The European Union as a masculine supranational community : a test case of its common market law

Abstract

With the paradigm shift in the gradation of the state’s compulsory masculinity from military and colonial power to the capacity to foster transnational business, as informed by the work of Connell’s and Hooper’s, the study argues -- in favour of the rather condescending nomination of the EU as an ‘economic giant, but a political dwarf’ -- that the EU’s creation and maintenance of its single market -- under the surveillance of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to enforce the common market law -- is actually a construction site of the hegemonic masculinity of the current globalised international society, a reading made possible by conflating Foucault’s theory of governmentality and Butler’s performativity, given both are deconstructive in nature. Not only does the study engage the EU’s transnational business masculinity on the discursive level. It extends the investigation to the material plane, arguing that the ‘masculinity’ in question is heavily tinged with patriarchy, affecting real women. The European single market gives the EU its desirable masculine gender identity not only because the neoliberal governmentality underlying it embodies aggressive and competitive characteristics usually assigned by society as ‘masculine’, but also because the market rationality materially privileges men over women whose ‘informal’ output in the domestic realm not only receives no economic valorisation, but also affects their competitiveness in the labour market. Given the rationale behind the legal framework for gender equality in the EU being the prevention of distortion of the transnational labour market, the fact that the ECJ excludes sexual orientation, homosexuals in their relationship in particular, from the prohibition against discrimination on grounds of sex -- which renders the EU’s masculinity not only patriarchal, but also heteronormative -- backfires the Union by undermining the goal of its economic integration, especially, the free competition in the labour market. The study, thus, concludes: in every attempt to construct one’s identity, particularly, one’s gender identity, one not only draws a clear boundary and stigmatises the other in the perpetual (re)creation of oneself, but also, as the case of the EU reveals, confronts with the self-inflicted instability -- engendered in this case by its own insecurity of not being ‘manly enough’ -- subverting such a desirable gender identity effect