Publisher's Synopsis
Nowhere in the world are women as equal to men as in the Nordic countries. Advanced social and economic rights are often given as the explanation for the equality. In this intriguing volume, Nordic feminist legal scholars give a more contradictory image of gender equality. The gendered construction of the legal subject and the legal understanding of gender have a two-pronged potential, both to change and to reproduce gender relations. Nordic women have been considered responsible for upholding the gendered social system ? as Responsible Selves rather than as individuals engaged in rights discourse. The authors claim and support their claims with examples from different fields of law that the belief in equality has made certain discriminative practices difficult to recognize and conceptualize. Since Nordic equality has been a project connected to the welfare state, the current transformation of social welfare puts collective equality policies to the test.
