Introduction

Like other external policy domains, mainstreaming gender in the context of trade requires political leadership, that is, the willingness to include gender equality as an objective of trade policy. It demands an understanding of the link between domestic consumption and global production chains. This process is dependent on both expertise in gender mainstreaming and an institutional architecture prepared to accept the challenge posed by feminist critiques of foreign policy objectives and practice (Eveline and Bacchi, 2010; EIGE, 2019). Whereas feminist political economists have long demonstrated the gendered impact of trade policy (Garcia, 2021; Hannah et al, 2020), policy makers and practitioners have lagged in applying these insights to policy-making practice and strategy (True, 2009).

Trade is an interesting area of foreign policy in so far as it establishes a direct link between the personal, in which social reproduction largely occurs, domestic economic and social policies and global politics. As a policy domain, trade has also been traditionally defined by competition and advantage without much consideration for the social and historical context within which many trade agreements have been signed and international trade policy has been defined (Watson, 2016). The challenge for gender scholars has been to centre these connections, or interactions, to expose the hierarchies of power that support global economic structures. International trade policy is just one of the policy domains through which these hierarchies become normalized and reified. For instance, one of these hierarchies is the assumed neutrality of trade as a field of practice that is implicitly outward-facing, underpinned by the pursuit of state interests, and driven by the logic of competitive advantage. In the face of these global hierarchies, centering social reproduction to understand the impact of trade on socioeconomic relations thus becomes particularly challenging.

This chapter explores the contributions of feminist approaches to foreign policy analysis that centre the continuum between social reproduction and global trade. It argues that the insights stemming from this policy domain help us to understand the nexus between domestic and international politics in shaping foreign policy. Specifically, the chapter, like the rest of the chapters in this book, starts from the assumption that trade, as all other areas of foreign policy and external action, is gendered even though it has been frequently portrayed as gender-neutral or gender-free. These omissions are not what sets trade apart from other domains of foreign policy.