Can the Law School Curriculum Be Disengendered?

Catharine R. Stimpson
New York University Office of the Graduate Dean of Arts and Science

 

  1. My position at this roundtable is that of an interloper, or less polemically, that of an outsider. I am a University Professor at New York University, with an academic background in literature and women's studies, and the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science. To be sure, I team teach one course in the New York University Law School with a remarkable colleague, Stephen Gillers. The course is "Law and Literature," and the privilege of teaching it is one of the high points of my professional career.

    1. However, despite my fascination with the law, I have no formal legal training.

    2. My title at the Law School is "affliated faculty," and that is a generous act.

  2. Nevertheless, if the interloper/outsider may comment. I have some difficulties with our title, difficulties that believe many of us will share. Let me point to two.

    1. The title does focus on gender alone and tempts us to ignore other elements of identity. We must always examine the interactive intersection of gender with those other elements of identity.

    2. Next, the prefix "dis" means to strip away something, or to get free of something, or to rid ourselves of something. (Dis is also a Roman term for the god of the underworld, but that is another story.) I would be wary of disengendering the law school curriculum in this sense, of stripping away gender at this time.

  3. Let me distinguish between negative and positive disengendering.

    1. Negative disengendering is to forget or overlook or ignore gender-even though it is there. An example: last fall, I was fortunate enough to be invited to lunch with Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and had the chance to listen to him in a Q and A session. He was thoroughly decent, principled, admirable. We were able to get a copy of his curriculum for a Law and Literature course. There were no women authors there, not even Susan Glaspell and "A Jury of her Peers."

    2. Positive disengendering is to live in a world in which gender no longer matters, the Utopia of "sameness" feminism. At a table at the same lunch for Justice Kennedy, some faculty were discussing the gender ratio in some law school courses. "Law and Literature" tends to draw a majority of women. "Juvenile Justice" had an overwhelming majority of women. If we were to achieve positive disengendering, surely no course would be "gender-marked" in this way as being more appropriate for or relevant to one gender or another.

  4. Obviously, some "negative disengendering" is still with us. What, then, is to be done?:

    1. A first step is to strip away "negative disengendering," to make gender visible in the curriculum. In "Law and Literature," this can be done through the selection of authors and through the ways in which we are archaeologists of the text and archivists of meanings. Yes, it does matter that Portia is a woman in drag. The fact that I am team-teaching with Stephen Gillers. the only team teaching I have ever enjoyed, makes a clear point about who can work as archaeologist and archivist. (Archiving, significantly, is an activity.)

    2. A second, related step is to show what Regina Graycar and Jenny Morgan have called "the hidden gender of Law." In The Hidden Gender of Law, 2nd edition, they (as others have done) trace the areas in which the hidden must be sought out in a deeply serious game of hide and seek. Here "engendering" the law is a form of disenchantment. Disenchantment must also have a historical dimension, i.e. to contextualize gender in complex historical processes and structures.

  5. Let me conclude by noting a comparatively new book, Women at the Intersection: Indivisible Rights, Identities, and Oppressions, ed. By Rita Raj. It reminds us, painfully, of the dangers of both negative disengendering and a premature positive disengendering.