1. A brief but informative overview of these developments can be obtained by reading first N. Lacey, ?Feminist Legal Theory?,Oxford Journal of Legal Studies (1989), 383?394, and then C. Smart, ?The Woman of Legal Discourse?,Social and Legal Studies 1 (1992), 29?44.
2. See for example M. Thornton, ?Feminism and the Contradictions of Law Reform?,International Journal for the Sociology of Law 19 (1991), 453?474; W. Brown, ?Finding the Man in the State?,Feminist Studies 18/1 (1992), 7?34.
3. I should emphasise that my concern here is with Smart's version of poststructuralism, rather than with poststructuralism, or even poststructuralist feminism, more generally. Smart does not cite these authors and her work differs in significant ways from them. By the same token Smart's work is not cited in discussions of poststructuralist feminism (for an introduction to the work of the French poststructuralist feminists see R. Tong,Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction (London: Allen & Unwin, 1989), Ch.8). As such, my argument does not claim to be of general application.
4. C. Smart, ?Law's Power, the Sexed Body and Feminist Discourse?,Journal of Law & Society 17 (1990a), 194?210, at 197.
5. Smart uses the term ?modernism? to mean the period since the Enlightenment, which has sought to apply rationality and reason rather than religious belief (superstition) in the understanding of the material and social world. As such she implies that this is the age of Truth. There is now considerable debate over the continued descriptive purchase of this term. Lyotard, for example, has argued that we have witnessed the death of the metanarrative (Truth) and its replacement with a technocratic rationality; that ?The question (overt or implied) now asked by the professionalist student, the State, or institutions of higher education is no longer ?is it true?? but ?what use is it??? J-F. Lyotard,The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), at 51. For a good introduction to this debate see chapter 5 of S. Lash,Sociology of Postmodernism (Routledge: London, 1990). Lash argues that modernism has now been replaced by ?modernity?, a term which he correlates to the demise of the metanarrative. My own view is that, whilst the trends which Lyotard detects are certainly present in many areas of social and cultural life ? education being the obvious example ? some areas, sexuality included, remain steeped in Truth. In other words, I would argue that Smart's use of the term ?modernism? (rather than ?modernity?) is accurate in the context within which she is working.