Resumen

BELTRAN Y PUGA, Alma. A Critique of Cultural Dichotomies and the Challenge of Distribution in Divorce Cases. Isonomía [online]. 2016, n.45, pp.47-81. ISSN 1405-0218.

This essay revisits the main feminist debates regarding the law of divorce to analyze how legal interventions in family law have impacted women, showing the criticism to the no fault divorce reforms and the possibilities to redistribute the spouses' patrimony and child care tasks. It argues that the feminist critique has helped to identify several cultural dichotomies (family/market; reproductive/productive work; husband-breadwinner/wife-caretaker) embedded in the law, particularly regarding divorce reforms, but more critical analysis is needed to analyze their effects when they are adopted or produced by the legal order. And it suggests that law has entered culture from the back door: through background rules that have legal, material and symbolic consequences. At the end, the conclusions underscore that gender inequality is also produced by the distributive effects of the cultural dichotomies that exist in the symbolic order, and that they have to be considered when there is a legal intervention to change that order. The essay analyzes divorce reform in the US and Mexico.

Palabras llave : divorce; feminism; gender equality; distributive analysis.

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