Race,gender and sexuality: The oppression of multiculturalism

In this article we analyse the impact of multicultural ideology on struggles for equality in the spheres of gender, race/ethnicity and sexuality. We argue that multiculturalism has permeated theory, policy and action in these areas and that this has resulted in divisions and conflicts between movements for human rights. This has allowed an uncritical brand of multiculturalism to flourish which operates to further oppress already disadvantaged groups. We illustrate our thesis in relation to the violence committed against Black/Asian women through such cultural practices as forced arranged marriage, domestic violence and female genital mutilation. We also note the violence against gay and lesbian people which is sanctioned by some cultural and religious traditions. We conclude that failure to address fundamental questions about possible limits to cultural diversity in liberal democratic societies has implications for the continued oppression of the least powerful and the future of human rights.     

‘Immorality’, Nationalism and the Colonial State in British Malaya: Indian ‘coolie’ women's intimate lives as ideological battleground

ABSTRACT

Cases settled by colonial courts in British Malaya often revolved around issues of gender, class, race and colonial law. This article uses official and non-official archival records to explore the realities hidden behind the gender stereotypes conveyed in accounts given by colonial authorities and Indian nationalists of immorality and domestic violence. It makes a detailed investigation of alleged offences committed by husbands or partners of ‘deviant’ women, and illustrates factors influencing the attitudes of colonial courts, newspapers, members of the coolie community and Indian nationalists towards such incidents. Coolie women lived under oppressive conditions arising from colonial rule, capitalist exploitation and patriarchal control. In seeking to escape unsuitable marriages or oppressive relationships, women exhibited fleeting signs of agency, but neither colonial administrators nor nationalist leaders acknowledged the agency of women. The image of coolie women as passive victims allowed colonial administrators to present themselves as protectors of social order, and nationalist leaders to accuse colonial administrations of failing to preserve the social and moral welfare of their subjects. Illustrating the importance of gender in the political struggle between colonialism and nationalism, this article suggests the need for a sensitive understanding of how subjugated individuals, especially coolie women, reacted to such socio-political situations. In so doing, the article provides a nuanced and complex interpretation of social control as well as agency of subjugated individuals in colonial plantation contexts.     

Battered Women’s Experiences of the Criminal Justice System: Decentring the Law

This article takes up Smart??s suggestion to examine the way the law works in practice. It explores the context of current criminal prosecutions of domestic violence offences in Queensland, Australia. This article argues that legal method is applied outside the higher courts or ??judge-oriented?? practice and that the obstacles inherent to legal method can be identified in the practices of police, lower court staff, magistrates and lawyers. This article suggests that it may be difficult to deconstruct legal method, even by focussing on law in practice, and as a result it may be difficult to successfully challenge law??s truth claims in this way. The analysis of criminal prosecutions of domestic violence offences reported here supports Smart??s earlier findings that women and children who seek redress through the criminal justice process find the process at best ambivalent and at worst, destructive. However, the article also shows how, in the Queensland context, women sometimes find their way to feminism and personal empowerment by going to law.     

Gender,Care, and the Normalization of Violence: Similarities between Occupational Violence and Intimate Partner Violence in Finland

According to the statistics, violence against women is quite common in Finland, particularly in partner relationships and in care work. The present article looks at the similarities in the ways in which victims of occupational violence in care work and victims of intimate partner violence understand their experiences of violence. The commonalities among interpersonal relations are highlighted in order to offer new insights to the analysis of gender in research on occupational violence. Drawing on empirical data and research literature on the experiences of violence of Finnish women, this article suggests that minimization, naturalization and legitimization of the encountered violence is typical for women in care work as well as for quite ordinary women in their intimate relationships.

The article identifies gendered ideals of caring as an area overlapping and in disjunction with violence at work and at home. These contribute to the ways in which women tend to belittle the impact of violence targeted at them in both these spheres of life. Women are traditionally assumed to be responsible for taking care of others and for maintaining interpersonal relations. In the Finnish context, the responsibility for care is associated with an assumption of endurance that Finnish women show even in violent situations. However, the complexities involved in the phenomenon of interpersonal violence give rise to a need of conceptualizing gender in a more multi‐faceted manner than as a binary opposition between men and women. While analysing the gendered meanings of care we should bear in mind the dynamic nature of gender as a process of signification.     

