Rewriting Rights: Feminist Legal Narra(c)tors, from Arendt to Women’s Courts

Descripción del proyecto

Empoderamiento de las mujeres marginadas en el discurso jurídico

En el ámbito jurídico, las mujeres suelen tener dificultades para hacer oír su voz y sus experiencias suelen quedar marginadas. Históricamente, la escena del juicio, fundamental en la teoría feminista, ha excluido las perspectivas de las mujeres. El equipo del proyecto RE-RIGHTING, que cuenta con el apoyo de las acciones Marie Skłodowska-Curie, pretende redefinir la narrativa. Al capacitar a las mujeres para desenvolverse en el lenguaje jurídico y llevar a cabo nuevos juicios desde sus perspectivas únicas, el equipo del proyecto pretende desafiar las limitaciones del sistema jurídico y ofrecer nuevas vías de acceso a la justicia. Mediante el examen de las prácticas narrativas y realizativas feministas, el equipo del proyecto pretende crear un archivo exhaustivo y explorar cómo se redefinen conceptos jurídicos clave.

Objetivo

The scene of the trial has always been at the core of feminist theories and practices of law, since it has often been identified as the space in which womens voices and bodies could break into the legal scene in order to claim for justice. The project aims to broaden our gaze of the legal scene adopting a new perspective: those of women who, even if they are not the main legal actors (judges, lawyers, plaintiffs), engage with the language of rights in order to re-tell, re-write or re-stage a trial from their situated position. Their voices do not limit to narrate the event of the trial, but actually perform a retrial with the dual aim of highlighting the failure of the legal language in doing justice, and offering alternative possibilities to regenerate and re-signify it. From Arendts pioneering report on the Eichmann trial to the experiences of Womens Courts, these both critical and creative practices are disseminated in the feminist field, but they have never been studied together. Through the newly defined concept of Legal Narra(c)tors, this ambitious and timely project aims to produce the first study of these narrative and performative practices of retrial, which have the merit of promoting a critical but not fatalistic approach to justice using as starting point of the reasoning in line with the feminist situated knowledge the story of a case rather than a theoretical abstraction. The main objective of the project is threefold: (1) empirically, to build an archive of feminist narrative and performative practices of retrial; (2) conceptually, to provide a definition and a theoretical framework for the new expression Legal Narra(c)tors; (3) normatively, to explore how main legal categories such as equality, difference, recognition, gender, subject (of rights), victim, witness, truth (and truth-seeking), and reparation are re-signified by these practices.