NCJ Number
146716
Journal
Journal of Law and Society Volume: 20 Issue: 4 Dated: (Winter 1993) Pages: 398-411
Date Published
1993
Length
14 pages
Annotation
Questions concerning feminist analysis of law are explored.
Abstract
The author explores some of the questions which postmodernism raises for feminist analysis of law. Since law insists upon translating claims into rights held by clearly defined groups, feminists have sought to explain women's situation in broad sweeping terms. By portraying women's oppression as a generalized and unitary experience, women have been able to make inroads into the legal arena. In the 1990s, however, feminism began to deconstruct women's experiences and found that there was not a single category of women sharing identical experiences as a result of their gender. By refusing to collectively consider women's interests, modern feminist writing may have appeared to abdicate itself from the legal arena. The author argues that finding a diversity of experience among women is not a reason to question the point of feminism nor is it a reason to abdicate from the legal arena. Rather, the author posits that finding differences among women is not logically incompatible with finding points of similarity and feminism can play an important role in exposing the partiality of the legal establishment and the theories by which it operates. The author identifies, discusses, and responds to attacks made in the last decade that feminism may have been insufficiently sensitive to differences among women. She concludes by arguing that there is not one brand of feminism that should triumph over the others; that feminists should not present themselves as a series of different cliques, with membership of one excluding the possibility of joining the others; and that a jurisprudential strategy which strips women of their particularity and ignores the diversity of their experiences will not succeed in providing real justice for women since it would have already denied their existence. 25 footnotes and references