Abstract

Justin Trudeau, the current prime minister of Canada, says he is a feminist. His government has formulated a feminist foreign policy and has presented official budgets alluding to intersectional feminism. Through discourse analysis, we examine how Trudeau’s self-description as a feminist manifests in his official speeches spanning from 2015 to 2018; we also situate his positioning in relation to contemporary literature on intersectional feminism. Our study illustrates what other scholars have identified as an increasingly difficult relationship between feminism and the dominant discourse of neoliberalism in political and policy circles. Our findings suggest that Prime Minister Trudeau’s understanding of feminism appears contained within and limited by a discourse of economic prosperity, which puts his positioning in line with a form of neoliberal feminism. We conclude that, in the analyzed speeches, the prime minister frames matters of gender equality primarily as a means to unleash women’s potential to contribute to economic prosperity, portraying them as an untapped resource.

摘要

加拿大现任总理贾斯汀·特鲁多（Justin Trudeau）表示，他是一名女权主义者。他的政府制定了女权主义外交政策，并提出了暗示交叉女权主义的官方预算。通过话语分析，我们考察了特鲁多在2015年至2018年的官方演讲中如何表现出作为女权主义者的自我描述；我们还将他的定位与当代关于交叉女权主义的文学联系起来。我们的研究说明了其他学者认为女权主义与政治和政策界新自由主义主流话语之间日益困难的关系。我们的研究结果表明，特鲁多总理对女权主义的理解似乎包含在经济繁荣的话语中并受其限制，这使他的定位符合一种新自由主义女权主义的形式。我们得出的结论是，在经过分析的演讲中，总理将性别平等问题主要作为释放妇女潜力以促进经济繁荣的一种手段，将她们描绘成一种尚未开发的资源。