CALL FOR PAPERS – Feminist Approaches to State and Governance

·       “Women in the Welfare State” (1989), “Revisiting Equality” (1993); “Feminism Confronts Economic Theory” (1995); “Women, Children and Poverty” (1995;“Feminism Confronts Economic Theory: Exploring Economic Concepts” (1996); “Feminist Economic Theory and the Difference it Makes” (1997); “Feminism Confronts Economic Theory: Policy Initiatives and Economic Rhetoric” (1997); “Discrimination and Inequality” (1998); “Economic Discourse and the Family” (1998); “Discrimination and Inequality II” (1999); “Children: Public Good or Individual Responsibility” (1999); “Comparative Concepts of Equality” (2000); “Corporations and Capitalism: Policy and Protest” (2001); “Corporate Citizens in Corporate Cultures” (2002).

·       Accessing the FLT Archive: You may access workshop workbooks, calls for papers, and schedules electronically through HeinOnline in the Women in the Law repository. For more information on workshops, PDFs, Calls for Papers, or workshop schedules, or if you do not have access to HeinOnline, please email Mangala Kanayson at mkanays [at] emory [dot] edu.

Limited electronic access to videos from previous workshops may be available. Contact us for information.

·       Are there insights from previous decades of feminist legal scholarship which can help explain or illuminate the current anti-feminist backlash?

·       How compatible is feminist theory with principles (and limitations) of legal theory?

·       How does the past help us to understand current feminist critiques of liberal legal theory centered on concepts such as autonomy, equality, and neutrality?

·       How do ideas from the past illuminate current attacks on liberal ideals?

·       Does the history of FLT suggest some approaches enshrined in contemporary critical (including feminist) theory may be in need of conceptual reevaluation and re-imagining?

·       How does the methodology used in the FLT workshops differ from that found in academic events today and might these differences affect perception of issues and their possible resolutions?

 More general (non-archive oriented) areas to explore include:  

·       When and where is there a need for state action and involvement?

·       Do feminist principles justify a more or less expansive notion of public interest in and influence over providing for human needs and social well-being?

·       Is there a feminist view of the state that differs from those presented in many other critical approaches?

·       How should we conceive of the state and its relationship to “private” institutions and alternative systems or centers of power (religion, corporations, culture, etc.)?

·       How have feminist proposals for expanded state welfare support or regulatory protections grappled with the problems of abusive state power?

·       How can feminist scholarship focused on expanding state responsiveness address the critical turn that increasingly focuses primarily on authoritarianism in law, culture, and government?

·       What is the contemporary role of the concept of gender in law and does it differ from understandings of gender and law in the past?

·       What have been the unique feminist contributions to critiques of the legal division between public and private?

·       How has feminist legal scholarship analyzed the role of the law in shaping the social and economic institutions that structure intimate relationships?

·       How has feminist legal theory critiqued conceptions of autonomy as the basis for resolving conflicts about the legal treatment of intimacy?

·       What insights from feminist debates can inform current questions of how to protect privacy and intimacy and relate to questions of democracy and justice?