Law and Gender Commons^™

Divorcing Gender From Marriage: A Feminist Perspective On The Jurisprudence Of Transgendered Marriage, Michelle Cass

DePaul Journal of Women, Gender and the Law

Sex is an immutable characteristic; says who? As transgendered people and LGBTQQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning) issues gain more traction and recognition, the clear contours of sex and gender are fading, and a more fluid concept of gender is emerging. However, the American legal system lags behind the mutability of gender in an environment where the conceptualization and understanding of gender is becoming ever more nuanced and complex. This is most apparent in the law’s treatment of transgendered marriage: a marriage involving at least one person who identifies as transgendered. A transgendered person can be defined as a …

Fifty Shades Of Oppression: Sadomasochism, Feminism, And The Law, Jacqueline Horn

DePaul Journal of Women, Gender and the Law

Can sadomasochism (S/M) be reconciled with feminism? When pain is pleasure and humiliation is empowerment, how should the law respond? This article investigates S/M under the legal gaze, particularly the manner in which legal theory and legal practice have constructed female masochism. This article argues that the jurisprudence of S/M is formed by the perception of the “sexual other” as a threat to the normative sexual behavior the law has worked tirelessly to maintain. Historically, society – and by extension the law – has been intolerant of behavior that transgresses sexual norms. As Laura A. Rosenbury and Jennifer E. Rothman …

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 …

Anti-Rape Culture, Aya Gruber

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Stereotyped Offender: Domestic Violence And The Failure Of Intervention, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Publications

Scholars and battered women's advocates now recognize that many facets of the legal response to intimate-partner abuse stereotype victims and harm abuse survivors who do not fit commonly accepted paradigms. However, it is less often acknowledged that the feminist analysis of domestic violence also tends to stereotype offenders and that state action, including court-mandated batterer intervention, is premised on these offender stereotypes. The feminist approach can be faulted for minimizing or denying the role of substance abuse, mental illness, childhood trauma, race, culture, and poverty in intimate-partner abuse. Moreover, those arrested for domestic violence crimes now include heterosexual women, lesbians, …

When Theory Met Practice: Distributional Analysis In Critical Criminal Law Theorizing, Aya Gruber

Publications

Progressive (critical race and feminist) theorizing on criminal law exists within an overarching American criminal law culture in which the U.S penal system has become a "peculiar institution" and a defining governance structure. Much of criminal law discourse is subject to a type of ideological capture in which it is natural to assume that criminalization is a valid, if not preferred, solution to social dysfunction. Accordingly, progressives’ primary concerns about harms to minority victims takes place in a political-legal context in which criminalization is the technique of addressing harm. In turn, progressive criminal law theorizing manifests some deep internal tensions. …

How Feminist Theory Became (Criminal) Law: Tracing The Path To Mandatory Criminal Intervention In Domestic Violence Cases, Claire Houston

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Our popular understanding of domestic violence has shifted significantly over the past forty years, and with it, our legal response. We have moved from an interpretation of domestic violence as a private relationship problem managed through counseling techniques to an approach that configures domestic violence first and foremost as a public crime. Mandatory criminal intervention policies reflect and reinforce this interpretation. How we arrived at this point, and which understanding of domestic violence facilitated this shift, is the focus of this Article. I argue that the move to intense criminalization has been driven by a distinctly feminist interpretation of domestic …

Corporate Governance Sex Regimes: Peripheral Thoughts From Across The Atlantic, Horatia Muir Watt

Pace International Law Review

The very recent and highly mediatized “Declaration of the 343 Salauds”, where 343 (male) signatures in support of prostitution in a form designed to echo the highly significant declaration of as many women in 1971 in favor of the legalization of abortion, sheds particularly interesting light upon debate about sex regimes in connection with French law. France has recently introduced compulsory quotas for women in corporate boards after imposing la parité for public appointments. A comparative perspective, confronting this recent legislative development from across the Atlantic with policy views on affirmative action and philosophical conceptions of diversity in the United …

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 …

Emerging Issues: Overthrowing The Government: What Boko Haram Means For Women, Kimberly R. Frazier

University of Baltimore Journal of International Law

Boko Haram has been active since 2002, however, most of the world became familiar with the Islamic terrorist group in April of 2014 after they kidnapped approximately 276 girls from a boarding school in northeastern Nigeria.1 The group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, announced in a video that the kidnapping was an act of retaliation after Nigerian security forces kidnapped the wives and children of Boko Haram leaders.2 He also stated that the girls would be forced to convert to Islam and sold into the slave market to begin their new lives as “servants.”3 The kidnapping was not the first act of …

I Am/I Am Not: On Angela Harris's Race And Essentialism In Feminist Legal Theory, Mary Anne Franks

Articles

In 1990, Angela Harris wrote an article that interrogated the limitations of feminist legal theory. Nearly a quarter of a century later, the insights and challenges Harris offered in Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory continue to reverberate. The influence of her ideas can be seen in the fractured and passionate conversations about gender, race, and solidarity occurring both inside and outside of academia. In recent years, we have witnessed an explosion of debate of these topics in social media forums such as Twitter and Facebook. Far from being trivial, the intensity and persistence of these conversations suggest a …

Flexible Feminism And Reproductive Justice: An Essay In Honor Of Ann Scales, Lynne Henderson

Scholarly Works

Professor Ann Scales began her distinguished career by taking feminism and reproductive justice seriously. She became a leading feminist voice and influence on a number of topics. In later years, she returned to concerns about reproductive justice by presciently emphasizing the need to preserve women’s access to abortions.

