Social movements change hearts and minds by shifting how people understand what is true about the world around them. They start by making differences visible, centering lives and experiences previously pushed to cultural margins. Such differences are often at once biological and social, inherent and constructed. Feminist scholars and activists, for example, have grounded ethical and policy visions in women’s experiences of bodily intimacy. Disability rights advocates show how physical infrastructure and institutional practices are premised upon normative bodies and capacities. In addition to bringing difference to the fore, social movements make legal claims respecting those differences. They show how difference shapes social groups’ varying perspectives on harm and liberation. Last, social movements connect the perspectives of subordinated groups to accounts of state protection and oppression. Domestic violence activists, for example, made claims to state protection based on women’s experience of vulnerability within the family. Black freedom activists, by contrast, argue for familial privacy in response to racial subordination by the carceral state. The voice in which social groups register injury shapes their claims about state power.
What is the role of an academic in these social movement processes? How does the professional intellectual manifest difference, express collective voice, and forge new power formations? Sherry Colb offered one answer to that question in her life’s work. It was to blur the distinction between academic scholarship and advocacy. Colb wrote for lawyers, students, and members of the public as well as for scholars. In addition to her scholarship in law journals, in online forums that ranged from Verdict to the Dorf on Law blog, she responded to many of the most important legal issues of her time. In particular, Colb engaged in feminist struggles for reproductive rights, against carceral regulation of pregnant women, for LGBT family recognition, and for freedom from sexual violence. Her clear, sharp, sometimes sardonic writing made her incisive legal analysis accessible. She put her rhetorical genius to work in favor of a strong ethical vision, one grounded in the intertwined bodily, psychological, and social experiences of women.
This Article considers how Sherry Colb acted at once as a feminist theorist and as a social change agent. I focus on Colb’s writing from the early 2000s anthologized in The Difference Sex Makes: Making Babies, Making Law and consider some later pieces. First, Colb developed a legal theory of women’s embodiment, exploring the meaning of reproductive sex difference in women’s lives and under the law. Second, Colb advanced the feminist movement by explaining “women’s perspective” on social and physical injuries. Colb acted as a feminist in a third way, by fighting simultaneously against state intrusion and for state protection. This Article further explores how Sherry Colb’s personal attributes—compassion, engagement, and courage—well complemented her intellectual work on difference, voice, and power. In conclusion, I consider the ongoing importance of Colb’s own voice to feminist struggles, including those for reproductive justice and equity in the workplace.
To read this Article, please click here: Sherry Colb: Feminist Theorist and Social Change Agent.
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