Law as Imagination: Feminist Rethinkings of Legal Pluralism

Sara Araújo

doi:10.35295/osls.iisl.2210

Authors

Sara Alexandre Domingues Araújo University of Maia https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1914-4074

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl.2210

Keywords:

Legal pluralism, feminist subjectivity, epistemic disobedience, world-making, colonial continuities, epistemological approaches

Abstract

In today’s political landscape, the rise of right-wing populisms across different regions has revived colonial grammars of difference, reframing women’s rights worldwide as markers of civilizational distinction while disregarding persistent gender inequalities within their own agendas. Against this backdrop, this article revisits the conceptual legacy of legal pluralism through feminist and postcolonial horizons. It offers a critical examination of classical, new, instrumental, global, and intercultural approaches, showing how recognition often operates as control. From the colonial codification of “customary law” to the technocratic pluralism of global governance, plurality has frequently served administrative ends. The article advances an epistemological reconceptualization of legal pluralism by moving beyond interpretive accounts centred on law’s cultural embeddedness toward an understanding of law as a system of imagination — a contested arena in which authority, meaning, and possibilities are negotiated. Drawing on feminist, Black, and Indigenous thought, it positions feminist subjectivity as a method of epistemological disobedience, expanding legal imagination while opening space for justice beyond the confines of modern legality and its imagined traditional counterpoints.

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