This Essay discusses Professor Scales’s concerns and feminist method and then turns to reproductive justice. The Essay notes that, with Scales, a right to abortion is foundational for reproductive justice. The Essay then examines the increasing narrowing of access to abortion through law. The Essay next examines a current crisis over access …

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 …

The Ethical Obligations Of Defence Counsel In Sexual Assault Cases, Elaine Craig

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The treatment of sexual assault complainants by defence counsel has been the site of significant debate for legal ethicists. Even those with the strongest commitment to the ethics of zealous advocacy struggle with how to approach the cross-examination of sexual assault complainants. One of the most contentious issues in this debate pertains to the use of bias, stereotype and discriminatory tactics to advance one’s client’s position. This paper focuses on the professional responsibilities defence lawyers bear in sexual assault cases. Its central claim is as follows: Defence counsel are ethically obligated to restrict their carriage of a sexual assault case …

Feminism, Democracy, And The "War On Women", Michele E. Gilman

All Faculty Scholarship

This article analyzes the social conservative attacks on women preceding the 2012 election cycle, known as the War on Women, and the ensuing feminist response. Combat was waged on many fronts, including abortion restrictions, access to contraception, funding for Planned Parenthood, welfare programs, and workplace fairness. The article discusses what this "war" means for the complex relationship between feminism and democracy. American democracy has had both liberating and oppressive effects for women, while feminism has sometimes struggled internally to appropriate the values of democracy and externally to harness its potential. Accordingly, the article explains the major political theories regarding feminism …

True Feminism: Identifying The Real Threats To Women, Cynthia Noland Dunbar

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

No abstract provided.

For Nontraditional Names' Sake: A Call To Reform The Name-Change Process For Marrying Couples, Meegan Brooks

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In a large number of states, women are encouraged to take their husbands’ surnames at marriage by being offered an expedited name-change process that is shorter, less expensive, and less invasive than the statutory process that men must complete. If a couple instead decides to take an altogether-new name at marriage, the vast majority of states require that each spouse complete the longer statutory process. This name-change system emerged from a long history of naming as a way for men to dominate women. This Note emphasizes the need for name-change reform, arguing that the current system perpetuates antiquated patriarchal values …

The Legacy Of Jane Larson: The Politics Of Practicality And Surprise, Martha M. Ertman

Faculty Scholarship

Jane Larson's work and life enriched my own and others. Her intellectual framework - applying legal economic ideas of consent to feminist theory, backed up by legal history - suggest surprising practical solutions to problems ranging from the injuries of adultery and prostitution to housing in border towns.

What's Feminism Got To Do With It? Examination Of Feminism In Women's Everyday Lives, Claire Carter

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In recent decades there has been considerable debate about the role and meaning of feminism in younger women's lives. Feminism can be understood as an empowering discourse, fostering critical awareness and resistance to dominant social norms. However, it can also be experienced as regulatory and disciplinary, clearly defining who and what constitutes a "good" feminist. Utilizing Michel Foucault's principle of care of the self, this paper analyzes women's body practices in relation both to women's interpretation of feminism and to dominant feminist discourses. The complexities of negotiating diverse social identities, as well as women's desire for a happier life and …

(Re)Pinning Our Hopes On Social Media: Pinterest And Women's Discursive Strategies, Katherine Gantz

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Pinterest, the theme-based image-sharing website, has seen a predominantly female usership since its launch in 2010. Unique in both its design and its demographics in the US, the site has generated distinctive patterns of use, posing new questions about how women are claiming this particular spot in social media as their own. Supported by both feminist linguistic and social science research, this article undertakes a discussion of Pinterest's implicit and explicit gendered protocols of usership, which result in what I argue is an emerging women's online rhetoric. Through the examination of images and accompanying comments taken from the site, I …

An Incomplete Revolution: Feminists And The Legacy Of Marital-Property Reform, Mary Ziegler

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

As this Article shows, the conventional historical narrative of the divorce revolution is not so much incorrect as incomplete. Histories of the divorce revolution have focused disproportionately on the introduction of no-fault rules and have correctly concluded that women's groups did not play a central role in the introduction of such laws. However, work on divorce law has not adequately addressed the history of marital-property reform or engaged with scholarship on the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment to the federal Constitution. Putting these two bodies of work in dialogue with one another, the Article provides the first comprehensive history …

