Feminist Legal Theories: Legal Feminism

Question 1

• Essentialism (including strategic

essentialism)

Answer 1

• The lack of recognition that marginalized beings within a certain demographic experience due to the hegemony in place that maintains the privilege of certain
  individualsFeminism is a primary example
• Only certain female identities are the face of feminism
• Racialized women and women who are economically disadvantaged are often forgotten about
• Creates a problem when women attempt to try and represent all women
• “Thus, it was generally conceded that ‘woman’ understood as the physically
  defined or biological female sex was the fixed and reliable starting point of feminist
  analysis.”
• If there is no focus on any other factors, the movements tend to be in tune with women of privilege

-Strategic essentialism: operate as if sex and gender are essential qualities in order to make political gains
-‘‘strategic essentialism’’ which
may be justified by the empirical evidence that women, even across their many
differences from one another, are often subject to rights abuses that relate specifically to un/authorized gender identities.

Question 2

• Legal identity /subjectivity

Answer 2

Poststructuralist feminism

• Link to Foucault
• Law is a discursive apparatus that produces particular kinds of gendered subjects
• Law recognizes a variety of legal identities, even in the one person, and it recognizes these identities in both women and men. And the way it does this is by effectively reconstituting the person within each legal
  relation they enter. This chameleon nature of legal identity has important implications for feminists. It means that law has always been able to accommodate women, in a variety of legal relations, and that orthodox lawyers
  can point to this accommodation in their defense of law’s commitment to sexual
  neutrality
• Identity has generated an important set of intellectual debates across the contested borderlines of feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory
• The way the law operates at the practical level produces different kinds of gender subjects
• crucial features of identity such as sex/gender are produced within social practices such as law goes hand in hand with the insight that there are significant interaction effects between class, sex/ gender, race/ethnicity, and so on in the production of social identities.
• Law plays an active, dynamic role in shaping gendered (sexually oriented, raced, and so on) subjects: that its categories, rules, institutional arrangements, modes of reasoning and analysis, make a decisive and productive difference to the kinds of subjects we think of ourselves as being, and to the kinds of social subjects that we can be

Question 3

• Public-private spheres

Answer 3

• Commitment to the public-private divide blocks the realization of justice in the public sphere
• Powerful feminist critique of liberalism’s abstract individualism; of its inattention to the social construction of gendered identity, its public-private distinction, its focus on formal rather than substantial equality, its pretension to sexual neutrality.
• Women’s inequality premised on gender subordination in both public and private spheres and social class

Question 4

Gendering practices

Answer 4

• Law genders its subjects

Lacey’s 3 approaches to legal feminism:

1. Analytic-positive and negative role of law
   - Law is a gendering process
   - Law sets the criteria for which gender materializes (ex. the law would require specific clothing for you gender)
2. Critique
   - Feminism critiques how law produces gender
3. Reconstruction
   - How to change law to produce what certain theories have