. A consideration of gender is intended to generate policies, programs, and projects adjusted to the difference of women and disruptive of the negative productivity of their difference. Interventions focus not on individuals in organizations as carriers of human capital but on bureaucrats as rule makers, standard setters, and conductors of the conduct of populations. Training seeks to accomplish multiple goals. First, it creates awareness and, thus, produces the right inclination among bureaucrats toward the governance of gender. But more importantly, it seeks to increase the skills of professionals so that they become better program administrators. These skills include a number of techniques, such as learning about laws and codes of conduct, and gaining competence in the application of checklists, gender analysis, impact evaluation, gender budgeting, and gender training. Thus, where diversity management generates entrepreneurs of the self within organizations whose human capital encompasses cultural competence, gender mainstreaming creates new managers capable of taming the negative productivity of difference through the application of techniques. GM embraces a logic of bureaucratic governmentality.

Unlike DM, GM cannot rely on the market to judge whether it has achieved the ends of governing gender; it needs to measure, assess, and evaluate. But, as with DM, the success of GM lies with the changed capability of individuals, in this case bureaucrats, who have absorbed the message that they should be thinking of gender impacts at all times. These bureaucrats develop the capacity to integrate the mandate for gender equality with other mandates they receive. Placed in the “mainstream,” they wage a battle against the negative productivity of gender while working to advance governmental ends, such as economic growth, free trade, security, and urban infrastructure. In this process, neoliberal logics do not constitute the means to governing gender—as in DM—but they help define the ends. For example, the effort to mainstream gender into the policies of the World Bank has led to programs encouraging men to share domestic and care responsibilities in private households at the expense of public investment into the care economy (Bedford Reference Bedford, Rai and Waylen2008). The effort to mainstream gender into European agricultural policy has amounted to fostering entrepreneurship in rural services in an effort to give women equal access to income, although it has largely left in place unequal gender relations in the agricultural sector (Prügl Reference Prügl2009). In the security arena, mainstreaming gender has often amounted to including women so that making wars and postwar reconstruction become more effective (Cohn Reference Cohn, Rai and Waylen2008). Thus, the success of gender mainstreaming is judged by how it facilitates the accomplishment of a range of goals, many entailing slim government, entrepreneurial solutions, and standards of efficiency and effectiveness.

In sum, the generation of selves attuned to difference is part of the contemporary apparatus of gender, an apparatus nourished by a regime of truth that encompasses feminist reasoning. It is an apparatus that operates to establish identities and orders social life in its various dimensions. Invoked in the practices of DM and GM, it also is an apparatus that brings to life categorical difference while serving as a conduit for power. It latches onto a neoliberal logic in the case of DM and a bureaucratic logic in the case of GM, becoming available for governmental ends in ways that ambiguously advance feminist agendas.