The Challenges of Multiplicity

A Review of Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought by Elizabeth V. Spelma

The Semiotic Fractures of Vulnerable Bodies: Resistance to the Gendering of Legal Subjects

While the turn to vulnerability in law responds to a recurrent critique by feminist scholars on the disembodiment of legal personhood, this article suggests that the mobilization of vulnerability in the criminal courts does not necessarily offer female drug mules a direct path to justice. Through an analysis of sentencing appeals of female drug mules in England and Wales, this article presents a feminist critique of the dispositif of the person and its relation to vulnerability. Discourses on drug mules’ vulnerability mobilize the trope of the colonial victim in need of protection, which is often translated into legal mercy. But mercy is rather an expression of biopower which inscribes not only fragility onto the bodies of drug mules by figuring them as exemplar paradigms of colonial subjectivity, but also reinvigorates the dispositif of gender implicit in the legal person. In this set-up, it would appear as if law and politics totalize the registers of life, in this case the contours of vulnerable body. The article suggests we must revisit the image of the wounded body in order to carve out a space for resistance. Drawing on Elaine Scarry and Judith Butler, it suggests vulnerable bodies are marked by a semiotic openness, which renders them subject to appropriation but also able to signify the precarity produced by the law through their resistance to representation

Gender injustice in compensating injury to autonomy in English and Singaporean negligence law

The extent to which English law remedies injury to autonomy (ITA) as a stand-alone actionable damage in negligence is disputed. In this article I argue that the remedy available is not only partial and inconsistent (Keren-Paz in Med Law Rev, 2018) but also gendered and discriminatory against women. I first situate the argument within the broader feminist critique of tort law as failing to appropriately remedy gendered harms, and of law more broadly as undervaluing women’s interest in reproductive autonomy. I then show by reference to English remedies law’s first principles how imposed motherhood cases—Rees v Darlington and its predecessor McFarlane v Tayside Health Board—result in gender injustice when compared with other autonomy cases such as Chester v Afshar and Yearworth v North Bristol NHS Trust: A minor gender-neutral ITA is better remedied than the significant gendered harm of imposing motherhood on the claimant; men’s reproductive autonomy is protected to a greater extent than women’s; women’s reproductive autonomy is protected by an exceptional, derisory award. Worst of all, courts refuse to recognise imposed motherhood as detriment; and the deemed, mansplained, nonpecuniary joys of motherhood are used to offset pecuniary upkeep costs, forcing the claimant into a position she sought to avoid and thus further undermining her autonomy. The recent Singaporean case ACB v Thomson Medical Pte Ltd, awarding compensation for undermining the claimant’s genetic affinity in an IVF wrong-sperm-mix-up demonstrates some improvement in comparison to English law, and some shared gender injustices in the context of reproductive autonomy. ACB’s analysis is oblivious to the nature of reproductive autonomy harm as gendered; and prioritises the father’s interest in having genetic affinity with the baby over a woman’s interest in not having motherhood imposed upon her

Care Work

Care is routinely provided both as a commodity (paid care) and as unpaid care, usually by women. Virtually all care is treated as of low value, and care givers, paid and unpaid, are seen as low status. This devaluing of care and those who do it make care a major part of hierarchy and inequality. I argue that the solution is not more commodification (like wages for housework), but a norm of universal, unpaid care-giving. This would be made possible by a corresponding norm of limiting paid work to 30 hours a week. Part Time for All: A Care Manifesto (Nedelsky and Malleson, 2023) spells out a feasible proposal for restructuring work and care in high-income countries in today’s global economy and offers arguments for transformation everywhere. The new norms are summarized here along with their main contributions. PTfA would redress four pressing problems: the inequality of caregivers; family stress from incompatible demands of work and care; chronic time scarcity; and policymakers’ ignorance about the care that life requires—the care/policy divide. These solutions rest on the revaluing of care that would arise when everyone understands themselves as both a care-giver and a care receiver. This transformation would be made possible by a norm that everyone, regardless of the “importance” of their work, contributes about 22 hours a week of unpaid care to family, friends, and community. These norms transform traditional (and some aspirational) relationships of care to the market, the family, and the state

A Relational Approach to Law and Its Core Concepts

This introduction to relational feminism builds on Nedelsky’s approach in which relationships are central to all human beings, not just to women. A relational approach to law provides both a clearer analysis of what is at stake in disputes over law and policy and a framework for assessing proposals for change. The basic claims are that relationships make possible the lived reality of values like security or autonomy, and law is one of the primary means of shaping relationships. Relational feminism reconceptualizes core concepts, like autonomy; links them to underlying conceptions of the self; and explains their role in law. The examples show the benefit of a relational approach to self, autonomy, and rights (and law more broadly). From questions of hierarchy and racism to environmental harm to mental health and a reconceptualization of property, the chapter works through the application of a relational approach