26026 - Women And Law

Learning outcomes

The student acquires specific knowledge on the subject of legal feminism and the critical study, from a gender perspective, of law and law as instruments of freedom, gender law, discrimination and human rights.

Course contents

THIS COURSE WILL BE HELD ENTIRELY IN ENGLISH

This course investigates the relationships between law, political economy, and nationalism within the current conjuncture of global war, understood as a process of reorganization of the capitalist mode of production. It situates this analysis within the historical depth of law, processes of subjectivation, and resource allocation in liberal democracies.

Central to the course are the intersections between reproductive rights, the organization of the welfare state, and the economic-cultural models of femininity, motherhood, family, and care, with particular attention to the networks that govern processes of social engineering as a whole.

Abortion regulation, the contraction of resources allocated to social reproduction, and institutional discourses concerning "women" will be analyzed within a feminist, materialist, and antiracist framework, in order to bring to light processes of the reprivatization of care within the family along the lines of the sexual division of labor.

Racist policies—spanning both the hardening and expansion of borders and forms of repression and differential necropolitics—will be examined as a systemic mechanism inseparable from patriarchal forms, within the horizon of nationalisms oriented toward the reproduction of a supremacist biological-cultural order in the global context of advanced capitalism.

With this aim, rearmament policies will be analyzed in relation to political agendas and economic allocations, in order to update analyses of the processes regulating biological and social reproduction in light of contemporary geopolitical scenarios, bringing multiple temporal and spatial scales into relation with one another.

Readings/Bibliography

Required Readings

I. One book to choose from:

• Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, Zone Books, New York, 2017.
  
  
• Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender & Nation, Sage, London and Thousand Oaks, 1997.

II. 3 essays chosen from the following:

• Angela Balzano, "Escaping Pro-life Neo-fascism in Italy: Affirmative and Collective Lines of Flight," in Rick Dolphijn and Rosi Braidotti (eds.), Deleuze and Guattari and Fascism, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2022.
  
  
• Gisela Bock, "Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization, and the State," in Signs, 8, 3, 1983, pp. 400–421.
  
  
• Layal Ftouni, "'They Make Death, and I’m the Labor of Love' . Palestinian Prisoners’ Sperm Smuggling as an Affirmation of Life", in Critical Times, 7, 1, 2024.
  
  
• Paula Mulinari, "From the Womb to the Borders: The Politics of Carcerality in Social Reproduction," in NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 34, 2, 2024, pp. 179–191.
  
  
• Enrica Rigo, "Mobility, Social Reproduction and Exploitation: A Critical Legal Perspective on the Tension between Capitalism and Freedom of Movement", in feminists@law, 12, 2, 2023.
  
  
• Dorothy Roberts, "Complicating the Triangle of Race, Class and State: The Insights of Black Feminists," in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37, 10, 2013, pp. 1776–1782.
  
  
• Loretta Ross, "Reproductive Justice as Intersectional Feminist Activism", in Souls, 19, 3, 2017, pp. 286-314.
  
  
• Zoë Sofia, "Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and the Sexo-Semiotics of Extraterrestrialism", in Diacritics 14, 2, 1984, pp. 47–59.
  
  
• Martina Tazzioli, "The Making of Migrants' Wageless Life: Exploiting by Debasing," in Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, OnlineFirst, 2025.

• Federica Timeto and Maddalena Fragnito, "Spermology of the Nation: Fertility Ideology and Settler Colonialism in Israel," in About Gender, 14, 27, 2025 (the essay is originally published in Italian; an English translation will be provided by the instructor).
  

III. 
Silvia Federici on war and social reproduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np07BgGM5UE.
&
Critical Resistance, Abolition Means No More War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WJW_yipXn8.

IV. Choose any two films. Nation Estate and Condom Lead together count as one film:
1. Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975.
2. Alfonso Cuaron, Roma, 2018.
3. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1979.
4. Ken Loach, Bread and Roses, 2000.
5. Arab Nasser, Tarzan Nasser, Condom Lead, 2013.
6. Larissa Sansour, Nation Estate, 2012.
7. Ettore Scola, A Special Day, 1977.
8. Ousmane Sembène, Black Girl, 1966.
9. Heiny Srour, Leila and the Wolves, 1984.

Teaching methods

The course will be held in English.

70% lectures + film and documentary screenings

10% seminars with outside experts. With Professor Elena Niccolai, a critical discourse analysis will be carried out of several historical figures, starting from Benito Mussolini's 'Ascension Day Speech' and continuing up to the present

20% active class involvement (discussions, labs/readings): Two in-class labs will engage students in reading and analyzing the Pact on Migration and Asylum, alongside the White Paper for European Defence – Readiness 2030 and other relevant documents.

Assessment methods

For attending students, the final exam will consist of a paper (approximately 8–9 pages) on a topic related to the course syllabus, to be agreed upon with the instructor. Students will be required to submit a short abstract and a preliminary bibliography, to be discussed together in order to foster a fruitful exchange.

For non-attending students, the assessment format is to be agreed upon in advance with the instructor.

Office hours

See the website of Elisa Bosisio