ABSTRACT

There is much debate about postfeminism, what it is, and its role in feminist politics. Whilst postfeminism has become increasingly influential in the study of literature, popular culture, and philosophy, it has so far received comparatively little attention in law. This book aims to remedy this situation. The book brings together feminist legal scholars working in different contexts to examine the idea of postfeminism and assess its contemporary relevance. It explores a range of questions including the following: Does postfeminism describe an age that follows modernism, an age where identity politics has realised its goals and feminism is no longer needed? Or does postfeminism describe the feminism of a postmodernist age where identity can mean anything at all? Or, differently again, does the term capture a ‘new feminism’ that discredits feminism and attempts to reshape its political consciousness? And what might the answers to these questions mean for law and legal theory, and a feminist politics of law reform?

chapter |8 pages

Introduction

The provocation of the ‘post’ in postfeminist legal theory

part I|1 pages

Legal feminism

chapter 2|18 pages

Postfeminist clothing

Anti-feminism or diversification of the narratives of emancipation?

chapter 3|12 pages

Narratives of belonging

Religion, the gendered body, and claims of autonomy and authenticity

part II|21 pages

The politics of law reform

chapter 5|17 pages

Interrogating ourselves, again

Women’s human rights and the feminist practice of critical self-assessment 1

part III|22 pages

Law

chapter 7|22 pages

The problem with research

chapter 8|14 pages

Breaking free from the orbit of legal centralism

Religious minority women in a postcolonial context

chapter 9|16 pages

Beyond identity

In theory