Law is an instrument which constructs gender and can coerce feminist approaches within society.

To adopt a feminist perspective is, first and foremost, to bring perception of legal and social arrangements to bear upon a largely gender-neutral understanding of them.31 The object is to highlight the assumptions embedded in such arrangements, assumptions rendered invisible by, among other things, the allegedly 'objective of traditional academia. Feminism thus presupposes that gender32 has a much greater structural and/or discursive significance than is commonly assumed, a significance which is ideologically but not practically diminished by its relative invisibility. In this sense, feminism purports to offer a better understanding of the social world by addressing aspects which have hitherto been ignored or misrepresented,33 while, at the same time, countering the ideological effects to which such misperceptions give rise. The application of feminist perspectives to law has been characterized by a focus not just on law as a reform mechanism, or even as (part of) a system of capitalist and/or patriarchal oppression, but also as a body of knowledge which can be explored, dissected, and subjected to close critical scrutiny.34 Feminist legal scholarship sets out to show how gender is both ignored and enshrined in legal theory and practice by highlighting the ways in which it is replicated and constructed in legal discourse. One approach involves analysis of how women are disadvantaged by rules formally complying with the rule of law. The gist of such work is to demonstrate how 'gender-neutral' laws can impact upon men and women differentially.35 Another closely related approach considers the extent to which legal concepts are gendered not just in their application, but also in their meaning and scope. The liberal legal idea of the 'individual rights-bearer', for example, has been said to rest on an implicit notion of the physically separate ('autonomous') person,36 thus rendering it ill-equipped to resolve the legal and moral dilemmas thrown up by pregnancy. Similarly, the rooting of concepts of property and contract in public discourse, commercial practices, and the historical commodification of women's bodies has, it is argued, made them poor mechanisms for conceptualizing and regulating intimate relations or facilitating egalitarian social change.37 Yet another feminist approach examines the myriad ways in which law constructs gender by invoking images of 'woman' - the 'good' battered wife,38 the 'bad' mother,39 the deserving and undeserving homemaker,40 the 'real' rape victim.41 These images serve to coerce women, both by penalizing them for corresponding or failing to correspond to the image invoked by law and by beguiling or 'con[ning]' them into believing that 'certain identities are natural and inevitable'.42 Thus, in feminist legal theory, the legal subject is posited, not as the abstract, ungendered creature of the traditional legal imagination but as an ideological construct, endowed with attributes that vary according to context, and compel particular (gendered) perceptions of the social world.43 The feminist unpacking of the largely hidden gendered content of law has operated in tandem with its strategic deployment to advance women's interests. An understanding of law as irretrievably 'male', while often attributed to feminism, is not a position generally cohering with the theoretical or practical orientation of feminists working in law.44 The recognition that law is gendered in ways which produce or contribute to inequality has resulted not in its eschewal but, rather, in careful, painstaking, and highly contextualized assessments of the strategic implications of legal engagement.45 The object has been to harness law's instrumental and discursive power to particular feminist goals - improving the rights of pregnant workers, securing better financial provision for women in divorce, protecting them (and their children) from physical and sexual abuse - while, at the same time, exploring how law's (mis)representations46 contribute to the perpetuation of women's disadvantaged status. Of course, it remains possible and, indeed, increasingly, common, to bring a gender perspective to bear upon law without any concomitant concern with advancing women's interests. The concern may be to improve the legal and social position of gays or transsexuals47 or, even, heterosexual men,48 or there may be no (articulated) political concern driving the engagement beyond that of 'excavating' law's gendered content. In this latter context, the growing theoretical emphasis on the performative dimension of law as a 'gendering practice' is illustrative of a shift in feminist focus away from a direct concern with women's disadvantage towards a broader engagement with law's discursive significance. From such a perspective, the stock of characters (male and female) depicted by law are not simply 'fictions' who fail to comply with the 'reality' of men and women's lives; they are, rather, constitutive of that reality, part of the process of gender identity formation.49 Within such a theoretical framework, law is relocated as one of a range of practices through which gender is acquired, a process of which gender and gender differences are an effect. The object of feminist legal theory is reconceived in terms of analysing law's role in gendering subjectivity50 and, although the concern of the analyst may well be women's disadvantage, it does not have to be ... or, does it?