ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter outlines the feminist historical materialist perspective that underpins the rest of the book. It draws on the work of Marx and Engels along with several different bodies of Marxist and feminist scholarship, including in the areas of (international) political economy, sociology, history, legal theory and criminology. In bringing together these different approaches, my theoretical apparatus goes beyond both the instrumentalism of much Marxist theory and the particularism that characterizes much feminist work. That is, in contrast to Marxist accounts that have tended to conceptualize the law (and law enforcement) as an instrument of class power and feminist accounts that have tended to shy away from grand pronouncements about the intrinsically gendered and class-based character of the law, in this chapter I outline a conceptualization of the law as constitutive of the class-based and gendered social relations of capitalism. I also outline the ways in which the law has both progressive and repressive dimensions.
