Law - Gender - Collectivity: The Contested General and the New Common, TP-D "The Organisation of Consumer Protection - Political Actors and Legal Frameworks".

Background:

The project is a sub-project of the DFG research group "Law - Gender - Collectivity". This group is interested in how social conflicts present themselves when they are viewed from the perspective of gendered and legally organised processes of collectivisation. The emergence of collectivity as well as the constitution of subjectivities will be focused in an interdisciplinary process. The project is led by Prof. Dr. Maja Apelt and carried out by Dr. des. Matthias Schneider and Teresa Löckmann M.A.

Main research question:

The central focus is to investigate what roles gender, organisation and law play in consumer protection today.

The main research question investigates:

With a legal, organisational and gender sociological orientation, the question is addressed to what extent German consumer law is sensitive to gender discrimination and asymmetrical power relations, what stances women's organisations take in current consumer protection and to what extent feminist alliances seek connection to consumer policy debates. Special emphasis is placed on the study of the reduction of the taxation placed on menstruation products (the so-called tampon tax), which brings into focus both the limits of the field of organised consumer protection and social movements as central actors. With this case study the mobilisation of law in connection with collectivisation and organising processes is brought into view.

Research objective:

On the basis of the organisations of consumer protection and the tampon tax the aim of the sub-project is to work out, which processes of organising happen during the mobilization of law in relation to consumer protection, how these influence jurisprudence and the implementation of law, and how in these processes gender and other dimensions of inequality are relevant.