THIRD ANNUAL RUTH BADER GINSBURG LECTURE: THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF FEMINST LEGAL THEORY

• Published in: Thomas Jefferson Law Review Vol. 28; no. 3; p. 307
• Main Author: Abrams, Kathryn
• Format: Trade Publication Article
• Language: English
• Published: San Diego The Law Review Association 01.04.2006
• Subjects: Civil liberties; Community; Comparative studies; Supreme Court decisions; Theory; Wages & salaries
• ISSN: 1090-5278; 2169-1436

There have been investigations of the impacts of globalization on women's labor,5 comparative studies of the relations between women's family and market work in different national and sub-group contexts,6 expositions of the "mothering chains" and related migrations occasioned by the impoverishment of women in South Asian, Central American, and African contexts,7 and inquiries into the needs of Western professional women.8 But these questions, and the broader challenge of work as an organizing frame for international or transnational analysis by feminists, have not frequently been taken up by feminist legal scholars in the way that, for example, violence (and sexual violence) against women has organized global interventions among feminist legal scholars, or in the way that family and reproduction are beginning to animate feminist legal scholars such as those involved with some of Martha Fineman's ongoing comparative projects.9 Work is of course implicated in both of these inquiries and has been discussed in those contexts: sex as work in the context of international trafficking debates,10 and the relation between control over reproduction and participation in public life including market employment.\n It would be a movement that regarded the sexualized subordination of women as a present possibility in many contexts of their lives, including their work, but was prepared to see women as workers, mothers, daughters, sisters, migrants, bearers of various forms of citizenship, and not simply or even primarily potential sexual objects.