Editorial: Gender Institutions Law
by Valeria Giordano
pp. 12-25 Issue 16 (8,2) – July-December 2021 ISSN (online): 2539/2239 ISSN (print): 2389-8232 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14718/SoftPower.2021.8.2.1
Abstract
The discontinuous and steep routes featured in the gender rights narration highlight the fragility of the individuals’ guarantee instruments, as well as the gap – never fully avoidable – between normativity and effectiveness, the domain of the form and that of the social practice.
Indeed, the discourse on human rights generally tends, to reveal that within the request for recognition as coupled with the demands for differentiation and specification of the needs of certain groups, there lies its emancipatory capacity, its transposition onto the legal plane of a normative ideal. As a normative ideal, it is brought to completion through a process of stabilization that even when progressive it never overlooks the projective dimension from which it stemmed.
Undoubtedly, the additional appearance of the constitutional state entitles the positivization of a catalogue of human rights, mainly delineated by the eighteenth-century rationalistic natural law. This catalogue lies at the foundation of the processes that have democratized our normative systems. That is because it questions the adequacy of the traditional categories of legal science in the light of a problematization of the relations between law and morality and the re-evaluation of a rationality, as immanent in the Constitution, and whose contours are being redrawn on a case-by-case basis.