Näkyväksi? Sukupuoli ja itseymmärrys oikeudessa, sen ammateissa ja tutkimuksessa
Keywords:
oikeushistoria, oikeustiede, yhdenvertaisuus, tasa-arvo, sukupuoliAbstract
Becoming visible? Sex/gender and self-understanding in law, its professions and its research
Law, legal theory and doctrine, legal education, and the professions of law are facing a sex and gender transition that began in Europe and North America in the 19th Century, accelerated and globalised in the 20th Century, and is currently
on-going. Before the transition, women were tacitly subsumed under the general human subject of law, the holder of rights that was male (man, homme). As a result, women were the law’s ‘Other’. With scarce access to education in
general, women were not able to access higher education, study law and enter the legal professions. Women had thus no direct influence on legislation and legal research. They were marginalised in the intellectual, societal and political
processes.
The authors discuss the sex and gender transition, its parameters and temporalities in diverse contexts, addressing the changes in terms of women’s gradual access to visibility. Their analysis focuses, on the one hand, on the national developments in Finland, influenced by scholarship and activism in Europe and North America and, on the other hand, on international law, where the transition has had a different trajectory, logic and pace compared to the liberal democracies in Europe.
The article has four substantive chapters, addressing: Women’s growing visibility in the public sphere demanding equal rights, women’s access to legal education and professions in Finland and comparatively, the particularities of women’s visibility in international law, and research of feminism(s) and visibility. In the introduction, the authors present the concepts and discourses of sex and gender, explaining why they build the analysis on the basis of the arguably outdated
binary of ‘women’ and ‘men’ and how they consider the centrality of intersectionality in the analysis of the sex and gender transition in women’s visibility.
The central claim of the article is that the on-going transition towards women’s visibility has already transformed and is likely to continue transforming material law, legal scholarship, themes and approaches of legal research, and the self-understanding of legal scholars. The analysis of the sex and gender transition in law is therefore a broad and important topic of legal and interdisciplinary research.
