Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2011

Source Publication

Martha Fineman (ed.) Transcending the Boundaries of Law: Generations of feminism and legal theory. New York: Routledge (2011), 115-130

Abstract

This chapter examines a shift within feminist legal theory from a central concern with sexual difference to one of embodied difference. The subject at the center of this theorizing is marked by bodily (as opposed to sexual) difference from the normative, self-actualizing individual of legal subjecthood. Bioethical and biotechnological inquiries too are concerned with bodily differentiation. Bodies discussed in these contexts are often anomalous or pathologized. They are brought under scrutiny, when they deviate from what is often regarded as "normal," that which is both valorized for its "species typicality" and, by extension, held out as the "natural" state of being (Buchanan et al. 2000).

Comments

This chapter is published in Martha Fineman (ed.) "Transcending the Boundaries of Law: Generations of Feminism and Legal Theory", New York: Routledge, 2011.

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