Daphna Hacker (Tel Aviv): Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization: Transnational Surrogacy and Care at Old Age as Case Studies

Abstract

The Covid-19 crisis proved how globally we are all connected, yet how strong national borders still are. Moreover, it exposed the vulnerability of what Prof. Hacker called in her recent book "Globordered Families". In her talk, she will focus on two kinds of such families - those created by transnational surrogacy and those assisted by a migrant care worker for an elder parent. These two case studies highlight Hacker's argument that the institution of the family can no longer be understood detached from globalization, and how, as such, it must escape the socio-legal methodological nationalism trap and be studied, instead, in the context of the international, regional, multi-national, and parochial laws that govern it. Likewise, they demonstrate how globalization cannot be fully understood without an in-depth investigation of the myriad ways in which families try to maneuver around the law – including family law, immigration law, labor law, and international law. Throughout these endeavors to navigate the legal universe, families are thus created, maintained, and separated while crossing national as well as social borders, such as those based on gender, race, and economic status.

Daphna Hacker

Curriculum Vitae

Daphna Hacker is a legal scholar and a sociologist, and a Full Professor at the Law Faculty and Faculty of Humanities, at Tel Aviv University. She is currently heading the NCJW Women and Gender Studies Program. Her socio-legal research focuses on the intersection of law, families and gender and provides empirical as well as normative insights in relation to singlehood and gender, post-divorce parental arrangements, inheritance conflicts, filial piety towards elder parents, and transnational families. Prof. Hacker has published numerous articles in leading legal and socio-legal journals and is the author of three books. Her latest, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017, is titled "Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization", and won the best book award by the American Law & Society Association. Prof. Hacker is also a feminist activist and for her public service on behalf of women, she has been given in 2013 the Katan Award for the Advancement of Gender Justice through Voluntary Work and in 2019 The Jewel Bellush Outstanding Israeli Feminist Award. She is Israel's candidate to the June 2022 elections to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women.