Law and Gender Commons^™

Women’S Divorce Rights In Jordan: Legal Rights And Cultural Challenges, Helen David

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This research aims to examine women’s divorce rights in Jordan examining the topic both through their legal rights as well as through the cultural challenges and stigma that divorced women face. The research is focused specifically on the rights of Muslim women, who have to file for divorce through the Shari’a court system, in Jordan that are Jordanian nationals. The literature used in the research provides background insight into Jordan’s tribal system, family law in Jordan, and psychological theories that relate to group therapy and self-efficacy in divorced women. The researcher hypothesizes that despite the many socio-economic and legal reasons …

"Les Droits Ne Sont Pas Respectés": A Study Of The Effectiveness Of The Moroccan Law In Protecting The Human Rights Of Sub-Saharan Female Migrants, Meghan Gragg

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This paper aims to determine to what extent Moroccan law is protecting female Sub-Saharan migrants against human rights abuses and in the process, it attempts to determine what the Moroccan government needs to do differently to protect this population. Female migrant women from Sub-Saharan Africa are a population that suffers human rights abuses because of their dual positionality as both women and Sub-Saharan migrants: both of which are discriminated populations in Morocco. The research was carried out by communicating with lawyers and non-governmental organization (N.G.O.) team members who work with women to determine the common legal and social problems affecting …

Finishing The Job Best Practices For A Diverse Workforce In The Construction Industry V.8 Sept 2018, Susan Moir Scd

Labor Studies Faculty Publication Series

This manual is a work in progress. It is produced by the Policy Group on Tradeswomen’s Issues (PGTI), a regional collaboration of researchers, government agencies, unions, community-based organizations, developers and contractors committed to increasing access for women and people of color to good paying careers in the construction trades. Our goal is to make our shared efforts and experiences helpful to industry leaders who share our commitment. It is based on best practices developed on major projects that came close, met, or exceeded workforce hiring goals. This manual and additional resources are available online at on the PGTI website at …

Simon De Montfort Et Le Gouvernement : Statut Des Femmes Dans Les Statuts De Pamiers (Art. 46) Avant La Magna Carta, Marjolaine Raguin-Barthelmebs

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Promulgated at Pamiers (Languedoc, France), 1^stDecember 1212 by Simon de Montfort after its first great victory during the Albigensian Crusade, those Statutes (juridical texts) are known as the introductory act for the Coutume of Paris in Languedoc, and more specifically regarding heirs rights. Redacted for the administration of newly conquest territories, the establishment of peace and to promote catholic faith against heresy and Languedocians owners of the land, theses Statutes dispose on women in their three final articles. More particularly, the article 46 concerns nobles and heirs women and decides, thanks to matrimony institution, who (and how) they …

The Solid South: The Suffrage Campaign Revisited, Abby Lorraine Crenshaw

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This examination of the southern suffrage campaign focuses the movement through the eyes of three prominent southern women within the political movement: Kate Gordon, Sue Shelton White, and Josephine Pearson. The merged National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) planned and organized a focus on the South during the second half of the suffrage campaign, which presented new challenges. The Nineteenth Amendment passed through Congress in 1918 and consequently set the stage for a raging political battle between suffragists and anti-suffragists. The suffrage campaign prompted women to question how the political platform of suffrage should be addressed. Women argued over the …

Beyond The Movement: State Action In Addressing Campus Sexual Violence, Amijo Wadena

Political Science Theses and Capstones

The "Me Too" movement, started by actress Alyssa Milano, has helped shine a light on the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual violence throughout the country. While it has helped the public understand the magnitude of the issue, it has only started the conversation about sexual violence. And while the focus has mostly been on Hollywood, there has been one area that is being overlooked; sexual violence on College and University campuses. With Secretary DeVos' repeal of Obama era policies, the current administration is being a lot less transparent when it comes to sexual violence, in general. With policy-making responsibility …

The Next Forty Presidents, Ori Aronson

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

A thought experiment in feminist constitutionalism, this Article explores a radical argument: allow only women to be elected as the next forty U.S. presidents. While on its face blatantly discriminatory, the forty female presidents rule turns out to be a robustly justifiable idea, along multiple axes of political fairness, and not to women alone—rather to the electorate as a whole. Due to several of its unique characteristics, the presidency turns out to be particularly fitting to innovation that would correct past injustices of political exclusion. Corrective justice, affirmative action, feminist critique, voter autonomy, and the democratic costs of identity politics …

