A series of challenges to the law's assumption that individuals act autonomously and to the law's ability to make objective determinations about the individual's intent, consent, and ability to make rational choices were stimulated by intellectual currents in other disciplines known as "postmodernism."⁽¹⁾ The postmodern view of the individual or the "legal subject" opposes the Enlightenment view of the stable, coherent self, capable of reason and "privileged insight into its own processes and into the 'laws of nature,'"⁽²⁾ with a more complicated view of the individual as one who is constituted form multiple institutional and ideological forces that, in various ways, overlap, intersect, and even contradict each other. These structures produce "the subject's experience of differentiated identity and . . . autonomy,"⁽³⁾ but a misleading one, for under the postmodern view this experience of what is real, rational, or, in some transcendent sense, true. Some of these and related themes were brought into law in the 1970's through what became known as the critical legal studies movement (CLS), a loose coalition of academic scholars who worked on many theoretical fronts to challenge the law's claim to neutrality, rationality, and objectivity, as well as the hierarchical structures of democratic society and the poverty of individualism. In some cases, CLS critiques led to paralysis an inaction, for the assault on the objective foundations of liberal legal thought seemed to undermine any foundations for an alternative framework as well. If neutrality, and objectivity, and even autonomy are impossible, it was hard to see how any reforms of existing legal structures, however radical, could be defended.

In the hands of scholars of gender and law, however, postmodern insights have not ended efforts to enhance the autonomy and freedom of women but rather have invigorated them. Legal activists and scholars who have enlisted postmodern critiques in the effort to end women's subordination have shown that better understanding of the limits of individual subjectivity and free choice can lead to better strategies for maximizing autonomy. The proposition that autonomy is impossible was restated by some scholars and women's advocates as a practical observation that choice is a relative concept, and that, in some matters at least, more is better than less. At the same time, the meaning of autonomy has been expanding beyond the right to be free from interference by others to include the ability to flourish among and in relation to others. This [unit] uses cases relating especially to rape, pregnancy, abortion, and welfare to explore the potential for, and new meanings of, autonomy.