Book Review: Sex and Gender in the Legal Process
| Date | 01 September 1998 |
| DOI | 10.1177/135822919800300208 |
| Published date | 01 September 1998 |
| Author | Caroline Keenan |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
149
women can speak for all women (Minow `Feminism
: getting it and
losing it'
(1988)
38
Journal
of Legal Education 47),
and whether
women's knowledge is indeed superior or whether such claims
merely lead to the same reductionism and hegemonic presumption as
claims made about the universality of male knowledge
. Clearly,
Standpoint Feminism, might free us from male essentialism and uni-
versality, but, bound in its own narcissism, it may substitute another
form of essentialism and bias
. Regrettably, the articles selected to
illuminate the concerns of Standpoint Feminism only tangentially
consider these fundamental philosophical questions
.
Finally the last in the tetralogy is the approach of Cultural Criti-
cism
. Here, Naffine identifies the importance of the way in which
language makes sense of the world and of the criminological world
in particular
. Included in this section is the important and influential
contribution by Judith Vega on sexual violence and a fascinating
contextual analysis by Sweann Caulfield of constructs of women and
sexually deviant women in
Vida Policial
(Police Life) the weekly
Rio de Janeiro police journal of the 1920's
.
Personally, I would like to have seen a greater consideration of
the way in which legal and sociological theory have impacted on all
these questions and the strides made by legal and feminist theory in
the field of women and crime
. The integration of these chapters as a
book is made even more difficult by a disjointed irregular presenta-
tion which relies on a range of typefaces, fonts, bold, and italicised
script remaining true to the house styles of the journals in which the
articles were originally printed
. It is passing strange, with the access-
ibility of desk top publishing, that this book has passed credit con-
trol
. Overall, a useful jamboree bag of photocopied articles bound in
hard back cover
. A pleasure to have the writings of especially Meda
Chesney-Lind, Judith Allen, Martha Minow, Judith Vega, Martha
Mahoney, Beverly Brown, and Pat Carlen at one's fingertips, even in
the absence of the greatest feminist contributions of Andrew Dworkin
and Catherine MacKinnon to issues of gender
.
Susan Edwards
School of Law
University of Buckingham
UK
SEX AND GENDER IN THE LEGAL PROCESS
. By Susan S
.M
.
Edwards,
Blackstone Press,
London, 1996, 461 pp
., £19
.95
.
Susan Edwards has attempted a mammoth task in writing
Sex and
Gender in the Legal Process
.
Her aim is to demonstrate that law and
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