Baring Inequality: Revisiting The Legalization Debate Through The Lens Of Strippers' Rights, Sheerine Alemzadeh

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The debate over legalization of prostitution has fractured the feminist legal community for over a quarter century. Pro-legalization advocates promote the benefits attending government regulation of prostitution, including the ability to better prosecute sex crimes, increase public health and educational resources for individuals in the commercial sex trade, and apply labor and safety regulations to the commercial sex industry in the same manner as they are applied to other businesses. Some anti-legalization advocates identify themselves as "new abolitionists," and argue that government recognition of prostitution reinforces gender inequality. Often, this debate is framed in the hypothetical: What would happen if …

Moving Beyond "Slaves, Sinners, And Saviors": An Intersectional Feminist Analysis Of Us Sex-Trafficking Discourses, Law And Policy, Carrie N. Baker

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This article analyzes stories and images of sex trafficking in current mainstream US public discourses, including government publications, NGO materials, news media, and popular films. Noting the similarities and differences among these discourses, the first part demonstrates that they often frame sex trafficking using a rescue narrative that reiterates traditional beliefs and values regarding gender, sexuality, and nationality, relying heavily on patriarchal and orientalist tropes. Reflecting this rescue narrative, mainstream public policies focus on criminal justice solutions to trafficking. The second part suggests alternative frameworks that empower rather than rescue trafficked people. The article argues that the dominant criminal justice …

Underneath Her Pantsuit: A Reflection On Hanna Rosin's The End Of Men, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

In her book, The End of Men, ¹ Hanna Rosin argues that women have “surpassed” men. This new reality necessitates a reevaluation of marriage, family, sex, and gender roles.² To further her claim, Rosin dedicates a chapter of her book to the topic of violence committed by women. She argues that women are becoming more violent³ :

The new [trope] taps into a fear that as they gain more power, women will use violence and their new specialized skills to get what they want. Singular and exotic though these cases may be, they raise the broader unsettling possibility …

Neofeminism, Aya Gruber

Publications

Today it is prosaic to say that "feminism is dead." Far from being moribund, feminist legal theory is breaking from its somewhat dogmatic past and forging ahead with new vigor. Many modern feminist legal scholars seek innovative ways to better the legal, social, and economic status of women while simultaneously questioning some of the more troubling moves of second-wave feminism, such as the tendency to essentialize the woman's experience, the turn to authoritarian state policies, and the characterization of women as pure objects or agents. These "neofeminists" prioritize women's issues but maintain a strong commitment to distributive justice and recognize …

Images Of Men In Feminist Legal Theory , Brian Bendig

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law, Land, Identity: The Case Of Lady Anne Clifford, Carla Spivack

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This article presents the case history of Lady Anne Clifford, a seventeenth century Englishwoman who spent most of her adult life fighting to regain her ancestral estates, which she felt her father had unjustly left to her uncle instead of to her. Although, as the article explains, she had the better of the legal argument, that was no match for the combined forces of her two husbands and of King James I, who sought to deprive her of her land. Finally, however, because Clifford outlived her uncle's son, the last male heir, she did inherit the estates.

The article examines …

Globalization And The Re-Establishment Of Women's Land Rights In Nigeria: The Role Of Legal History, Adetoun Ilumoka

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Much has been written on women's limited legal rights to land in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, which is often attributed to custom and customary law. Persisting biases against women in legal regimes governing land ownership, allocation and use, result in a situation in which women, in all age groups, are vulnerable to dispossession and to abuse by male relatives in increasingly patriarchal family and community governance structures.

This paper raises questions about the genesis of ideas about women's rights to land in Nigeria today. It is an analysis of two court cases from South Western Nigeria in the early …

Engendering The History Of Race And International Relations: The Career Of Edith Sampson, 1927–1978, Gwen Jordan

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Edith Sampson was one of the leading black women lawyers in Chicago for over fifty years. She was admitted to the bar in 1927 and achieved a number of firsts in her career: the first black woman judge in Illinois, the first African American delegate to the United Nations, and the first African American appointed to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Sampson was also a pro-democracy, international spokesperson for the U.S. government during the Cold War, a position that earned her scorn from more radical African Americans, contributed to a misinterpretation of her activism, and resulted in her relative obscurity …

Women Lawyers And Women's Legal Equality: Reflections On Women Lawyers At The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition In Chicago, Mary Jane Mossman

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In Chicago in 1893, for the first time in history, women lawyers were invited to participate with male lawyers and judges at the Congress on Jurisprudence and Law Reform, one of a number of Congresses organized in conjunction with the World's Columbian Exposition. By the 1890s, women lawyers had achieved considerable success for at least two decades in gaining admission to state bars in the United States, and their success provided important precedents for women who wished to become lawyers in other parts of the world. Yet, as Nancy Cott explained, although women's admission to the professions had been seen …