DDRO 25A17 - Law & Political Economy of Gender

This course bridges feminist theory, legal studies, and political economy to provide students with a multidimensional understanding of how gender structures economic and legal systems. It complements existing offerings in political theory, law, and gender studies by integrating critical perspectives on care, welfare, and neoliberalism with emerging debates on digital capitalism and global governance. Drawing on feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholarship, it explores how gender is not merely shaped by legal and economic systems but is fundamentally constitutive of them.

The syllabus is designed to be intellectually rigorous yet accessible to undergraduates from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, progressively introducing theoretical frameworks and applying them to concrete economic and policy issues. Indeed, students will investigate how care and reproductive labor sustain markets and states; how institutions of property, finance, and welfare define economic citizenship; and how global processes—including colonialism, migration, and development—reproduce gendered hierarchies. The course also addresses the gendered dynamics of digital capitalism, exploring how contemporary technological infrastructures and platform economies shape labor, value, and power.

Through close reading of legal and theoretical texts, class discussions, and media materials, the course connects historical and contemporary debates on work, welfare, sexuality, and governance. Students will interrogate the ways legal regimes define economic citizenship, moral worth, and bodily autonomy, while also considering feminist strategies for resistance, redistribution, and transformation. By linking feminist thought to law and political economy, the course aims to equip students with conceptual and analytical tools to critically engage with law as both a site of domination and potential social change.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Analyze how law constructs and reproduces gendered, racialized, and class-based inequalities within political and economic systems.
• Explain key concepts in feminist legal and political economy scholarship—such as social reproduction, intersectionality, biopolitics, and economic citizenship—and apply them to legal and policy contexts.
• Critically evaluate how feminist scholars have challenged dominant legal paradigms, including neutrality, formal equality, and the public/private divide.
• Interpret the legal, fiscal, and institutional dimensions of care, welfare, and labor, linking them to broader debates on neoliberalism and globalization.
• Assess how colonial and digital infrastructures shape contemporary gendered political economies and the possibilities for feminist legal reform.
• Engage with contemporary feminist and anti-gender movements by situating them within historical and theoretical frameworks of law and political economy.
• Synthesize theoretical and empirical insights from readings, legal cases, and multimedia materials to articulate feminist critiques of legal and economic governance.

/

• 1 group presentation on a topic chosen from sessions 5-12 (to be presented during the relevant session) (35%)
• 1 final paper (max.1200 words, including footnotes, excluding bibliography) on a topic chosen or approved by the instructor (35%)
• Weekly reflections (max.150 words) on mandatory readings to be submitted before the relevant session (reflecting on optional readings is not obligatory but a plus) (20%)
• Student engagement during the semester (participation in class discussions during and outside of class, ability to ask questions, and class citizenship etc.) (10%)