Feminist Jurisprudence, Personal Liberation, and Hope

Global examples evidence the failure of achieving, and backlash against, gender equality, contributing to a need to revisit feminist jurisprudence and its methods. This paper examines aspects of feminist theories highlighting how law participates in removing hope for gender equality and justice, but also how feminists suggest ways to reimagine law differently with the hope of bringing positive change, aiming for gender justice. The paper focuses on women's liberation and social conditions of freedom before connecting personal liberation to hope oriented to action-an ordinary, horizontal hope in and through our everyday lives that law frames, scaffolds and socially structures. The author argues that, through these practices in which everyone can participate, there is hope of liberation, of freedom as creativity, developing the capacities of each unique person, an emancipatory project in a hope for epistemic justice.