Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben and the 'nomos' of contemporary political life

This chapter examines how gender equality has been transformed in European Union (EU) policymaking into a bioeconomic 'technology of power' tailored to optimise the life and productivity of European populations. It expresses that EU gender equality policy infused the idea of socially constructed sex with the precepts of human capital theory to rationalise the re-optimisation of population and productivity, especially in the context of the reconciliation of work and family life. The chapter analyses how EU gender equality policy paradoxically entails little concrete intervention into the lives of women and men, but rather advocates changes in gender roles in various policy fields in order to reorder men and women's productive and reproductive labour. It then examines the processes of power/knowledge through which EU gender equality policy and gender mainstreaming became entangled with not only neoliberal strategies of governance, but also biopolitical strategies that subscribe to the neoliberal logic of human capital.