Law and Gender Commons^™

Religiosity In Constitutions And The Status Of Minority Rights, Brandy G. Robinson

Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions

Minority rights and religion have never been topics that are simultaneously considered. However, arguably, the two have relevance, especially when combined with the topic and theory of constitutionalism. Historically and traditionally, minorities have been granted certain rights and have been denied certain rights under various constitutions. These grants and denials relate to cultural differences and values, arguably relating to a culture’s understanding and interpretation of religion.

This article explores the relationship and status of minority rights as it relates to religiosity and constitutionalism. Essentially, there is a correlation between these topics and research shows where certain nations have used religion …

Feminist Legal Theory As A Way To Explain The Lack Of Progress Of Women’S Rights In Afghanistan: The Need For A State Strength Approach, Isaac Kfir

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

Cultural and religious practices are critical to explaining Afghanistan’s dreadful reputation concerning the preservation, protection, and promotion of women’s rights. Those advocating misogynistic practices assert that the calls for reforms challenge their religion and culture, while also claiming that many women’s issues exist within the private realm. Accordingly, they assert that reforms that aim at addressing disempowerment are not vital to the state and go beyond the established limits of state authority. Building on feminist legal theory, which distinguishes between the public and private spheres, I argue in Afghanistan misogynistic and discriminatory practices stem from contrived cultural and religious norms. …

Piercing The Prison Uniform Of Invisibility For Black Female Inmates, Michelle S. Jacobs

Michelle S Jacobs

In Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women In Prison, Professor Paula Johnson has written about the most invisible of incarcerated women — incarcerated African American women. The number of women incarcerated in the United States increased by seventy-five percent between 1986 and 1991. Of these women, a disproportionate number are black women. The percentages vary by region and by the nature of institution (county jail, state prison or federal facility), but the bottom line remains the same. In every instance, black women are incarcerated at rates disproportionate to their percentage in the general population. In Inner Lives, Professor Johnson …

Femicide In Bolivia After Law 348, Adán Martínez

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This project explores the concept of femicide from a unique perspective, by analyzing the effect that Law #348: The Internal Law to Guarantee Women a Life Without Violence after a year that it passed during the Morales' administration. I examine two crucial questions to this study: 1) How do we explain the paradox that although this law has passed, today we see an increase in the number of femicides in Bolivia? 2) What are the obstacles that prevent that application of law 348 3) What can we do to put a stop to femicides? I demonstrate that several factors like …

Raymond, Janice. Not A Choice, Not A Job., Ane Mathieson

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

No abstract provided.

‘Anchor/Terror Babies’ And Latina Bodies: Immigration Rhetoric In The 21st Century And The Feminization Of Terrorism, Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo, Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

The post-9/11 era in the United States has revealed a specific fear about immigrants as terrorist threats. Although this fear manifests as a generalized one against any immigrant, when we analyze public discourse, we can find rhetorical patterns involving specific groups, with Latinos/as at center. U.S. public discourse typically conjures images of immigrants as terrorists, which are either genderless or male, and it is activated and cultivated in moments of national crisis (most recently, the 2013 Boston marathon bombing attacks). In this paper, we move beyond notions of immigrants as either genderless or male to discuss post-9/11 perceptions of immigrant …

When Harvard Said No To Eugenics: The J. Ewing Mears Bequest, 1927, Paul A. Lombardo

Faculty Publications By Year

James Ewing Mears (1838-1919) was a founding member of the Philadelphia Academy of Surgery. His 1910 book, The Problem of Race Betterment, laid the groundwork for later authors to explore the uses of surgical sterilization as a eugenic measure. Mears left $60,000 in his will to Harvard University to support the teaching of eugenics. Although numerous eugenic activists were on the Harvard faculty, and who of its Presidents were also associated with the eugenics movement, Harvard refused the Mears gift. The bequest was eventually awarded to Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. This article explains why Harvard turned its back …

Human Rights, Women, And Third World Development, Winston E. Langley

Winston E. Langley

As part of the effort to inaugurate a new international socio-political order after World War II, international emphasis was given to certain moral and legal entitlements we have come to call human rights. That emphasis initially found its most forceful expression in the Charter of the United Nations, which not only asserts its members' faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, as well as in the equal rights of men and women of all nations, but also recites its members' commitment to employ international machinery for the promotion of the social and economic …

Dan Subotnik, Toxic Diversity: Race, Gender, And Law Talk In America, Hannah Abrams

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Migrant Workers' Access To Justice At Home: Nepal, Sarah Paoletti, Eleanor Taylor-Nicholson, Bandita Sijapati, Bassina Farbenblum

All Faculty Scholarship

Nepal’s citizens engage in foreign employment at the highest per capita rate of any other country in Asia, and their remittances account for 25 percent of the country’s GDP. The Middle East is now the most popular destination for Nepalis--nearly 700,000 were working in the Middle East in 2011 on temporary labor contracts. For some Nepalis, working abroad provides much-needed household wealth. For others, their contributions to Nepal come at great personal cost. Migrant workers in the Gulf, for example, routinely report wage theft, lack of time off and unsafe and unhealthy working conditions. Some migrant workers report psychological and …

Keynote Address: Untying The Moral Knot Of Abortion, Caitlin E. Borgmann

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Innocent Burdens, James Edwin Mahon

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reflections On Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections Of Race And Class For Women In Academia Symposium - The Plenary Panel, Maritza I. Reyes

Journal Publications

No abstract provided.

