LAWGEM - Dissemination of research

The textbook presents a result of joint work of authors from five European universities - Lumsa University (Italy), Cadiz University (Spain), Orebro University (Sweden), Saarland University (Germany), and Belgrade University (Serbia) which also acted as coordinator. It is safe to say that this textbook presents an important step towards achieving a better understanding of law in a systemic and gender-competent way.

One of the main intellectual outputs of the LAWGEM project is the publication of this textbook, which reflects all relevant fields of legal education of the curriculum for the master’s study program “Law and Gender”. Academic scholars from universities across five different countries were involved in writing this book. Such successful teamwork gives the text a specific quality and is an unprecedented academic phenomenon.

Working at different universities (primarily at faculties of law), researchers accepted to investigate and study feminist critical legal and political literature, reconsidering from a gender perspective their various fields of academic research and teaching. All chapters of the book present an in-depth attempt to deconstruct and reconstruct specific relevant fields of legal education from a gender perspective. To that end the chapters articulate scientific analyses of all legal fields of knowledge related to the positive civil, public, international, criminal law, European Union Law, as well as to the legal-economic, legal-historical, theoretical-legal fields of legal education.

Sometimes the notion of “woman” still features as the paradigmatic subject, rather than the notion of “gender;” other times, the notion of “gender” is considered mostly in a binary way and primarily in a heteronormative sense. This is problematic when faced with the diversity of lives women lead and considering the changing notions of “man” and masculinity, as well as that of “gender,” and indeed, when witnessing the impact changes to family law, inheritance law, criminal law, tax law etc., have had on the heteronormative order.

Some authors and chapters have kept the binary gender construction, others have moved towards conceiving issues surrounding the identities of a third gender and transgender persons. These differences in levels of understandings reflect the different stages and states of affairs in knowledge and mindsets of the authors involved, thus also generally reflecting existing differences in that regard among the contemporary intellectual, political, and legal public. It could be said that the scope of these texts surpasses their inner quality; indeed, they do because they seek to stimulate and provoke further academic attempts at ever better and richer results of systemic gender-competent legal knowledge. This textbook will certainly stimulate its users, but also the broader legal public to continue reconsidering the law and specific fields of interest within it from a gender perspective.