Parliamentary ethnography and feminist institutionalism: gendering institutions – but how?

Abstract

Gender and politics scholars are conceptualising parliaments as workplaces, drawing on feminist institutionalist frameworks. Ethnography is a promising methodology that can be used to capture how gender is repeated over time. Ethnography offers scholars opportunities to explore heterogeneity by analysing actors as multiply positioned – with and through institutional rules – and affords attention to ambiguity and contradictions by examining everyday ambivalences. Furthermore, it can nuance conceptions of agency, treating agency as in process rather than as static. Despite these potentials, this article finds that the pairing between ethnography and institutionalism has been problematised and considers these concerns in depth. The diversity of feminist institutionalism across epistemological leanings makes for an important reflexive exercise about what ethnography can offer and how it can be practised. More specifically, the article argues that feminist institutionalism can be thickened with ethnography and by drawing on Butler’s concepts of interpellations, undoing and iterability.

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