Gender Justice: Reassessing Theories of Justice from Feminist Perspectives

Résumé 0

Justice is one of the central concepts of both traditional and contemporary political philosophy, always aiming to articulate the best political order/s, those devoted to the common good, the well-being of the community, and a fair share of the community’s goods among citizens. Within the mainstream theoretical tradition, discourse on justice is linked to the public sphere of law and politics, with the public/private dichotomy in the background. Feminist critical reconsideration of justice points to the crucial importance of introducing family and gender justice into the justice discourse. This chapter aims to demonstrate how family justice and gender justice are essential for a proper conception of justice within an inclusive understanding of equality in constitutional democracies and the context of global justice. The chapter also demonstrates how contestable the mainstream division between the public and private spheres is, as well as the consequential reduction of justice to the public sphere. The chapter begins by problematizing the figure of justice as a woman, which is further developed in the first section. The second section considers the meaning and genesis of the concept of justice, with particular stress on family justice and gender justice. The third section explores the position of gender justice in contemporary theories of justice, with a particular focus on John Rawls’s conception of justice. We also consider two other mainstream theories of justice, Michael Walzer’s communitarian and Philip Green’s social-democratic theories, both of which contain elements of family and gender justice. Relevant examples of liberal feminist thought on justice of Susan Moller Okin, the feminist socialist thought on justice of Nancy Fraser, and the social justice conception of Iris Marion Young are considered in the final section.