5 - The Working Subject

Summary

This chapter explores how law and gender come together to co-constitute working subjects and with what conceptual, normative and distributive effects. The notion of subjectivity deployed here is both ontological and epistemological. It is ontological in the sense of being concerned with aspects of being – with who or what the subject is; and it is epistemological in that it is engaged with questions of knowledge – with how knowledge of and by the subject is produced and validated. Thus understood, subjectivity offers a space of enquiry into questions about the formation, shape and consequences of consciousness and the production, validation and effects of knowledge.