Deconstruction and Law's Other: Towards a Feminist Theory of Embodied Legal Rights

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Abstract
This article considers how feminist theory can develop a non-essentialist model of the relation between law, legal rights and gender inequalities. Drawing on recent deconstructive theory, as shaped by Jacques Derrida's writing on justice, it is suggested that law operates as a citational practice in which bodies are gendered in the process of being constituted through legal demands. The notion of law as an embodying practice emphasizes the contingent relation between law and gender, in which the subject of law is gendered as well as radically unstable and potentially 'other'. This non-essentialist model of the relation between law and gender is demonstrated through an attention to the issue of legal rights and entitlements in the context of the abortion debate and the Child Support Act (1991). It is suggested that the feminist use of rights discourse may embody and divide the very concept of abstract legal rights.

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