“So, I’m not giving you enough money to buy gender appropriate razors?”: Women, Economic Burdens and a Materialist Analysis of Gender Pricing

The International Law Reading Group (ILRG) is happy to announce a session as part of its Early Career Research Exchange (ECRE) Series, hosting Dr Suzana Rahde Gerchmann, who is a Swiss Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Suzana will be presenting a paper on gender pricing, ie charging consumers differently for the same products or services based on their gender. The paper will explore how law and capitalism have co-constituted the legal subject as a gendered consumer, and what the repercussions are for liberation. The ILRG is looking forward to discussing and exchanging ideas on this exciting topic.

 

The full abstract of Suzana's research could be found below:

An insidious economic burden, gender pricing involves charging consumers differently for the same products or services based on their gender (e.g. pink and blue razors), resulting in women paying more for commodities marketed to them. Contrary to other economic burdens women bear, such as the gender wage gap and unpaid housework, gender pricing has received little attention from critical legal scholars. Viewing law as critical to women’s emancipation, liberal lawyers suggest solutions based on anti-discrimination law. However, this fails to consider the systemic causes of gender pricing and how women’s experiences as consumers in capitalist societies are co-constitutive of their gendered legal subjectivities and of their consequent entrapment in a subordinated social position as part of capitalism’s accumulation strategies. It is this gap in the scholarship that this thesis explores. To fully understand gender pricing, I turn to Marxist theory and method. My research question is: How have law and capitalism co-constituted the legal subject as a gendered consumer, and what are the repercussions for liberation? In answering it, I take gender pricing as a case study to analyse (1) the legal aspects of gendered subjectivity, (2) the meaning of being a woman in capitalist societies, and (3) the role (or the limitations) of law in liberation. In answering it, I develop the concepts of ‘gender hegemony’ and ‘false needs’, which allow me to demonstrate gender pricing’s dialectical function of ideologically concealing and materially concretising women’s subordination. Building on Queer and Trans Marxism, I conclude that consumption is a site of regulation upholds gender hegemony through the imposition of false needs, which constrains women to a subordinated gendered legal subjectivity in order to enable capitalism’s accumulation strategies and to avoid crises. Consequently, I analyse the limitations of law’s emancipatory potential and the necessity of feminist/trans/queer solidarities to achieve real emancipation.

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