Fleeing rural violence: Mam women seeking gendered justice in Guatemala and the U.S.

ABSTRACT

I use the concept of gendered embodied structures of violence as the analytical framework for illustrating how in rural Huehuetenango, Guatemala, historical and contemporary structures and processes of violence which center the normalization of multiple forms of implied or actual physical and sexual violence against women (and often other men and children) continue to undermine efforts to strengthen women’s rights and provide access to safety and justice for women. Overlapping structures of primarily male power suggest the difficulty of separating state and non-state actors from the vectors of violence affecting women. This article contributes to emerging literature on indigenous women’s access to justice in Latin America through adding a transnational lens to this discussion and suggesting why we cannot separate pubic from private violence and state from non-state actors.     

Female bigamists: their particular position in the Canadian courts and media

Concentrating on women bigamists allows one to gauge social conceptions and attitudes towards marriage. Their relatively high presence in the courts, especially during wartime, points to closer monitoring of their lives. Patriarchal society tolerated less their perceived crossing of morality lines. Paradoxically, the courts by imposing lighter sentences, and the media by portraying many female bigamists first and foremost as victims, recognized that they did not threaten Canadian society to the same extent that male bigamists did. Although jurists did not make it explicit in bigamy laws that marriage served to protect women and children, the courts did not hesitate to assign that function when passing judgment. The analysis of bigamy prosecutions and press coverage, instead of showcasing how the patriarchal institution of marriage oppressed women, highlights its paternalistic benevolence.     

special guest contribution: violence against women as a barrier to the realisation of human rights and the effective exercise of citizenship

This article focuses on violence against women as a barrier to the realisation of women’s civil, political, economic, social, cultural and developmental rights, as well as the consequences of this for the effective exercise of citizenship. The value of adopting a citizenship lens, identifying the nexus between violence against women and human rights, and adopting an approach that acknowledges the multiplicity, intersectionality and continuity of violence across the public and private spheres serves to assist in identifying and providing an analysis of the continuing challenges in the quest to eliminate violence against women. Owing to the scarcity of literature that explicitly highlights the link between human rights, citizenship and violence against women, the current analysis highlights some of the existing literature on a situated understanding of citizenship through a women’s human rights lens, while the discussion on violence against women as a barrier to realising all human rights that enable the exercise of effective citizenship is largely underpinned by the work of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its Causes and Consequences.     

Manhood Deprived and (Re)constructed during Conflicts and International Prosecutions: The Curious Case of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Prosecutor v. Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta et al.</Emphasis>

Recent case law on sexual violence crimes heard before the ad hoc international criminal tribunals and courts, that interpret them in connection with ethnic conflict, raises the question of which acts can be defined as sexual violence. The International Criminal Court (ICC), in the situation of Kenya, does not regard acts of forced nudity, forcible circumcision and penile amputation as sexual violence when they are motivated by ethnic prejudice and intended to demonstrate the cultural superiority of one tribe over another. The Court argues that not every act of violence that targets parts of the body commonly associated with sexuality should be considered an act of sexual violence. This recent interpretation of what counts as sexual violence provides another example of the complicity of international criminal law institutions in the ongoing construction process of female subordination. The ICC, in the Kenya situation, implicitly confirms the mutilation of female agency by interpreting penile amputation as a kind of power game between males, and by instrumentalizing the male sexual organ as an indicator of masculinity and manhood.     

the gender politics of political violence: women armed activists in ETA

This article aims to contribute to the developing area of feminist scholarship on women and political violence, through a study of women in one of Europe's oldest illegal armed movements, the radical Basque nationalist organization ETA. By tracing the changing patterns of women's participation in ETA over the past four decades, the article highlights the historical factors that help explain the choice of a small number of Basque women to participate directly in political violence, and shows how these factors have differed from those for men. While the gender politics of radical nationalism are intricately linked to cross-cultural associations of militarism with certain forms of masculinity, the article also stresses the importance of understanding women's activism in ETA in the context of the organization's characteristic as an ethnic nationalist movement, as well as the wider historical circumstances of the movement's development, including the modernization of Spanish and Basque society over the past four decades. Although comparisons with women in other armed movements are possible, such historical specificities undermine any attempt to construct a universal theory of women and ‘terrorism’, such as Robin Morgan's ‘couple terrorism’ thesis. Finally, the article examines the changing representations of female ETA activists in the Spanish and Basque media. Although women ETA activists are now regarded as ‘normal’, popular representations continue to link women's armed activism with deviant sexuality and the transgression of their natural destiny as mothers. The different treatment of women is evident as well in claims of sexual torture made by some detainees. The article concludes that although the participation of women in political violence poses disquieting questions for the largely anti-militarist women's movement, case studies of women in armed organizations, as well as their place in the wider practices of conflict, are an important contribution both to feminist debates about violence and to wider studies of political violence.     

