ABSTRACT
The contemporary debate on equality-formal and substantive, simple and ‘complex’—has to take into account not only the familiar problem of the relationship between protection and self-determination, but also the fact that ever new ‘differences’ are today reclaiming recognition as ‘differences’. It is well known that the achievement of formal equality, through the fertile terrain of claims and conflicts, often produces new forms of discrimination. One of the central themes of feminist thinking was precisely that of how to escape the alternative between equality as the forced assimilation to a standard which, while neutral in appearance, is in reality defined in terms of the male gendered (as well as white, property owning, etc.) subject, and a recognition of ‘difference’ implying protection and discrimination. The genderisation of the legal subject (of the symbolic, of culture in general) is one attempt to find a way out of this entanglement. How to translate it, however, into a concrete politics is anything but a simple question. Whether it is in fact possible in the case of the politics of criminal justice is what I want to look at now.
