LAW/GENDER/BODY/TEXTS Flora Renz

This series of talks aims at envisioning alternative ways of conceiving gender by taking into account practices and material conditions that challenge the binary understanding of gender. Legal systems, bodies and texts will be considered as spaces within which gender emerges as a problematic, fuzzy, dynamic substance.

Valeria Venditti

Flora Renz Rethinking gender through disability

How can we move beyond current contentious debates around the role of gender? Is it possible to (re)imagine gender within the legal sphere in a way that does not conceive it as either solely oppressive or purely self-determined? To address these questions I will draw on some themes emerging from a wider ESRC funded research project on the future of legal gender. This is a prefigurative law reform project that asks whether legal gender status still matters, in what circumstances, and for whom. By asking a law reform question that is not yet on the table, namely, what value does the current status quo have (if any), this project seeks to explore the consequences and impact of more fundamental changes to legal gender status.

Part of the challenge of a prefigurative law reform project, is to think through what such options would look like. If we want to imagine and anticipate different ways of dealing with gender as a legal status, one useful starting point may be to think about how other identity statuses or categories are currently dealt with in social, policy and legal contexts. Disability as a category may offer a particularly rich source both for comparison, but also to think about how future changes to gender could be approached from a different starting point. In thinking through these issues I am using disability or chronic illness not as a direct comparison but rather as a prompt for considering some aspects of gender that are less prominent in current discussions, such as gender as a legal category whose intensity and relevance may fluctuate in different times and places.

LAW/GENDER/BODY/TEXTS Flora Renz

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LAW/GENDER/BODY/TEXTS Flora Renz

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