When Speech Isn't Free: Legal Barriers And Consequences Of Reporting Sexual Violence, Kevin M. Fleming

Departmental Honors Projects

Incidents of sexual violence continue to be a serious problem for society. Likewise, acts of sexual violence impose severe consequences for survivors. The consequences initially begin at the onset of the survivor’s journey to psychological recovery following the traumatic sexual assault. The consequences take on a unique set of characteristics when the survivor attempts to use the justice system to confront the perpetrator who committed the offense. These characteristics can transform an adversarial process into an isolated battle for the survivor. In the worst cases, the justice system empowers individuals who wish to silence survivors with free speech restrictions instead …

Precarious Pedagogies? The Impact Of Casual And Zero-Hour Contracts In Higher Education, Ana Lopes, Indra Angeli Dewan

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Precarious work is associated with and characterizes the effects of neoliberal policy—the transference of economic risk onto workers, the erosion of workers’ rights, the flexibilization and casualization of work contracts, self-responsibility, financial insecurity, and emotional stress. In the Higher Education (HE) sector, the number of insecure academic jobs, especially zero-hour contracts for hourly paid teaching and short-term contract research, has grown exponentially in recent years in response to the structural and fiscal changes within universities, which reflect these global shifts. This paper presents findings from a pilot study conducted with academics on casual contracts in HE institutions in England and …

Decolonizing Higher Education: Black Feminism And The Intersectionality Of Race And Gender, Heidi Safia Mirza

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Drawing on black feminist theory, this paper examines the professional experiences of postcolonial diasporic black and ethnicized female academics in higher education.1 The paper explores the embodiment of gendered and racialized difference and reflects on the power of whiteness to shape everyday experiences in such places of privilege. The powerful yet hidden histories of women of color in higher education, such as the Indian women suffragettes and Cornelia Sorabji in late nineteenth century, are symbolic of the erasure of an ethnicized black feminist/womanist presence in mainstream (white) educational establishments. The paper concludes that an understanding of black and ethnicized female …

Beginning With The Body: Fleshy Politics In The Performance Art Of Rebecca Belmore And Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Samantha Balzer

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article examines what I term the "fleshy" politics of Rebecca Belmore's 2002 Vigil and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's contributions to the 2009 version of the performance project Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility. Focusing on the embodied performances of both Belmore and Piepzna-Samarasinha, I read the skin of the artist as a site where complex politics develop. This analysis is broken into three sections: the first considers the relationship between the performing body and the performance space; the second attends to specific movements each artist makes; the third focuses on garments worn in each …

Teaching Postcolonial Literature In An Elite University: An Edinburgh Lecturer’S Perspective, Michelle Keown

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This reflective essay explores some of the pedagogical challenges I have faced in teaching postcolonial literature and theory at the University of Edinburgh. There are particular social dynamics at work at Edinburgh that make engaging with intersectionality, particularly in the context of colonialism and racism, a rather complex endeavor. Edinburgh is a Russell Group university, and our undergraduate constituency is overwhelmingly white, middle class and British, with a high proportion of students coming from British public-school backgrounds. Many of these students approach postcolonial writing with well-meaning liberal intentions, but often adopt what Graham Huggan (2001) would term an exoticizing perspective …

Mother Of A New World? Stereotypical Representations Of Black Women In Three Postapocalyptic Films, Karima K. Jeffrey

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay explores three cinematic representations of Black matriarchs who play prophetic roles in redeeming humanity in the midst of apocalyptic change: Ika (Quest for Fire), Kee (Children of Men), and The Oracle (The Matrix trilogy). Not only do these courageous women resist the politics of domination, rebelling against a dying status quo, but they "give birth" to the leaders needed to rebuild a world in chaos and decay. One film ends with a pregnant woman rubbing her belly as she stands on the precipice of evolutionary change; another positions a mother and newborn adrift, waiting to be found by …

Feminist Interruptions: Creating Care-Ful And Collaborative Community-Based Research With Students, Kelly Concannon, Laura Finley, Nadine Grifoni, Stephanie Wong

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article describes a feminist community-based research project involving faculty and student collaboration to evaluate a dating and domestic violence awareness initiative. Using a critical ethics of care that emphasizes relationships and allows for constant reflection about power dynamics, role, positionality, and emotions, the authors reflect on what was learned during the research process. Faculty and student researchers share their perspectives and offer suggestions for future feminist collaborative research projects. Significant lessons learned include ensuring that all are invested from the outset of the project, guaranteeing that student researchers understand why their role is so critical in community-based research, and …

