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Civil Rights Reform And The Body, Tobias Barrington Wolff
Civil Rights Reform And The Body, Tobias Barrington Wolff
All Faculty Scholarship
Discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression has emerged as a major focus of civil rights reform. Opponents of these reforms have structured their opposition around one dominant image: the bathroom. With striking consistency, opponents have invoked anxiety over the bathroom -- who uses bathrooms, what happens in bathrooms, and what traumas one might experience while occupying a bathroom -- as the reason to permit discrimination in the workplace, housing, and places of public accommodation. This rhetoric of the bathroom in the debate over gender-identity protections seeks to exploit an underlying anxiety that has played a role in …
From Multiculturalism To Technique: Feminism, Culture, And The Conflict Of Laws Style, Karen Knop, Ralf Michaels, Annelise Riles
From Multiculturalism To Technique: Feminism, Culture, And The Conflict Of Laws Style, Karen Knop, Ralf Michaels, Annelise Riles
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
The German Chancellor, the French President, and the British Prime Minister have each grabbed world headlines with pronouncements that their states' policies of multiculturalism have failed. As so often, domestic debates about multiculturalism, as well as foreign policy debates about human rights in non- Western countries, revolve around the treatment of women. Yet feminists are no longer even certain how to frame, let alone resolve, the issues raised by veiling, polygamy, and other cultural practices oppressive to women by Western standards. Feminism has become perplexed by the very concept of "culture." This impasse is detrimental both to women's equality and …
Exchange As A Cornerstone Of Families, Martha M. Ertman
Exchange As A Cornerstone Of Families, Martha M. Ertman
Faculty Scholarship
This essay up-ends critical theorist Ivan Illich’s critique of economic thinking as replacing households defined by vernacular gender with married pairs in “inhumane” sex-neutral economic partnerships. It challenges Illich’s view of exchange as a destroyer that has meddled in families for only a few hundred years, citing sociobiological literature to counter his case against exchange with one valorizing two exchanges that I call “primal deals” that played crucial roles in the evolution of humans, families, and day-to-day life. These primal deals—especially the primal pair-bonding deal between men and women—continue to play a central role in families and family law today. …