Emancipating The Passive Muse: A Call For A Feminist Approach To Writing Biographies On Historical Women, Ina C. Seethaler

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay analyzes two popular biographies on historical women to interrogate how a focus on gender has shaped the genre: Nancy Ruben Stuart’s The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation (2008) and Jung Chang’s Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (2013). I argue that biographers who perpetuate gender stereotypes miss a momentous opportunity during the current life writing boom in the United States to educate readers on women’s social, cultural, and political contributions worldwide. In proposing that feminist-informed biographies are more accurate, complete, and make social …

"We Aren't All The Same": The Singularity Of Reproductive Experiences Amidst Institutional Objectification In Argentina's Public Maternal Health Services, Sabrina S. Yañez

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Reproductive health services in Argentina are organized in ways that depersonalize, standardize, and fragment women’s bodies and lives. Alternatively, women’s accounts of their pregnancy, birth, and postpartum experiences reveal many nuances and moments of dislocation between experience and language: their immersion in social and material conditions; traces of ambivalence and contradiction; moves between continuity and fragmentation; density of lived time and space; and profound corporeal awareness. Guided by the methodological and conceptual premises of institutional ethnography, this article is a critical effort to explore experiential narratives as a means for apprehending what women perceive, need, and want during their reproductive …

Battleground Texas: Gendered Media Framing Of The 2014 Texas Gubernatorial Race, Susan E. Waters, Elizabeth A. Dudash-Buskirk, Rachel M. Pipan

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Feminist political theory is a sprawling theoretical field that intertwines sociological and philosophical perspectives and applies them to the study of campaigns, policy, voting, and the general structure of what Americans call politics. In Western democratic republics, the concept of participation has been hotly debated, specifically with regard to voting. Applying the critical lens of an intersectional feminist perspective introduces questions about the participation of different genders, races, classes, and cultural groups in political action, voting, and running for office. Before equal representation can be attained (if that is, indeed, desirable), it is important to understand how our politics are …

Reclaiming The Streets: Investigating Female Experience Of Cinematic Urban Violence, Angelica De Vido

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The spatial ideologies and narrative tropes of gendered victimhood, which are designed to induce fear and anxiety, are routinely employed to govern and restrict female access to and experience of urban spaces—both in cinematic depictions and in the real world. This paper explores how such tropes are challenged and rewritten in three screen narratives based in urban landscapes: London in Happy-Go- Lucky (2008), Paris in Amélie (2001), and New York in Sex and the City (1998–2004). Contrary to the ideologies of fear that routinely dominate urban narratives, I will argue that the texts under discussion instead display the city as …

Teaching Feminist Research Methods: A Comment And An Evaluation, Shannon N. Davis, Angela Hattery

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

What are feminist research methods and how are they different from other, non-feminist research methods? This paper begins by interrogating the question of how research methods become labeled as feminist. Building on this knowledge, we detail how this investigation guided our implementation of a new feminist research methods course sequence in a Women and Gender Studies program. This article is not an evaluation of our course; it is a feminist exercise in self-reflection on the feminist processes that, when invoked, results in feminist teaching of any course. But in this case, it is a course that is not always identified …

From The Editors, Heather M. Turcotte, Anupama Arora, Anna M. Klobucka, Jeannette E. Riley

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Precarious Responsibility: Teaching With Feminist Politics In The Marketized University, Lena Wånggren

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

One of the most pressing characteristics of the neoliberal restructuring of academia, together with increased managerialism, performativity measures, and a “customer service” approach, is the casualization or precarization of academic work. Casualization entails a fragmentation of academic work, where academics are forced to move between workplaces on hourly-paid and fixed-term contracts, often doing their job without access to resources such as an office, training, or paid research time. While a number of feminist scholars have investigated the ways in which feminist academics negotiate the ever-increasing mechanisms of individualization, ranking, and auditing of their work, this article focuses on the precarious …

The Maternal Assemblage: Nonprocreative Maternity As Contagion And Resistance, Charles E. Hicks

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article analyzes the consistent problematic of nonprocreative maternal identity, specifically its positioning in a heteronormative symbolic framework as the antithesis of biological or “real” motherhood. Using Lee Edelman’s work on the queer body’s relationship to a futural horizon, the first part addresses how the epistemological framework whereby nonprocreative maternal bodies are subjected to the image of the Child, a fantasy of wholeness, thematizes the nonprocreative maternal body as deviant and enacts a logic of repetition that supplements a heteronormative future. The second portion of this essay illustrates how, due to the monomaternalist matrix’s refusal to accept it as legitimate, …

Recreating And Reenvisioning Scandal: A Photographic Exploration Of The Eliot Spitzer And Anthony Weiner Press Conferences, Hinda Mandell, Meredith Davenport

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"We Sick": The Deweys As Women's Willful Self-Destruction In Toni Morrison's Sula, Kathleen Anderson, Gayle Fallon

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Toni Morrison explores the complexities of race, gender, and matrilineal influence in Sula. Although much recent feminist criticism has addressed the operations of race and gender in the novel, this essay provides the first developed examination of Morrison’s strategic use of three diminutive boys, all named “dewey,” to emphasize the willfully self-destructive tendencies of the novel’s female characters. Burdened with their community’s limiting idealizations of femininity and motherhood, the women of Sula practice various forms of self-harm in an effort to develop and proclaim their holistic, autonomous selves. The deweys’ mischievous childhood games foreshadow the consequences of female self-harm, but …

Just Like Us: Elizabeth Kendall’S Imperfect Quest For Equality, Kate Rose

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay analyzes United States academic Elizabeth Kendall’s 1913 travelogue A Wayfarer in China through the lenses of gender and criticism of imperialism. In China, Kendall sought to transcend social norms while reflecting empathetically, though sometimes contradictorily, on the lives of the people she encountered. In her travelogue, Kendall is exploring China’s wild areas but also the metaphysical, untamed space beyond conventions in a quest for gender equality and cultural autonomy. She also defends Chinese immigrants in the US at a time of overwhelming anti-Asian prejudice.

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

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Very Long Engagements: The Persistent Authority Of Bridewealth In A Post-Apartheid South African Community, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

This article examines the persistent authority of the customary practice for forming recognized marriages in many South African communities, centered on bridewealth and called “lobola.” Marriage rates have sharply fallen in South Africa, and many South Africans blame this on the difficulty of completing lobola amid intense economic strife. Using in-depth qualitative research from a village in KwaZulu-Natal, where lobola demands are the country’s highest and marriage rates its lowest, I argue that lobola’s authority survives because lay actors, and especially women, have innovated new repertoires of lobola behavior that allow them to pursue emerging needs and desires for marriage …

Lessons For Legalizing Love: A Case Study Of The Naz Foundation's Campaign To Decriminalize Homosexuality In India, Preston G. Johnson

Capstone Collection

In 1860, British colonizers codified Section 377 into the Indian Penal Code. 377 is an anti-sodomy law based on Victorian/Judeo-Christian values which criminalizes homosexuality through judicial interpretation and the manipulation of ambiguous language. On August 15^th, 2017, India celebrated 70 years of independence from British control, yet 377 still exerts oppressive control over the safety and freedom of Indian LGBTQI communities. Defining queerness as perversion has caused LGBTQI individuals to become victims of false accusations, blackmail, harassment, housing and workplace discrimination, familial rejection, forced “conversion therapy”, assault, rape, torture, and even murder because of this power imbalance and …

The Legacy Of British Rule On Lgbt Rights In Jamaica And The Cayman Islands, Zachary Stewart

Master's Theses

This thesis explores the relationship between British colonial influence and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) rights in the Caribbean. Comparing the Cayman Islands, a British Overseas Territory, and Jamaica, an independent former colony of the United Kingdom, the situation for LGBT people is evaluated. While Jamaica has serious abuses and a concerning situation for the human rights of LGBT people, the Cayman Islands’ LGBT community’s position is far less concerning. Owing to its continued connection to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Cayman Islands’ LGBT rights situation is much less dire. Through British influence via …

Dean's Desk: Past And Present, Women Play Key Roles At Iu Maurer, Austen L. Parrish

Austen Parrish (2014-2022)

Under first lady Laurie Burns McRobbie’s leadership, Indiana University founded Women’s Philanthropy as one way to celebrate alumnae leadership and to make the achievements of our most talented and trailblazing women graduates more visible. As the IU Maurer School of Law’s 175th year draws to a close, consistent with these larger University efforts, it’s an opportune time to celebrate some of the law school’s extraordinary women graduates. Their stories are powerful and inspiring, and I’m pleased to share just a few.

Remembering An Abolitionist, Ambassador John R. Miller (May 23, 1938-October 4, 2017), Eleanor Kennelly Gaetan, Donna M. Hughes

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

A memorial for Ambassador-at-Large to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, John R. Miller (May 23, 1938-October 4, 2017). Ambassador Miller believed modern-day slavery, encompassing sex trafficking and forced labor, requires a principled global offensive that the United States is morally obligated to lead. In the four formative years he led the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, 2002 to 2006, John Miller set the office’s course as diplomatically aggressive and programmatically creative. He made the annual Trafficking in Persons report more than a bureaucratic submission, putting daring heroes at the center, and insisting on compelling …

Beyond Vulnerability: Refugee Women’S Leadership In Jordan, Widad Hassan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While both men and women are affected by conflicts and humanitarian crises, 80 percent of the world’s refugees and internally displaced persons are women and children, indicating that women experience conflict and war differently. The emphasis on women’s vulnerability during conflicts and humanitarian crises leads to their exclusion from leadership roles and decision-making on humanitarian programs and issues that impact them. Though women experience numerous socio-cultural barriers to exercising leadership in humanitarian settings, they have taken on important roles in emergency response and in refugee camps. This paper traces the progress of UN and humanitarian agencies recognition and development of …

More Women In Parliament: Advocacy Lessons Learned From The Georgian Women’S Task Force On Political Participation, Emma Shattuck

Capstone Collection

Emma Shattuck – PIM 75

MORE WOMEN IN PARLIAMENT: ADVOCACY LESSONS LEARNED

FROM THE GEORGIAN WOMEN’S TASK FORCE ON POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

May 2017

This Policy Advocacy Course-Linked Capstone is a case study of an on-going advocacy campaign to increase women’s political participation in the Republic of Georgia’s Parliament. It tells the story of a dedicated group of advocates who are determined to help Georgian women’s voices be heard in a primarily male-dominated political context. Drawing on my personal experience living and working in Tbilisi, Georgia, and based on comprehensive key informant interviews with leaders of the campaign, I analyze the …

Telling A Story, Changing The World: California Rural Legal Assistance, Jonathan J. Chavez

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This capstone project attempts to provide an in-depth view of how stories influence change in our lives as well as in the field of law.

Female Autonomy: An Analysis Of Privacy And Equality Doctrine For Reproductive Rights, Elizabeth Levi

Political Science Honors Projects

What is the constitutional basis for women’s equality? Recently, scholars have suggested that as the right to privacy has floundered against the political undoing of women's access to abortion, equal protection arguments have grown stronger. This thesis investigates the feminist utility and limits of the equality and privacy arguments. Taking liberal feminism and feminist legal theory as analytical lenses, I offer interpretations of gender discrimination, reproductive rights, and marriage equality case law. By this framework, I argue that while an equality argument is less inherently oppressive towards women than the privacy doctrine, equality doctrine has been constructed thus far to …

The Tension Between Equal Protection And Religious Freedom, John M. Greabe

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] "The Constitution did not become our basic law at a single point in time. We ratified its first seven articles in 1788 but have since amended it 27 times. Many of these amendments memorialize fundamental shifts in values. Thus, it should come as no surprise to learn that the Constitution is not an internally consistent document."

…

"Other constitutional provisions -- even provisions that were simultaneously enacted -- protect freedoms that can come into conflict with one another. The First Amendment, for example, promises both freedom from governmental endorsement of religion and freedom from governmental interference with religious practice. …

Twenty Reasons To Publish In Dignity, Donna M. Hughes

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.