Constitutions as Gendered Power Maps: A Documentary Analysis of Bodily Autonomy in the UK

This paper examines how constitutional authority over the body is articulated across the UK’s four nations through documentary analysis of recent flashpoints in gender recognition, abortion, and assisted dying. Drawing on legislation, parliamentary debates, judicial rulings, and activist commentary, the paper traces how Westminster and devolved governments assert and contest authority in regulating bodily autonomy. Recent developments — Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform veto, abortion buffer zone legislation, and Westminster’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill — reveal how a formally unitary constitution produces fragmented and contested regimes of care and recognition. Using feminist constitutional theory, I conceptualise these conflicts as a gendered cartography of power in which dignity, care, and vulnerability are unevenly distributed. The analysis contributes to debates on constitutional pluralism by demonstrating how constitutions function not only as legal architectures but as instruments of social ordering, with profound implications for those navigating reproductive, gendered, and end-of-life claims.The paper conceptualises constitutions as gendered power maps: discursive and legal terrains that reveal whose bodies are recognised, whose claims are marginalised, and how authority is asserted across overlapping scales. Preliminary findings show that constitutional authority is increasingly articulated through gendered framings of vulnerability, dignity, and care, which both extend and constrain embodied autonomy. As a stand-alone study, this documentary analysis advances feminist constitutionalism by reframing constitutional pluralism in terms of the regulation of bodies rather than the distribution of sovereignty. It also contributes to British political science by demonstrating how documentary sources capture the gendered dynamics of constitutional conflict in a devolved but asymmetrical union.