Response to Flora Renz, ‘Gender (de)certification and the home: A new focus for feminist legal scholarship?’

Abstract

Flora Renz's paper ‘Gender (de)certification and the home: A new focus for feminist legal scholarship?’ draws attention to instances in which the question of gender (de)certification is relevant to the private sphere. This response to Renz's paper reflects on the fact that gender categories remain highly salient in the ‘private’ realm of family law, despite the formal gender neutralisation or decertification found in legislation and judicial decisions in this field. It goes on to problematise the public/private distinction itself and to highlight the rich vein of feminist scholarship which has argued that the ‘private’ functions as a zone in which non-state normativities often flourish unexamined to the detriment of women. Rather than unquestioning acceptance and/or ideological deployment of the gender and public/private binaries, it argues for a more nuanced understanding of both and of the interrelationships between them.