Gender in law and political economy

Miriam Bak-McKenna and Maj Grasten

Chapter 5 in Research Handbook on Law and Political Economy, 2025, pp 75-95 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter examines the intersection of gender, law, and political economy, highlighting how critical feminist jurisprudence has long engaged with core tenets in the emerging field of Law and Political Economy (LPE). Through its review of liberal feminism, materialist feminism, and anticolonial approaches, the chapter shows how feminist scholars have analyzed the dialectical relationship between law and economic power in shaping gendered social relations. The analysis focuses on three key sites where law, gender, and political economy intersect: the home, the market, and the body. These sites reveal how legal frameworks both create and maintain economic inequalities through the regulation of family relations, labor markets, and bodily autonomy. The chapter proposes a novel research agenda that employs translation as a heuristic device and examines legal borderlands to understand how gender is constructed and regulated across different social contexts. This framework enables scholars to analyze how law creates and maintains gender inequalities across multiple scales, from local to global. The chapter concludes that feminist approaches to law and gender offer crucial insights for LPE scholarship, particularly in understanding how legal structures shape economic power relations and gender inequality in contemporary society.

Keywords: Feminist legal theory; Social reproduction; Gender inequality; Care work; Public-private divide; Legal borderlands (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781803921181
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