Introduction-The provocation of the ‘post’ in postfeminist legal theory

Abstract

In the 1990s, feminist legal theory burst into university law schools and onto the pages of law journals (Graycar & Morgan 1990; Thornton 1990, 1995; Naffine & Owens 1997). Yet almost as quickly as feminist legal theory appeared on the scene, it virtually disappeared (Thornton 2010, 92). There are many different explanations given for this dramatic retreat. Thornton suggests that the retreat was due to the rise of neoliberalism and the massification of higher education (Thornton 2010). Others suggest that feminist legal theory was unable to respond to the postmodern destabilisation of identity politics and the subsequent challenge to the very idea of a ‘feminist project’ (Conaghan 2004). The retreat might also be a paralysis produced within feminism, caused by an acknowledgement of its complicity with the exclusion of differently situated women (Armstrong 2004). Alternatively, the retreat might be linked to a popular rejection of the contemporary relevance of feminism (Faludi 2006), a desire ‘to take a break from feminism’ (Halley 2006), or a combination of any, or all, of these reasons.