Rethinking Monastic Suppressions in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Italy: how women religious negotiated for their communities

Female religious communities and individual women religious confronted the monastic suppressions in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Italy by actively negotiating with authorities both during and after the suppression decrees. The lack of the voices of the suppressed women religious in current scholarship has led scholars to argue for top-down, predetermined reorganization and destruction of religious life in revolutionary and Napoleonic Italy. A comparison of the three main suppression decrees reveals, instead, an evolving approach to religious institutions during this period. The petitions by women religious underscore how compromise and accommodation characterized the interactions between female communities and local and central authorities. The suppression of monasteries was not imposed on monastic women unilaterally; rather, these women actively negotiated the suppressions to optimize the outcome for their communities and for themselves.     

Exploring the boundaries of law, gender and social reform

Conclusion Both dowry and domestic violence are manifestations of the socially subordinate position of women in India, in particular of women in relation to and within the institution of marriage. Studies reveal how the socio economic changes ushered in by modernisation have interacted with traditional norms to sustain these practices and through them, the subordination of women. The women’s movement began addressing these social problems through law, and has through the years continued to critique the law for its failure to deliver. The critiques and debates arising from this concern have periodically generated recommendations for law reform, higher sentencing, widening the net of criminalisation, creation of special women’s police stations and courts in addition to strategies for raising gender awareness amongst the judiciary and the police. This article attempts to suggest that the shortcomings of the decades of women’s engagement with the law is not merely because of flaws and gender bias within the law, but more importantly, because of the expectations from the law and the centrality placed on its role in social transformation. The author is a lawyer and researcher based in New Delhi. She is presently Steering Committee member of the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development, a regional organisation.     

The continuum of violence against women in canadian universities : Toward a new understanding of the chilly campus climate

This paper examines various components which constitute the “chilly climate” for women in universities and argues that such behaviours and institutional practices must be understood as forms of violence against women. The instances of violence against women on campus are connected to each other because each incident represents men's attempts to socially control women through force, coercion, abuse, and silencing.     

Sexual Assault and the Meaning of Power and Authority for Women with Mental Disabilities

The sexual assault of persons with mental disabilities (also described as cognitive, intellectual and developmental disabilities) occurs at alarmingly high rates worldwide. These assaults are a form of gender-based violence intersecting with discrimination based on disability. Our research on the treatment of such cases in the Canadian criminal justice system demonstrates the systemic barriers these victims face at the level of both substantive legal doctrine and trial procedure. Relying on feminist legal theory and disability theory, we argue in this paper that abuses of trust and power underlie most sexual assaults of women with mental disabilities. We argue that existing Criminal Code provisions in Canada are inadequate to address this type of exploitation because courts have consistently failed to recognize that such abuses of power and trust are fundamentally inconsistent with any notion of voluntary consent.     

A Woman’s Work is… Unfinished Business: Justice for the Disappeared Magdalen Women of Modern Ireland

In this article I explore one core feature of contemporary campaigns for justice for Ireland’s Magdalen women concerning their deaths and disappearances, which continue to be denied by a State that has only recently started to acknowledge civilian deaths in other contexts such as armed conflict. I examine the treatment of the disappeared and deceased Magdalen women in the economic and political context of the Irish use of religious institutions and consider the significance of this regime for women’s citizenship in the postcolonial nation-building processes of the twentieth century. I aim to illustrate the connections between gender, violence and citizenship that are implicated in outcomes for justice for Magdalen survivors and victims, as well as conceptions of Irish women’s citizenship in general. In this discussion I consider the Magdalen campaigns for justice as significant for the individual women and families involved, as well as the entire nation’s conception of self as represented in history.     

