The question of belonging and participation is one of the most contentious ones in Western democracies today. Law plays a central role here, be it as a point of reference to articulate a demand, or as a goal in order to shift existing boundaries. New social conflicts bear witness to this dynamic, for example around anti-discrimination legislation and the rights of workers, the question of who the city belongs to, or the rights of refugees, as well as generally around the possibility of the equal participation of all “in the practice of civic self-determination” (Jürgen Habermas).

Against this backdrop, the interdisciplinary Research Unit focuses on the relationship between law, gender, and collectivity. We ask about the efficacy of gendered collectivity in a hegemonic male-oriented, hetero-normative, bourgeois and privatized tradition of law. With a deepened understanding of collectivization processes that are both legally standardized and gendered, we are interested in how current social conflicts present themselves, and how they may be understood and described with due complexity.

To this end, the Research Unit accounts for multiple dimensions of collectivity - (social) collectives, ideas of collectivity, and processes of collectivization. It focuses on the intersections of law as a meaningful, socio-cultural field of discourse and activity, and gender as a powerful social norm and structural category. The Research Unit‘s goals are thus, firstly, added theoretical value for the fields of both legal studies and gender studies, and, with this specific focus, secondly, achieving a unique contribution to understandings of the meaning of collectivity in late modern societies from a transnational perspective.