TY - JOUR
T1 - Crafting Prefigurative Law in Turbulent Times: Decertification, DIY Law Reform, and the Dilemmas of Feminist Prototyping
AU - Cooper, Davina
N1 - Funding Information:
I am grateful to Margaret Davies, Didi Herman, my colleagues on the ‘Future of Legal Gender' project, and the anonymous reviewers for Feminist Legal Studies for their feedback on earlier iterations of this article. The research underpinning this article was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council award number ES/P008968/1.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s).
PY - 2023/3/23
Y1 - 2023/3/23
N2 - This article explores the challenge of developing a feminist law reform proposal to decertify sex and gender based on research conducted for the ‘Future of Legal Gender' project. Locating the proposal to decertify within a do-it-yourself, prefigurative approach to law reform, the article asks: Can a law reform proposal be both instrumental and radical? Can a proposal take shape as a viable legislative text and as a more subversive intervention to unsettle and reimagine gender’s relationship to law? This article explores this at two levels. First, it considers the ontological challenges of developing a controversial law reform proposal in terms of its realness (or fictiveness), contours, and temporality, turning to ‘slow law' as a credible way of approaching radical reform. Second, it explores the design-based challenges of legal prototyping—foregrounding questions of legitimacy, participation, and purpose, which arise in designing a decertification law. At the heart of this discussion is the relationship between representation and enactment—between what a proposal presents and what its presentation does and does not accomplish.
AB - This article explores the challenge of developing a feminist law reform proposal to decertify sex and gender based on research conducted for the ‘Future of Legal Gender' project. Locating the proposal to decertify within a do-it-yourself, prefigurative approach to law reform, the article asks: Can a law reform proposal be both instrumental and radical? Can a proposal take shape as a viable legislative text and as a more subversive intervention to unsettle and reimagine gender’s relationship to law? This article explores this at two levels. First, it considers the ontological challenges of developing a controversial law reform proposal in terms of its realness (or fictiveness), contours, and temporality, turning to ‘slow law' as a credible way of approaching radical reform. Second, it explores the design-based challenges of legal prototyping—foregrounding questions of legitimacy, participation, and purpose, which arise in designing a decertification law. At the heart of this discussion is the relationship between representation and enactment—between what a proposal presents and what its presentation does and does not accomplish.
KW - gender, sex, law reform, prefigurative politics, DIY, the real, slow law
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85150620356&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10691-022-09515-4
DO - 10.1007/s10691-022-09515-4
M3 - Article
SN - 0966-3622
VL - 31
SP - 17
EP - 42
JO - Feminist Legal Studies
JF - Feminist Legal Studies
IS - 1
ER -