212.32 sec. 1 - Intersectionality in Gender-Based Movements for Legal Change (Fall 2026)
Instructor: Kathryn Abrams (view instructor's teaching evaluations - degree students only | profile)
View all teaching evaluations for this course - degree students only
Units: 3
Grading Designation: Graded
Mode of Instruction: In-Person Instruction
Meeting:
Tu 10:00 AM - 12:40 PM
Location: TBA
From August 18, 2026
To November 17, 2026
Course End: November 17, 2026
Class Number: 33134
Enrollment info:
Enrolled: 21
Waitlisted: 9
Enroll Limit: 24
As of: 06/05 05:01 AM
Women of color have long played a pivotal role in movements for gender-based social change. But they have often found their voices, priorities, and life experiences marginalized in versions of those movements that are led by white women. This pattern has been particularly prominent in social movements that aim to influence the law. This seminar will examine two recent gender-based movements, #metoo (and more broadly, the movement to end gender-based violence) and the movement for reproductive freedom. These movements have sought legal change in a setting in which there is growing scholarly and cultural attention to the intersectional claims of women of color, low-income women, immigrants, and gender non-conforming people. It will explore how these movements, despite their awareness of intersectional claims and experience, have tended to perpetuate a “single axis” vision of gender that centers the experience of comparatively privileged white women. And it will focus on efforts by proponents of a more intersectional agenda to create change within or alongside those movements.
The course will begin with a brief unit on feminist legal theories, exploring liberal (or “equality”) feminist theories that have emphasized equal opportunity and bodily and decisional autonomy, and dominance theories that have described sexualized injury as a vehicle for the production and maintenance of gender inequality. It will highlight critiques of both schools of feminist theory as “single axis” theories that obscure or neglect the intersection of gender with race, class, sexuality, gender identity, or immigration status.
We will then turn to the #MeToo movement, examining its use of online storytelling as a vehicle for exposure and solidarity, as well as the largely extra-legal trajectory of its immediate consequences. We will also look at the challenges that it has encountered over the long run, including: a "tactical freeze," or difficulty in translating the momentum of exposure into more systematic solutions; and a failure to reach from the comparatively elite contexts of entertainment and the professions to low-wage work (including agricultural, hospitality, and home-in care work) which problems of sexualized injury are also pervasive, labor is performed primarily by low-income women of color, including immigrants, which can increase barriers to reporting and resistance. In addition, such low-wage jobs themselves are subject to cultural understandings, ranging from complacency in the face of “bad work” to the construction of paid labor as affectionate care, that naturalize the subordination implicit in the work and complicate the recognition and remediation of sexualized violations.
In the last portion of this unit, the course will interrogate the complicity of #MeToo and earlier feminist struggles against sexual violence in the rise of mass incarceration, which has not only immiserated low-income communities of color but has imposed particularly burdens and conflicts on the women of those communities.
Finally, the course will study the movement for reproductive rights and justice that has emerged since Dobbs overruled Roe v. Wade, particularly in abortion-restrictive states. It will examine the marginalization of low-income women, including many women of color, that dates back to the abortion funding cases, and ask whether and how efforts to restore the abortion right can be built on a more inclusive foundation, that also centers the right to choose to have children and to raise those children in circumstances of dignity, safety, and material sufficiency, and to access broader rights of bodily autonomy. Consistent with this goal, we will ask how the mainstream impetus toward a singular focus on abortion – which reflects a very real concern with the harms inflicted on pregnant persons in abortion-restrictive states -- may fuel or detract from a broader agenda of reproductive justice, that highlights issues including pregnancy justice and family policing and connects reproductive oppression to larger structures of racism, income inequality, and re-emergent anti-LGBTQ politics.
Students in this class may fulfill Option 2 of the Writing Requirement or complete a take-home examination.
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Requirements Satisfaction:
This class fulfills Option 2 of the J.D. writing requirement for all students in the course. All students must write 30 pages and complete a draft. |
Exam Notes: (TH/P) Take-home Final Exam, or Paper: students option
(Subject to change by faculty member only through the first two weeks of instruction)
Exam Length: 4 hours
Course Category: Social Justice and Public Interest
This course is listed in the following sub-categories:
Public Law and Policy
Race and Law
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Class materials may also be available on bCourses.berkeley.edu
Readers:
No reader.
Books:
Instructor has indicated that no books will be assigned.