Looking Back, Looking Forward
| Author | Debra Parkes,Susan B Boyd |
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0964663917724867 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Looking Back, Looking
Forward: Feminist Legal
Scholarship in SLS
Susan B Boyd and Debra Parkes
University of British Columbia, Canada
Abstract
This article offers a review of shifts in feminist legal theory since the early 1990s. We first
use our respective histories and fields of expertise to provide a brief overview and
highlight some key themes within feminist legal theory. We then examine Social & Legal
Studies (SLS), asking whether it has met its key goal of integrating feminist analyses at
every level. Our review suggests that SLS has offered many important contributions
to feminist legal scholarship but has not fulfilled its lofty goal of integrating feminist
analyses at every level of scholarship. It features feminist work quite consistently and
some degree of mainstreaming is evident, as is the international reach of SLS. Too many
articles fail, however, to incorporate or even mention feminist approaches. We end with
thoughts about, and hopes for, the future of legal feminism, examining efforts to revi-
talize the field and suggesting possible directions for the future.
Keywords
Feminist legal studies, feminist legal theory, law and gender, materialist feminism, the
state
Social & Legal Studies has four main aims [including] ...the integration of feminist anal-
yses at every level of scholarship.
With these words, the editors of Social & Legal Studies (SLS) signalled a major com-
mitment to feminist scholarship in their first Editorial (1992: 5). There was no shortage
Corresponding author:
Susan B Boyd, Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia, Vancouver V6T 1Z1, Canada.
Email: boyd@allard.ubc.ca
Social & Legal Studies
2017, Vol. 26(6) 735–756
ªThe Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663917724867
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of feminist scholars to provide content when the journal was started in 1992. The number
of women in legal academia and related fields began to increase during the 1980s and,
especially, the 1990s. Feminist literature grew exponentially, even if it took some time
for women to achieve numeric equality. Not all women law professors held feminist
worldviews and then, as now, some who did published in fields often not assumed to be
directly relevant to feminist legal theory (e.g. Sarra, 2013). Nevertheless, the entry of
feminists into academia had a significant impact on legal scholarship (Bartlett, 2012:
383–386; Davies, 2007: 651)
1
and some male legal scholars also published work that
was influenced by feminist perspectives.
Feminist legal theory has as its focus women and law, but in recent decades, much
feminist scholarship has problematized both concepts (Painter, 2015). Feminist scholars
working in law schools, as well as in sociology, philosoph y, criminology and other
disciplines have drawn on a variety of theoretical sources and developed the field in
ways that have influenced law reform and litigation, while also critiquing some of those
reform efforts, narratives of progress and strategies for achieving equality and liberation.
Many feminist legal scholars continue to draw on studies outside law (Davies, 2007:
651), and some have home disciplines other than law, as is evident in SLS (e.g. Ahmed,
1993; Smart, 1992).
This article offers a review of shifts in feminist legal theory since the early 1990s.
Because we represent different generations of feminist legal scholars, we first use our
respective histories and fields of expertise to provide a brief overview and highlight
some key themes within feminist legal theory. We then examine SLS itself, asking
whether it has met its key goal of integrating feminist analyses at every level. We end
with thoughts about, and hopes for, the future of legal feminism.
Situating Ourselves and the Field
Our histories in legal academia began during different periods in the trajectory of
feminist legal theory. Susan was a junior academic in the mid-1980s when feminist law
professors were a minority, but interest in applying feminist theory to law accelerated.
Even then, scepticism arose about the extent to which law or legal rights alone can
provide remedies for inequality. Reflecting a heightened appreciation of the complex
factors at work in sustaining inequality, many feminist interventions moved away from
formal legal equality towards approaches that take structural impediments seriously.
This work accepted the challenges of feminists who pointed to the limits of formal
equality in achieving meaningful change (e.g. Lawrence, 2006) due to its elision of
substantive inequalities. In countries such as Canada with constitutional equality guar-
antees, considerable time has been devoted to considering which theories of equality
might best provide remedies for systemic inequalities and which fields of law might most
usefully be challenged to promote equality. This is not to say that scholarship focused on
equality was the only approach, even in the earlier days.
Indeed, categorizing the different approaches within the proliferating feminist lit-
erature on law was in vogue in the 1980s. In her early bibliographical work with
Sheehy, Susan used the then-dominant theoretical categories such as liberal, radical
and socialist feminism (Boyd and Sheehy, 1986; Sheehy and Boyd, 1989: 1–2). Only a
736 Social & Legal Studies 26(6)
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