exploring symbolic violence in the everyday: misrecognition,condescension, consent and complicity

In this paper, we draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘misrecognition’, ‘condescension’ and ‘consent and complicity’ to demonstrate how domination and violence are reproduced in everyday interactions, social practices, institutional processes and dispositions. Importantly, this constitutes symbolic violence, which removes the victim’s agency and voice. Indeed, we argue that as symbolic violence is impervious, insidious and invisible, it also simultaneously legitimises and sustains other forms of violence as well. Understanding symbolic violence together with traditional discourses of violence is important because it provides a richer insight into the ‘workings’ of violence, and provides new ways of conceptualising violence across a number of social fields and new strategies for intervention. Symbolic violence is a valuable tool for understanding contentious debates on the disclosure of violence, women leaving or staying in abusive relationships or returning to their abusers. While we focus only on violence against women, we recognise that the gendered nature of violence produces its own sets of vulnerabilities against men and marginalised groups, such as LGBT. The paper draws on empirical research conducted in Sweden in 2003. Sweden is an interesting case study because despite its progressive gender equality policies, there has been no marked decrease in violence towards women by men.     

independence,dependency and interdependence: struggles and resistances of minoritized women within and on leaving violent relationships

This paper draws on research conducted in Manchester, UK, examining service responses to African, African-Caribbean, Irish, Jewish and South Asian women experiencing domestic violence (Batsleer et al., 2002). Popular discourses of domestic violence, which also feature in services, are underpinned by ‘victim-blaming’ together with an assumption that women only show agency and control when they leave violent relationships, and/or what are constructed as oppressive minority cultures. Contrary to these perceptions, firstly, I note competing notions ascribed to ‘independence’. Secondly, I highlight the strategies of resistance used by minoritized women whether they stay, or leave, abusive relationships, and examine the inter-relationships between gender, class and culture. Thirdly, I outline the level and type of support on offer, including key barriers and dilemmas to accessing sensitive and relevant services that respond to women's positions of minoritization, focusing particularly on refuge or shelter provision as they offer one of the key points of transition for women using domestic violence services. Lastly, I indicate some positive steps that can be taken by helping agencies to respond more appropriately to minoritized women facing domestic violence.     

from pillar to post: understanding the victimisation of women and children who experience domestic violence in an age of austerity

The dismantling of the welfare state across the United Kingdom (and indeed a number of other Western industrialised democracies, such as Canada and the United States) and the reductions to welfare provisions and entitlements are having a detrimental impact on women’s equality and safety. Towers and Walby argue that the recent cuts to welfare provision in the United Kingdom, particularly for women’s services, could lead to increased levels of violence for women and girls. This paper makes the argument that female victims of domestic abuse experience violence on two levels: first, at the intimate/personal level through their relationship with an abuser and, second, at a structural level, through the state failing to provide adequate protection and provision for women who have experienced violence in intimate relationships. Using a specific example of post-violence community services delivered to both the children of women who have experienced domestic violence and the women themselves, this paper draws on empirical research carried out in 2010–2011 with London-based third-sector and public sector organisations delivering the Against Violence and Abuse Project ‘Community Group Programme’. We argue that the lack of services for women involved in, or exiting, a violent relationship can amount to state-sanctioned violence, if funding is withheld, or indeed, stretched to breaking point.     

Educated doubt: women,religion and the challenge of higher education,c. 1870-1920[1]

Abstract

The advent of higher education for women, with its emphasis on reason, on scientific thought and on critical approaches to knowledge, constituted a potential threat to religious belief. The stories of male ‘doubters’ are legion but what happened to thoughtful women, confronted with challenges to their belief systems? This article shows that educated doubt was not only a male affliction. Women responded to the challenge in a variety of ways. Some rejected belief, turning their religious impulses to aesthetic or social ends. Others brought scientific reasoning to bear on religious phenomena, hoping to ‘prove’ the existence of spirituality. Some saw in science and reason a further manifestation of the spiritual impulse; in education further possibilities of the life of the spirit. A common thread unites the responses, the search for a voice, an authority which women sought in the new secular institutions of higher learning.