Critical Feminist Law-Making: Imitative Spaces and Improvised Coalitions

Abstract

Feminists working in the law may experience tension between mainstreaming feminist ideas to make the everyday life of women better and maintaining a critical feminist method of law-making. Some (including myself) might at times feel pessimistic for the present, and future of, critical approaches to law. Mainstreaming feminist demands can be a powerful and effective method, potentially monopolising feminist engagements with law. In this article, I take this concern seriously by exploring the hope and possibility of an improvised coalition between mainstream and critical feminist approaches. To show this, I use the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, specifically its finding that gender-based violence constitutes a form of torture, as a methodical example of law-making. The result of this is an identification of an imitative space in which critical feminist law-making could maintain its possibility. I argue that the imitation embedded in both mainstream and critical feminist approaches to law, and the Court’s autopoietic method, could create this imitative space to safeguard feminist critical engagements with law. My analysis shows how feminist demands, mainstream or critical, carry the potential to activate an imitative space, where subversion becomes a possibility.