Proceedings of the 2026 3rd International Conference on Public Relations and Media Communication (PRMC 2026)

2026 3rd International Conference on Public Relations and Media Communication (PRMC 2026)

📍Kunming, China🗓️ 12-14 June 2026
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The Gaze of the State and the Gaze of the Crowd: On the Construction of Female Political Subjectivity Before Law and the Imperative for Pluralist Feminism

Authors
Huijun Wang1, *
1YK Pao School, Shanghai, 201620, China
*Corresponding author. Email: S24534@ykpaoschool.cn
Corresponding Author
Huijun Wang
Available Online 4 September 2026.
DOI
10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_60How to use a DOI?
Keywords
disciplinary power; male gaze; legal anthropology; autonomy; political subjectivity; plural feminism
Abstract

Despite formal legal equality, women continue to face systematic injustice in courts across different legal systems. Existing scholarship examines legal inequality and gender inequality separately but lacks a unified theory of how female subjects’ political subjectivity is constituted before the law. This paper integrates Foucault’s disciplinary power, Beauvoir’s othering, and Mulvey’s male gaze to analyze three cross‑cultural cases: L. c. France (institutional gaze), Magaya v. Magaya (customary patriarchal gaze), and State v. Rusk (judicial evidentiary gaze). It argues that a structural misfit exists between the law’s ideally presupposed rational subject and the pre‑legally constituted female subject in reality, which manifests the impaired female autonomy and thus their political subjectivity. The paper theorizes pre‑legal construction of female political subjectivity as a new concept in feminist legal theory. And by proposing the new concept, the paper demonstrates that pluralist feminism is an ontological necessity and outlines future research directions for digital and AI governance.

Copyright
© 2026 The Author(s)
Open Access
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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Volume Title
Proceedings of the 2026 3rd International Conference on Public Relations and Media Communication (PRMC 2026)
Series
Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research
Publication Date
4 September 2026
ISBN
978-2-38476-609-3
ISSN
2352-5398
DOI
10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_60How to use a DOI?
Copyright
© 2026 The Author(s)
Open Access
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Cite this article

risenwbib
TY  - CONF
AU  - Huijun Wang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/04
TI  - The Gaze of the State and the Gaze of the Crowd: On the Construction of Female Political Subjectivity Before Law and the Imperative for Pluralist Feminism
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 3rd International Conference on Public Relations and Media Communication (PRMC 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 564
EP  - 575
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_60
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_60
ID  - Wang2026
ER  -