Gender-related issues
Coordinator: Barbara Giovanna Bello
Across Europe and globally, gender equality remains a foundational yet contested principle of democratic governance. Legal systems increasingly recognise gender-based violence, discrimination, and structural inequalities; however, persistent gaps and political backlash continue to undermine effective implementation, access to justice, representation, and social protection. At the same time, understandings of gender have evolved: both as a social phenomenon and as an analytical category, gender is increasingly conceptualized beyond the traditional male–female dichotomy, a development also reflected in numerous legal texts and judicial decisions.
Drawing on diverse strands of critical theory – including feminist and queer theory, as well as postcolonial and decolonial perspectives – contemporary scholarship has demonstrated that law not only regulates inequality but also participates in the construction of gendered and othered subjectivities and in the structuring of hierarchies of power across multiple levels of analysis (micro, meso, and macro).
Feminist legal approaches have exposed structural biases embedded within ostensibly neutral norms, through which hierarchies are institutionalised, legitimised, and contested. They have also challenged the public–private divide and foregrounded care, embodiment, and relationality as central legal concerns.
In this context, intersectionality has emerged as a critical heuristic device for interrogating the ways in which law simultaneously constitutes, stabilises, and at times disrupts interlocking systems of domination and power. Rather than treating gender, race, class, migration status, disability, sexuality, age, and other axes of “differentiation” as discrete categories, intersectionality foregrounds their co-constitutive and mutually reinforcing character.
Accordingly, gender-responsive and intersectional methodologies must be systematically and reflexively embedded in socio-legal research design, institutional governance structures, and policy-making processes, ensuring that knowledge production and regulatory interventions do not reproduce the very inequalities they purport to address.
Against this backdrop, this Research Line aims to establish a theoretical and methodological hub for advancing, systematising, and disseminating feminist legal approaches within the Law and Society tradition, informed by – and engaging with the tensions arising from – queer theory, postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, and intersectional analysis.
It will do so by developing focused priorities for 2026 while also, upon request, supporting other research lines and individual researchers in integrating gender-sensitive and intersectional perspectives into their projects.
It aligns with the strategic priorities of the European Commission under Horizon Europe, particularly with regard to gender equality and intersectionality, fundamental rights, and inclusion, while at the same time aiming to contribute to the advancement of theoretically grounded and policy-relevant research also in the Basque Country.
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