Professor Xavier Is A Gay Traitor! An Antiassimilationist Framework For Interpreting Ideology, Power And Statecraft, Michael Loadenthal

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Ideology is an integral component in the reproduction of power. Integral to this central tenet of statecraft is the regulation of identity and proscribed methods of social engagement—positive portrayals of "good citizenry" and delegitimized representations of those challenging hegemony. Through an Althusserian and linguistic analysis, positioning the X-Men movie franchise as an Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), one can examine the lives of mutants portrayed in the text as indicative of preferred methods of state-legitimized sociopolitical interaction. This metaphorical and textual analysis is used to discuss the lived realities of queer persons resisting hegemony, and is located in the bodies and …

Introduction: Education, Intersectionality And Social Change, Lena Wånggren, Maja Milatovic

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Critical Spaces: Processes Of Othering In British Institutions Of Higher Education, Aretha Phiri

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Global recession and the economic crisis have affected contemporary British society in predictable ways. But this age of austerity has also unveiled the continued sinister machinations of whiteness. While not necessarily homogeneous, austerity rhetoric, as it is currently conventionally deployed, works to perpetuate white masculinist privilege and further entrenches the normative value of whiteness, while simultaneously masking and marginalizing those ethnic minority populations traditionally othered from mainstream sociopolitical discourse. More specifically, recent austerity measures adversely affect the situation of women and the future of feminist theory and practice in British higher education. This paper investigates and problematizes the deployment of …

Queer Desires And Critical Pedagogies In Higher Education: Reflections On The Transformative Potential Of Non-Normative Learning Desires In The Classroom, Jennifer Fraser, Sarah Lamble

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article considers what a queer approach might offer in addressing some of the challenges of higher education in the contemporary neoliberal landscape. Despite a rich literature on queer issues in the classroom, most of the existing scholarship has focused on engaging queer students, being a queer teacher, or teaching queer content in the curriculum. Very little work has focused on what it means to take a queer approach to pedagogic techniques or how such an approach might impact educational practices more broadly. We ask: What does it mean in theory and practice to “queer” our teaching methods? What role …

Teaching Against Hierarchies: An Anarchist Approach, Stephanie Spoto

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The state of California spends more on prisons than on colleges and universities, and the fact that these two budgetary figures are often compared shows the relationship between the two state institutions. Our classrooms, starting from a very early stage, not only prepare children to be productive members of the consumer economy but educate them for complacency in the face of state violence and mass incarceration. In attempting to move away from hierarchical models of education, this article looks at the feminist pedagogical theory of bell hooks and antiauthoritarian and anarchist theorists such as Jacques Rancière and Derrick Jensen in …

Neoliberalism And Public University Agendas: Tensions Along The Global/Local Divide, Peter Wanyenya, Donna Lester-Smith

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Over the last decade, internationalization efforts have accelerated at leading postsecondary institutions in North America and elsewhere, with universities now aggressively competing for the most talented students worldwide. With the focus on recruiting international students, one of the major attendant objectives has seemingly been a social-justice-oriented agenda on tackling pressing global issues; the local has indeed become the global. However, not everyone is ostensibly benefiting from this new global focus. For some, their local issues and conditions are increasingly precarious and nonprioritized in institutional and broadening neoliberal governmental agendas. In the Canadian context, various Indigenous and low-income racialized communities, youth …

Tiaras, Queen Bees, Imposters And The Board Room: Lean In & Women In Corporate Governance, Christyne J. Vachon

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

From The Editors, Anna M. Klobucka, Jeannette E. Riley, Catherine Villanueva Gardner

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Feminist Praxis, Critical Theory And Informal Hierarchies, Eva Giraud

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article draws on my experiences teaching across two undergraduate media modules in a UK research-intensive institution to explore tactics for combatting both institutional and informal hierarchies within university teaching contexts. Building on Sara Motta’s (2012) exploration of implementing critical pedagogic principles at postgraduate level in an elite university context, I discuss additional tactics for combatting these hierarchies in undergraduate settings, which were developed by transferring insights derived from informal workshops led by the University of Nottingham’s Feminism and Teaching network into the classroom. This discussion is framed in relation to the concepts of “cyborg pedagogies” and “political semiotics of …

Feminicidios En Cd. Juárez: Sombras Del Evanescente Olvido; Luces De Lucha, Fuerza Y Resistencia, Amber Ramirez

Honors Theses

Desde principios de los años noventa, mujeres y niñas en Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, México han sido raptadas de día y de noche mientras se dirigen al trabajo, a sus casas, o a la escuela. Después de días, semanas y a veces hasta años, muchas han sido encontradas brutalmente asesinadas, calcinadas, mutiladas, violadas y torturadas; sus cuerpos han sido abandonados para luego ser localizados completamente desnudos o parcialmente vestidos, en completo estado de descomposición o solamente en huesos en las calles en las zonas desérticas de Cd. Juárez. El paradero de muchas otras mujeres y niñas aún se desconoce y a …