This article examines the way feminists engage with gender mainstreaming in their attempt to transform gender inequalities in Newfoundland and Labrador, a province on Canada's east coast. It employs an anthropological perspective to explore one aspect of gender mainstreaming, namely the way gender analysis models are deployed in specific encounters, to consider how such equality templates can both reproduce and challenge pre-existing social relations. I argue that a feminist practice approach in anthropology, in particular its reflexive and practice orientation, can foreground the way gender models are actually implemented and interpreted. Through this analysis I argue that gender mainstreaming at this point reproduces wider relations of power - governmental and normative - and cannot yet accommodate preexisting social cleavages in the province.
