In the biblical book of Leviticus, the whole life of the Hebrew people is codified under the aspect of purity and impurity, and the reintegration into purity. When read in the light of gender, these prescriptions show that women are twice as impure as men, while their monetary value is half. Using the semiotic approach developed by A. J. Greimas, this study shows that, beneath the religious discourse obscuring this valuation, is an equally gendered ideology. The source of this valuation is not the foundational events which engender mosaic law, but its roots are to be found in deeper mythical ground. For the condition of women to change, the issue of their impurity—inferiority must be treated at this level. A striking example illustrating this argument is the persistence of purification rites related to the menstrual cycle in modern Orthodox Judaism. Over the course of centuries, the code that contains them has become obsolete. Nevertheless, they remain in place through successive reinterpretations, which do not address the real reason for their existence.

This paper enlarges the discussion of normative systems by arguing that the professional domain is just as normatively “gendered” as any such systems at the societal level. Taking off from recent media discussion, the author underlines the extent to which the implicit normative systems of the work world are overwhelmingly male and she demonstrates how the currently accepted definitions distort our understanding not only of women's work but also of men's. She employs her recent research on women professionals (particularly architects and engineers) to argue that a variety of definitional norms of the professions are credible, but that these are differentially exclusive of women. She ends with a wide-ranging discussion of definitional criteria for feminists which would serve to ensure that women's modal experience within professional arenas is included to the same extent as men's, for women's contributions to the workplace can only be grasped if male normative approaches are abandoned.

The State's resistance to making prison law agree with the Charter of Rights and bring women's carceral conditions closer to the male norm is illustrated in a recent comparative research on 24 prisons for women in eight advanced countries. If that conclusion was not unexpected, despite the fact that the countries and establishments had been selected for being progressive and very ‘humane’ ones, and notwithstanding the relentless claims presented by feminist groups and human rights advocates, what came as a surprise was that avant-garde initiatives like mixed prisons, mother-and-child units, well-equipped modern programs in women's prisons proved to be, if possible, more gendering in their actual effect than old traditional male arrangements. Using materialist feminism and discourse analysis to interpret her data, the author concludes that women's incarceration is a powerful gendering strategy and a form of appropriation of women by State's apparatuses to men's advantage.

The Supreme Court of Canada has recognized the right to reproductive autonomy for women based on the right to liberty protected by section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Thus, it is a woman's choice whether to have children. It follows, therefore, that in the case of a violation of her reproductive autonomy, a woman has a right to compensation. It is in light of these principles that I analyze the wrongful pregnancy cases in Québec civil law. From a feminist analytical framework, I posit that Québec courts have effectively denied women the right to reproductive autonomy by awarding compensation for the cost of child-rearing only in cases where a difficult economic situation is evidenced by the parents. In so doing, the courts have not only refused to fully compensate women for the injuries caused to them, but they continue to reproduce the dominant pronatalist ideology in reproductive matters. This judicial reaction to cases of wrongful pregnancy is another example of the gendered dimension of law.

In this article, the authors carry out a documentary analysis of the stakes and debates surrounding the policies and practices of the recruitment of ethnicized and racialized groups within the Canadian police services. The analysis of the justifications set forth by the proponents of affirmative action in the police services as well as the identification of the questions which have prompted the debates, criticisms and hesitations regarding this policy bring the authors to conclude that the integration of minorized groups in the police services is less concerned with the redressing of inequities than with the development of a new process of racialization.

This paper shows the role of the courts in the advancement of gay and lesbian rights to be restricted to intervening when three conditions are present: after legislation has been felt by minority groups to be deficient; where stating principles rather than implementing them is involved, and when legislative modification is difficult to achieve because amendment of a rigid constitution is out of question, or in parts of the country where political conservatism has a similar effect. Decisions are grounded on equality, while other values put forward by gays and lesbians such as dignity, recognition, respect of identity and difference and social concerns will be endorsed only by dissenting judges, unless the majority is sure that their mention will have no practical consequence. However, this modest victory was not achieved at the cost of representing gays' and lesbians' interests or values as common with those of the dominant heterosexual majority. On the contrary it seems that the affirmation of the “right to difference,” centered on diversity, and the openness of this constructed identity might have led to a chain reaction starting with the evolution of public opinion as a consequence of lobbying and education by the gay/lesbian community, proceeding to create a new balance of power, more favourable to the gay/lesbian minority, and finally reaching more respect from courts and legislatures alike.

The limits of the normative nature of law may be illustrated in the current English Canadian context by apparently contradictory phenomena: legal defeats of welfare mothers (e.g. Masse and Falkiner), and the legal victories of lesbian mothers (Re K). Drawing upon Fine, this paper employs the analytic frame of form and content to analyse contradictions within the legal form, notably in respect of the definition of spouse and the regulation of relations of property and poverty, and the struggles of lesbian parents who have applied to the courts to formalize their relationships to their children by way of adoption, and who, in so doing, have challenged the normative content of spousal relations. In analysing law as a gendering strategy, it is necessary to be mindful that law may not be the dominant site through and in which gender relations are constructed, regulated, reconstructed, or resisted. In this paper, the author examines and analyzes the contradictions in the legal form that have been mobilized, the ‘stirring up’ of the content that has been done, and the constraints and limits that shape the results.

The 1990s inaugurated a new era of policing the border, one in which a variety of legislative initiatives were introduced to regulate more tightly the flow of immigrants and refugees to Canada. Border control is closely linked to the internal policing of people of colour, stigmatising and monitoring such bodies in ways that clearly establish their subordinate status in the nation. In this article, I reflect on the practices involved in the policing of the border through an exploration of how individuals participate in, and experience, these practices. Specifically, I describe my own experience of how an individual judge performed the role of the imperial patriarch in a trial of a racial minority woman lawyer charged with immigration fraud. I do not make an empirical claim that the case I explore demonstrates racism and little else. Rather, my central concern is to describe the everyday performance of domination as it occurs in this trial. I seek to illustrate the kinds of things individuals say and do when they engage in making Canada White through the law and to suggest that such individual performances, in this case of hegemonic masculinity, are part of a national story of belonging, a story in which people of colour are marked as degenerate and white subjects are the bearers of culture and civilization. In the second half of the paper, I demonstrate this national mythology as it is expressed by elites.