Despatriarcalyzing kinship and filiation: a feminist legal reform based in care
Book review
Abstract
Laura Esteve Alguacil's book is situated between a social practice that multiplies forms of parenting, cohabitation, and co-responsibility, and a legal system that continues to recognize, protect, and privilege the heterosexual biological nuclear family.
The book offers a critical diagnosis of this imbalance accompanied by an articulated normative proposal aimed at redefining family ties by placing caregiving at the center. In this sense, it joins a long feminist tradition of politicizing reproduction and kinship and showing that the private, far from being solely personal, is political. Furthermore, Esteve assumes that law is not a mere reflection of society, but a technology of power that can slow, channel, accelerate, or amplify social processes. Thus, she constructs a proposal that does not limit itself to adapting law to social change, but rather drives it. And, in dialogue with the tradition of feminist legal sociology, she affirms that legally recognizing non-normative caregiving ties is a way of depatriarchalizing kinship.
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Ministerio de Educación y Ciencias
Grant numbers PID2021-126552OB-I00
Copyright (c) 2025 Ruth Mestre i Mestre
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