The Cambridge Companion to Gender and the Law

With systematic, thematic chapters, this volume demonstrates how law and gender co-produce gendered legal subjects.

Stéphanie Hennette Vauchez (Edited by), Ruth Rubio-Marín (Edited by)

9781108499248, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 January 2023

500 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.7 cm, 0.72 kg

To what extent is the legal subject gendered? Using illustrative examples from a range of jurisdictions and thematically organised chapters, this volume offers a comprehensive consideration of this question. With a systematic, accessible approach, it argues that law and gender work to co-produce the legal subject. Cumulatively, the volume's chapters provide a systematic evaluation of the key facets of the legal subject: the corporeal, the functional and the communal. Exploring aspects of the legal subject from the ways in which it is sexed and sexualised to its national and familial dimensions, this volume develops a complete account of the various processes through which legal orders produce gendered subjects. Across its chapters, each theoretically ambitious in its own right, this volume outlines how the law not only acts on the social world, but genders it.

From law and gender to law as gender: the legal subject and the co-production hypothesis
Part I. Bodies: 1. The sexed subject Marie-Xaviere Catto and Stefano Osella
2. The foetal subject: law, gender and embodiment Michael Thomson
3. The terrorized subject: a critique of 'women', 'gender violence' and 'vulnerability' as legal categories Márcia Nina Bernardes and Sofia Martins
4. The sexual subject: recasting the sexual citizen Melissa Murray
Part II. Functions: 5. The working subject: the collusion of law and gender in the construction of working subjects Joanne Conaghan
6. The reproductive subject: the reproductive subject and the embodied state of international human rights law Joanna N. Erdman
7. The caring subject Jonathan Herring
Part III. Communities: 8. The national subject Melanie Toombs and Kim Rubenstein
9. The familial subject Fernanda G. Nicola and Ann Shalleck
10. The political subject Stéphanie Hennette Vauchez and Ruth Rubio Marin.

Subject Areas: Gender & the law [LAQG], Jurisprudence & general issues [LA], Gender studies: men [JFSJ2], Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ]