Law and Gender Commons^™

Marriage (In)Equality And The Historical Legacies Of Feminism, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, I measure the majority’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges against two legacies of second-wave feminist legal advocacy: the largely successful campaign to make civil marriage formally gender-neutral; and the lesser-known struggle against laws and practices that penalized women who lived their lives outside of marriage. Obergefell obliquely acknowledges marriage equality’s debt to the first legacy without explicitly adopting sex equality arguments against same-sex marriage bans. The legacy of feminist campaigns for nonmarital equality, by contrast, is absent from Obergefell’s reasoning and belied by rhetoric that both glorifies marriage and implicitly disparages nonmarriage. Even so, the history …

Equality And Singapore’S First Constitutional Challenges To The Criminalization Of Male Homosexual Conduct, Jack Tsen-Ta Lee

Jack Tsen-Ta LEE

In 2013, in Lim Meng Suang and Kenneth Chee Mun-Leon v Attorney-General and Tan Eng Hong v Attorney-General, the High Court of Singapore delivered the first judgments in the jurisdiction considering the constitutionality of section 377A of the Penal Code, which criminalizes acts of 'gross indecency' between two men, whether they occur in public or private. The Court ruled that the provision was not inconsistent with the guarantees of equality before the law and equal protection of the law stated in Article 12(1) of the Constitution of the Republic of Singapore. The result was upheld in 2014 by the Court …

My Body, Not My Say: Regulation Of Reproductive Freedom In America, Kisha K. Patel

Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies Summer Fellows

Women’s bodies have been legislated for years. Many people associate regulation beginning in 1973 when Roe V. Wade was decided, however legislation has affected women for much longer. These infringements on women’s rights create a major roadblock in gender equality. During summer fellows I researched how the law regulates aspects of American women's lives particularly in reproductive freedom (birth control, day-after pill, abortion, maternity discrimination). Conducting this research included thorough research of 48 pieces of congressional legislation from the 114^th Congress that limit women's reproductive freedom through abortion bans, non-accessible health care, and cuts in federal spending towards Planned …

Impact Of The “Nirbhaya” Rape Case: Isolated Phenomenon Or Social Change?, Tina P. Lapsia

Honors Scholar Theses

In December 2012, a twenty-three year old college student, who was given the pseudonym “Nirbhaya” (“fearless”), was fatally gang-raped on a private bus in Delhi, India, galvanizing the country to swiftly adopt new legislative measures and catapulting the issue of violence against women in India into the international spotlight. Although assault and rape cases have made India infamous for its high volume of crimes against women, the reaction to this particular incident was much different from before. This paper investigates whether the governmental and societal responses represent social change, as indicated by changing attitudes towards violence against women in India. …

"'The Law’S The Law, Right?' Sexual Minority Mothers Navigating Legal Inequities And Inconsistencies.”, Emily Kazyak

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

LGB parents face a number of legal inequities and confront a legal landscape that not only varies drastically by state but also quickly changes. Research has shown that some LGB parents and prospective parents have inaccurate knowledge about the laws relating to parenting. Drawing on data from 21 interviews, I ask how sexual minority mothers gain knowledge about the law. I found that people were very aware of the legal inequities they face and sought to become knowledgeable about the law before they had children. Sexual minority mothers reported using four primary methods to learn about the law: doing independent …

Professional Women Silenced By Men-Made Norms, Maritza I. Reyes

Journal Publications

The call of this symposium was for articles regarding women's rights and the movement toward equality. We are still wrestling with what equality should mean. In this Article, when I refer to equality I envision it as both a strategy and as the end goal. Equality as a strategy means assessing the inherent inequalities of particular situations and using the means necessary to remedy the inequalities and achieve equality as the end goal. The end goal is for women (with all our complexities and intersectionalities) to achieve the same rights and results as men (with all their complexities and intersectionalities) …

Moving Forward/Looking Back: Reclaiming And Revising Our Feminist Past And Searching For Solidarity, Cassandra Denise Fetters

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Interweaving personal anecdotes, feminist theory, and literary and popular culture references, this article attempts to provide answers to the question of how we build a social movement and establish solidarity among women while still recognizing and respecting difference. The article traces historical accounts of feminists contending with the “difference impasse” and argues that we should return to and revise the feminist thought that preceded us, weaving together theories from our feminist past with contemporary models, including those of feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin and her ideas of “mutual recognition” and intersubjectivity. Drawing on fictional accounts from literature by women writers, the …

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

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

She Had A Name That God Didn’T Give Her: Thinking The Body Through Atheistic Black Radical Feminism, Marquis Bey

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The article attempts to demonstrate the necessity of acknowledging the body when considering the current Black Lives Matter movement, give an account of Black female and trans erasure, and ultimately (re)affirm the lived embodiment of Black, female, and trans bodies, all through an atheistic lens. Atheism here, while indeed denying the existence of gods, has as its primary concern affirming life. Too often is theology, as theologian Anthony Pinn says, “a theology of no-body”; thus atheistic feminist Blackness, as understood here, seeks to entrench the body rather than abstract it. Atheistic feminist Blackness reinscribes and affirms the subjectivity and humanity …

“You Have To Confess”: Rape And The Politics Of Storytelling, Tara Roeder

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article examines the discourse of rape in contemporary culture, paying special attention to the courtroom setting, where rape victims are often required to tell cohesive, linear narratives that underscore their blamelessness if they hope to be believed. Because of deeply entrenched cultural myths about rape, the type of story often required for the successful prosecution of perpetrators may require rape victims to construct narratives that do not accurately reflect their lived experience. Writers such as Susan Brison, Patricia Weaver Francisco, and Alice Sebold engage with the complex politics of rape and its telling in their memoirs. While constructing stories …

She Legislates, He Scandalizes: Reenvisioning The Impact Of Political Sex Scandals On Assemblywomen In New York, Hinda Mandell

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

A rash of three political sex scandals within the span of less than two years, from 2012 to 2014, shook the New York State Assembly. All of the sex scandals involved male politicians accused of sexual harassment of female staffers and subordinates. This study investigates how New York State assemblywomen were impacted by the scandals of their male colleagues, exploring the “contagion” of scandals (Adut 2008). Interviews were conducted with eight assemblywomen in 2014, although all 33 assemblywomen serving in the legislature at the time of this research endeavor were invited to participate in a research interview. Findings indicate that …

The Power And Joy Of Derby: Women’S Participation, Empowerment, And Transformation In A Flat-Track Roller Derby Team, John Paul, Sharla Blank

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In what ways do sports make a difference in the lives of the people who play them? In this paper, we employ a sporting feminist perspective to answer this question and detail how women benefit from the sport of roller derby. Our analyses are structured around the themes of the body (exploring examples of bodily empowerment and reconceptualization); the team (highlighting feminist themes of loyalty and team as family); and the crowd (identifying the ways in which derby is “sold” to the crowd, as well as the ways in which athletes use derby to challenge conceptions of beauty, desirability, and …

Freedom From Violence And The Law: A Global Perspective In Light Of Chinese Domestic Violence Law, 2015, Rangita De Silva De Alwis, Jeni Klugman

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

‘Please Be A Lady… You Are Not Going To Be Heard’: The Debate Over The Ratification Of The Convention On The Elimination Of All Forms Of Discrimination Against Women, Kasie Durkit

International ResearchScape Journal

Why did the United States fail to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women? This overarching question forms the basis of this paper and will be answered using an array of primary and secondary sources. This paper gleans most of its evidence from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearings of 1994 and 2002, letters from both President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Congressional Research Service reports on CEDAW from 2013 and 2007, several Senators’ statements in the Congressional Record, Congressional testimony, and the text of the CEDAW treaty. This …

School-Based Supports For Trans Youth In Ontario, Charlie E. C. Davis

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Trans youth are some of the most marginalized youths in schools. In 2012, the Ontario Government passed two legislations, one of which was the Accepting Schools Act, strengthening supports for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning (LGBTQ) students in schools. The other was Toby’s Act, an amendment to the Ontario Human Rights Code including protection from discrimination on the grounds of gender identity and gender expression. The purpose of this thesis is to examine how these two acts have created a political context supporting trans youth in schools. A comprehensive mixed-methods approach was used to examine provincial trends of trans-specific …

Coercing Assimilation: The Case Of Muslim Women Of Color, Sahar F. Aziz

Faculty Scholarship

Today, I have been asked to address the domestic context of civil rights issues facing Muslim women in the United States. Admittedly, examining the experiences of Muslim American women is a risky endeavor because they are such a diverse group of women ethnically, racially, socio-economically, and religiously in terms of their levels of religiosity. Hence, I acknowledge the risk of essentializing, despite my best efforts to recognize the individual agency of each Muslim woman.

This lecture is based on a larger project that examines the myriad ways Muslim women are adversely affected by their intersectional identities, and how it impacts …

Intersectionality And Title Vii: A Brief (Pre-)History, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

Title VII was twenty-five years old when Kimberlé Crenshaw published her path-breaking article introducing “intersectionality” to critical legal scholarship. By the time the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reached its thirtieth birthday, the intersectionality critique had come of age, generating a sophisticated subfield and producing many articles that remain classics in the field of anti-discrimination law and beyond. Employment discrimination law was not the only target of intersectionality critics, but Title VII’s failure to capture and ameliorate the particular experiences of women of color loomed large in this early legal literature. Courts proved especially reluctant to recognize multi-dimensional discrimination against …

Evolving Standards Of Domination: Abandoning A Flawed Legal Standard And Approaching A New Era In Penal Reform, Spearit

Articles

This Article critiques the evolving standards of decency doctrine as a form of Social Darwinism. It argues that evolving standards of decency provided a system of review that was tailor-made for Civil Rights opponents to scale back racial progress. Although as a doctrinal matter, evolving standards sought to tie punishment practices to social mores, prison sentencing became subject to political agendas that determined the course of punishment more than the benevolence of a maturing society. Indeed, rather than the fierce competition that is supposed to guide social development, the criminal justice system was consciously deployed as a means of social …

Encouraging Maternal Sacrifice: How Regulations Governing The Consumption Of Pharmaceuticals During Pregnancy Prioritize Fetal Safety Over Maternal Health And Autonomy, Greer Donley

Articles

Pregnant women are routinely faced with the stressful decision of whether to consume needed medications during their pregnancies. Because the risks associated with pharmaceutical drug consumption during pregnancy are largely unknown, pregnant women both inadvertently consume dangerous medications and avoid needed drugs. Both outcomes are harmful to pregnant women and their fetuses. This unparalleled lack of drug safety information is a result of ill-conceived, paternalistic regulations in two areas of the law: regulations governing ethical research in human subjects and regulations that dictate the required labels on drugs. The former categorizes pregnant women as “vulnerable” and thus precludes them from …

Sex And The Shari’A: Defining Gender Norms And Sexual Deviancy In Shi’I Islam, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

This paper demonstrates that modern authoritative jurists working within the Shi’i tradition have developed their rules respecting sex regulation to serve three primary commitments. The first of these is that there is an intense and near debilitating desire on the part of human beings generally, though mostly men, for a great deal of sex. This desire must be satisfied, but it also must be tightly controlled. This is because of the second commitment, which is that excessive licentiousness is a form of secular distraction from a believer’s central obligation to worship God. Finally, and perhaps the most interesting, is the …

On Not 'Having It Both Ways' And Still Losing: Reflections On Fifty Years Of Pregnancy Litigation Under Title Vii, Deborah L. Brake

Articles

This article, published in the B.U. Law Review Symposium issue, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 at 50: Past, Present and Future,” reflects on the past fifty years of conflict and struggle over how to treat pregnancy discrimination under Title VII. Pregnancy has played a pivotal role in debates among feminist legal scholars and women’s rights advocates about the limitations of both the equal treatment and special treatment anti-discrimination frameworks. The article’s title references the much-discussed Wendy W. Williams cautionary note that if we cannot have it “both ways” we need to decide which way we want to have it …