The potential for new materialist justice via Nordic feminist perspectives of law

Abstract

The Nordic feminist perspectives in law have traditionally been relatively successful in advocating, and effectuating, a feminist perspective of justice both within law and the society. However, Nordic feminist perspectives of law have at least to some degree, at this stage been limited to questions of equality between men and women and to the production of justice within the boundaries of the nation-state. In this article, I take the challenge upon myself of elaborating the notion of justice advanced by new materialist theory as a means to infuse the Nordic feminist perspective in, and on, law. This is pursued by reading new materialist theory and Nordic feminist perspectives of law against each other. In sum, the reading suggests that a focus on new materialist justice could be used to infuse Nordic feminist legal perspectives on justice by both shifting the understanding of law, and justice, as well as its contextual focus.

How freedom of movement infringes on the right to leave

“…Knowledge, in this case, is also material practice. Law is not separate from those who produce it and those being produced by it; it is an embodied spatial and relational materiality (Käll, 2020). The EU funds freedom of movement work with governments but imposes its specific articulation and practices.…”

“…I will use body, space and entanglement (Käll, 2020) as my conceptual tools to tease out the orienting of bodies achieved by norm development and implementation in West Africa. Ahmed (2006, p. 552) bodies in space as it mediates and contains relations against a background: the norms (the incoherent interplay between hard and soft norms as they are expressed by legal political or programming instruments) that embody force sustained by patriarchal, racist and ageist histories and hierarchies.…”