Between Consumption and Liberation – A Critical Analysis of Women’s Legal Trajectory of Emancipation, Regulation and Gender Pricing

Abstract

ABSTRACT Law is always perceived as pivotal to women’s emancipation. Women gaining any form of legal recognition is construed as a step towards gender equality. Therefore, when looking to address issues around gender pricing – charging consumers differently for the same product or service because of their gender – experts turn to law as an obvious solution. Legal scholars suggest anti-discrimination regulation as the answer to liberation, and economists argue women should make better consumer choices. However, neither of these approaches addresses the problem in its entirety. In this article, instead of presenting anti-discrimination as a solution, I take gender pricing as a case study to map the intersection among law, gender, and capital and understand why the law might not be the answer leading women to emancipation. Through Queer Marxist lenses, I start by presenting gender pricing as a burden affecting women in the consumption sphere. In the second part, I focus on consumption and its relevance for the imposition of gendered subjectivities as part of an accumulation strategy. In the third part, I draw a parallel between the stages of women’s emancipation trajectory and the forms of backlash they face in their liberation struggle. As a case study, gender pricing allows me to understand consumption as an instance or site of regulation of gendered identities that goes beyond the formal equality achieved in law. The conception of women as consumers, mainly in the global North, reinforces particular subjectivities according to a historical process and is part of capital accumulation strategies. While corporations profit from gender pricing commodities, women are comparatively impoverished by gender pricing and other economic burdens, thus allowing men to maintain their hierarchically superior economic position.