ABSTRACT
Feminist legal theorists belong to a norm-forming group involved in what Robert Cover has described as the creation of new legal meanings. Feminist legal theory needs to allow room for the destabilization of gender as both a conceptual and practical tool of analysis. Feminist legal theory moves in the right direction when it pursues the humanist project of agency and subjectivity and attempts to redefine subjectivity to redress gross gender-related exclusions. A feminist theory of subjectivity can adequately elaborate an alternative vision to the liberal self by showing the centrality of the political and cultural history in which the subject is born; a context of personal and social de-legitimation. If feminism, and feminist legal theory in particular, is to remain a liberation project, it needs to come to grips with its cognitive distortions and self-idealized universal discoveries.
