Editing the Wiktionary Entry for “Female”

Editor’s note

In its new Online Edition, the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice seeks to publish pieces that transcend the traditional bounds of legal scholarship and offer critical reflections on gender, race, sexuality or other axes of oppression. Such publications, we hope will include pieces of poetry, fiction, and personal reflection, as well as current-events oriented scholarship.

Last year, the Online Edition launched this mission with the publication of student commentary on Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearings. Online now presents Yxta Maya Murray’s short fiction on the performance art of Aliza Shvarts and the Wikitionary definition of “femaleness.” Namely, the narrator of Murray’s story reflects on the sociocultural power of linguistic definitions—how those definitions constrain and proscribe their subjects—and the deconstructive force of Shvarts’s Yale senior thesis, which questioned societally-created definitions of “female” through recording her own artificial inseminations and induced miscarriages. Interested readers can learn more about the controversial final project and read Shvarts’s own reflections on the piece.

Abstract

This is one in a series of “legal fictions” that I have been publishing in law journals. It concerns the roles that law, art, and language play in the manufacture and destruction of female identity.

To read the full article, please click here.