Women, Europe and the New Languages of Politics

This book contributes to two ongoing debates: one about the presence and activity of women in politics, and the other about the part which language plays in shaping and developing our political activity. Footitt argues that, in a world of shifting roots and multiple identities, the stories we tell, the ways in which we understand the relationships between us, and the communities we imagine ourselves belonging to, are of ever-increasing political importance. At the center of the study are the women from twelve European Union countries who participate in the transnational political site of the European Parliament. Using interviews with women Members of the European Parliment, and a close textual study of speeches in the European Parliament, Hilary Footitt argues that women have created a language of politics that transcends nationalities and political parties and contributes to engendering democracy, defining citizenship and imagining the community of Europe. Politics, she argues, is multilingual, and an understanding of the varieties of vocabularies and grammars that are potentially available to us may help us to create a more inclusive and dynamic political process.