Policy as Poetry: Why Feminist Research Must Reimagine Language

Introduction Policies are written in the language of bureaucracy: “capacity-building,” “gender mainstreaming,” “stakeholder engagement.” These words circulate in international NGOs, state ministries, and UN reports with the weight of authority — and yet, they often fail to move the very people they are meant to protect. The paradox is clear: feminist research has generated rich, textured accounts of women’s lives, but by the time these accounts are distilled into policy briefs, they are stripped of voice, urgency, and emotion.

This essay argues that feminist research must reimagine policy language. To write feminist policy is not simply to change the content of recommendations; it is to transform the very form of writing. Policy can be technical and poetic at once — rigorous in its evidence, but also alive to the dignity of those it speaks for. If feminism has taught us that the personal is political, then feminist research must also insist that the poetic is policy.

The Violence of Bureaucratic Language

Feminist ethnographers know that stories matter. In a focus group in Vietnam, a woman recalls selling noodles on the street while hiding from the police; in a South African township, a mother recounts walking home in fear after dark; in a Bolivian village, an elder speaks of honoring Pachamama. Each story is singular, embodied, irreducible.

Yet when these narratives enter the bureaucratic machinery, they become “informal labor,” “gender-based violence,” “indigenous knowledge systems.” The translation is efficient, but it is also violent: lived realities are flattened into categories legible to donors and policymakers.

This bureaucratic language is not neutral. It reflects the priorities of institutions that value measurability over meaning. As a result, the voices of women risk being heard only as “data points” rather than as subjects of knowledge.

Feminist Method as Feminist Writing

Feminist research has long emphasized methodology — participatory action research, intersectional analysis, collaborative ethnography. But methodology without attention to language risks betrayal. If our methods honor women’s voices, our writing must honor them too.

Imagine a policy brief that opens not with bullet points, but with a testimony: “Every morning I wake before the sun to sell food by the roadside. I do this not only to survive but to keep my daughter in school.” Imagine if this sentence was not relegated to the appendix but placed at the center of the recommendation.

To write this way is not sentimentalism. It is an epistemological stance: to recognize that knowledge is carried in stories, in metaphors, in rhythms. Policy stripped of narrative is policy stripped of truth.

Policy as Promise

Policies are often treated as technical instruments, but they are also promises about the future. When a government commits to maternity leave, when an NGO pledges to protect women against violence, these are not only administrative actions; they are collective statements of care.

Yet most policy briefs read as if they were written to avoid emotion. They are cautious, hedged, bureaucratic. Feminist research can challenge this by treating policy as a form of ethical promise — a speech act that commits us to imagining and building a different world.

In this sense, policy writing can learn from poetry. Poetry does not mean abandoning clarity; it means embracing resonance. A line of poetry lingers not because it is vague, but because it names the unspoken. In the same way, a feminist policy brief should not only inform — it should move.

Case Study: Policy Briefs in Practice

In our collective’s work, we experimented with re-framing briefs around voices rather than categories. For a discussion on labor rights in Vietnam, instead of beginning with statistics, we began with a worker’s narrative:

From there, we built recommendations: wage transparency, worker representation, health protections. The evidence remained rigorous, but the entry point shifted. Policymakers could no longer read abstractly; they had to read as though the worker was speaking to them directly.

Feedback from NGOs indicated that these briefs were not only more engaging but more persuasive. Numbers alone can be dismissed; stories resist dismissal.

The Risk of Aestheticization

Of course, to poeticize policy carries risks. There is the danger of turning suffering into spectacle, of aestheticizing pain for advocacy. Feminist research must be vigilant: poetry in policy must be ethical, not exploitative.

The task is to write in ways that restore dignity rather than consume it. To let testimony stand in its own voice, not as ornament, but as argument.

Implications for Global Feminism Reimagining policy as poetry has broader implications for global feminism. It means:

1. Resisting technocracy: Refusing to let bureaucratic templates dictate feminist agendas.

2. Centering voice: Allowing testimonies, metaphors, and local languages to shape policy content.

3. Embracing multiplicity: Recognizing that no single form of writing suffices; briefs can be statistical and lyrical, technical and human.

It also means acknowledging that language is power. The words we choose determine whose realities count. To shift from “beneficiaries” to “partners,” from “vulnerable groups” to “communities of resilience,” is not semantics — it is politics.

Conclusion

Policy will always be necessary. Governments and NGOs need briefs, frameworks, recommendations. But necessity does not justify sterility. Feminist research challenges us to write policy differently: to infuse it with care, dignity, and resonance.

To imagine policy as poetry is not to abandon rigor, but to insist that rigor includes listening, narrating, feeling. Every policy is, in the end, a story about what kind of future we are willing to commit to.

And perhaps the most radical thing feminist researchers can do today is to remind the world that the future cannot be built in the language of bureaucracy alone. It must also be spoken in the language of promise — and of poetry.