ABSTRACT
In the early twenty-first century the question of gender justice is more salient than ever. We live in a time of wholesale commodification of the social spheres, in a densely globalising world economic system haunted by a disturbing and growing global gap between rich and poor. We face the related reality of globally spiralling gender violence, burgeoning social complexity and deepening risk – all set against the backdrop of the looming threat of environmental breakdown.1 At the same time, important challenges are emerging concerning law’s need to be more inclusive by extending the protection of legal subjectivity not only to non-human animals and the environment but also to a range of other entities and putative rights claimants, including artificial intelligences, robots and nanotech entities – signalling a vital debate which looks set to inform ethical deliberation on the best way to deliver legal justice in our futures, human and post-human alike.2 In short, there is an undeniably urgent need for us to reimagine and reconstitute our relationships with each other and with the nonhuman world of which we are a part. Legal rationality/subjectivity forms an indispensable and muscular thread in the Gordian knot of challenges ahead. Critical reflection on law’s gendered rationality, in this context, is arguably especially significant. The thoroughly gendered nature of law’s historical exclusion of persons
constructed as ‘non-insiders’ to legal discourse is radically continuous with identifiable exclusions operative in the burgeoning global capitalist techno-economy. Scholars and activists alike argue that a range of ‘outsider’ subjectivities disproportionately bear the costs of economic globalisation and the risks it produces. Such accounts draw decisive links between the exclusion of the poor, women, children and other non-dominant humans – such as racial minorities and the disabled, nonhuman animals, sensitive ecosystem habitats and the environment itself.3
Importantly, there is a fundamental sense in which all these ‘outsider’ or ‘other’ subjectivities can be seen as quintessentially feminised.4 The gender of legal rationality, in the light of law’s role as a dominant and legitimating carrier of inclusions and exclusions is, accordingly, a matter in need of continuing critical interrogation.
