Law, Gender, Equality

This course explores the importance of gender as a category that structures identity, opportunity, and hierarchy. Gender intersects with other categories of hierarchy such as race, class, religion, citizenship status, ethnicity, sexual preference and identity, and able-bodiedness.  The course will explore both theories of how intersectionality works, and the role it plays in the particular spheres of law we will focus on. The primary focus of this course is the complex role that law plays in constructing gender (understood in intersectional terms) and in both maintaining and attempting to overcome inequality. The first overarching topic is violence: Sexual Assault on Trial; Law, Gender and Violence: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives; Structural Violence and Indigenous Women. Another very basic way that gender organizes people lives and opportunities is the way gender structures who provides the basic care that all human beings rely on, and how paid work is organized. Thus, the second broad topic is how law intersects with issues of work and care:  gender identity, labour law, international migration, tax law, and the global economy. We will look at issues of : Masculinity,  Care, and the Legal Structuring of Gender Relations; The Intersecting Structure of Work and Care; Care, Work and “Domestic Work”; Restructuring Work and Care; Law and Gender in Global Context. The readings will provide a range of approaches from feminist theory, to legal history, to empirical studies of lawyers and courts, to doctrinal analysis, to proposals for fundamental societal transformation.