Gender in Law and Family Values: In Search of a Balance

Abstract

The paper examines the current gender aspects of legislation regulating relations with the family element (mainly from the family legal space), the practice of its application by the courts. The provisions of the legal doctrine, primarily civil and civil procedure, on this issue are summarized and analyzed. Meanwhile, the author intentionally leaves civil law out of the field of research, since civil law norms are specified by family and administrative legislation and are gender neutral. The gender contexts of the institution of marriage (its heterosexual legal attitudes, the legal consequences of sex change in marriage, the problem of same-sex marriage, de facto marriage, gender prohibitions in the divorce procedure), the institute of parenthood (presumption of paternity, the influence of gender stereotypes on the legislation on the establishment of extramarital paternity, the law enforcement presumption of the mother’s preferential right to leave her young child, the rights of fathers, same-sex parenthood and its consequences), the institute of surrogacy (gender differentiation the subject composition of the program participants, controversial administrative and judicial practice in cases of the legal consequences of the use of assisted reproductive technologies). Other gender aspects of Russian family legislation are analyzed (for example, gender neutralization of norms on alimony obligations). In the argumentation of his position on these issues, the author not only relies on the analysis of legal norms, court decisions and provisions of legal doctrine, but also refers to the sociological meanings of gender practices. The author notes that the proposed approaches to the classical and modern gender contexts of family and related legislation indicate the actualization of both the problem as a whole and the need to answer questions on its individual components.