In the last decades, theorizing about societal and political transforma­tions have been closely intertwined with claims about new modalities of knowledge production. The institutionalization of women´s and gender studies as post-academic interdisciplinary field corresponds with this so­cially distributed, system of knowledge production. Equally important has been the remaking of the policy-science nexus. Scientific claims in polit­ical processes have become increasingly publicly contested, not least in the field of gender policies. The traditional technocratic and hierarchical policy-making style has been reshaped by more horizontal participatory procedures which have been perceived as democratization of expertise. These developments implied a recognition of feminist knowledge and academia as politically relevant “gender expertise,” in many European countries. Parallel to this processes, since around 2005 public cam­paigns against the “ideology of gender” or “genderism” started to ques­tion the scientific character of gender research as a discipline.

This paper explores the interplay between gender, knowledge, and poli­cy-making in Germany and Sweden within the field of gender equality. This paper deploys a novel perspective. It launches the concept of polit­ical epistemologies drawing on insights from science and technology studies, which have been pioneering research focusing on the policy-sci­ence nexus and moving it from a linear “knowledge utilization approach” towards a notion of co-production and boundary-crossing configura­tions. It will pursue the following questions: In what ways has scientific expertise contributed to the shape of these political fields? What institu­tional and epistemic mechanisms can account for the detected knowl­edge regime? Which impact has the anti-genderist mobilization on the political epistemology?