ABSTRACT
Women have always been incredulous about the naturalness of power but their experience has been defined as ignorance by professional communities whose beliefs have been established as foundations of knowledge. Feminist jurisprudence has begun to question these professional communities about the naturalness of legal power and the foundational character of beliefs about law (MacKinnon, 1982, 1983). This paper will address some issues raised by feminist work upon the theory of the subject (Coward and Ellis, 1977), it will investigate the place of subjectivity within disciplinary constructions of meaning. It aims to consider the theory of the subject within jurisprudence as a way of articulating the issues which traditional jurisprudence ignores-the positionality of knowers about law, the negotiation of meaning about authority, and the professional academic practices which exclude women’s experience from the development of legal theory. It investigates the epistemological status of the body. I prefer to describe this project as one of legal theory rather than jurisprudence as legal theory connotes to me an inquiry into the relation of individual subjects to the question of authority; it could just as well be described as feminist jurisprudence. But the present meaning of jurisprudence seems to present “ l a w ” as an existing object waiting to be discovered, while I prefer to understand my project as an inquiry into the practices whereby the beliefs and questions about authority create our understanding of “law."
