Gender Disruption, Amelioration, and Transformation

American legal feminism has many different variants, each offering important insights. The danger, however, is that this complexity to feminist legal thought may cause some lawyers and scholars to “tune out” to feminist insights. We provide a way of understanding these various insights, which acknowledges their complexity but seeks to make them more accessible. To do so, we propose the idea of feminist “disruption,” “amelioration,” and “transformation” as organizing principles that underpin feminist thought, in different ways and to different degrees, but which provide a common language for understanding new and older feminisms. We illustrate this approach, and its potential benefits, through the lens of a feminist analysis of COVID-19 and its impact.