Covering the gender that the law can not see: the difficult circulation of the feminist concept of gender in the legal language

A fundamental element of the feminist enterprise of deconstruction and reconstruction, the concept of "gender" has evolved a lot since the 1970s. It has permitted feminist theorists not only to apprehend social relationships of power between the class of "women" and the class of "men" and to denaturalize these two groups but also to denounce the social construction of biological sex. Thus, gender precedes sex. If gender has been a "useful" category of analysis to write women's history, as Joan W. Scott has argued, it has been a useful category for women's rights. This article analyzes the inclusion of the feminist concept of gender in international human rights documents and in Canadian and Quebec laws. The concept of gender has progressively imposed itself, but not without having lost its feminist subversive meaning. In Canadian and Quebec law, it seems that the legislators have faced problems integrating the concept into law. The circulation of a concept may encounter obstacles. Even if the concept of gender is absent from Canadian legislative language, we cannot conclude that it has not been a "useful" category to better respect women's rights.