Law’s Vulnerability,and Vulnerability in Law

Vulnerability acts as a touchstone in this issue as we find our contributors reflecting on its intersection with gender and sexuality in different ways. Saeidzadeh draws out the significance of misrecognition in her consideration of responses to transsexuality in Iran, while Doonan highlights the potential pitfalls of relying on situational vulnerability in her critique of anti-trafficking legal discourse in the US. Lindsey considers the legal potential of situational vulnerability as a tool to address the ‘persistent failure to take action against abuse’ in the UK. Durojaye and Oluduro contribute to the recent revitalisation in asking ‘the woman question’ by drawing on African law and literature to flesh out the development of a gender-sensitive, substantive equality approach from the jurisprudence of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights as it addresses vulnerability to violence. The reviewers continue this international conversation as they address recent contributions on sexuality, family formation and social security.     

Motherhood in the East–West Encounter: Pandita Ramabai's Negotiation of ‘Daughterhood’ and Motherhood

The female East–West encounter often pivoted upon the motherhood role played by the representatives of the empire. This article aims to explore the complexities of the construction and enactment of this role. The analysis focuses on a cameo of triangular interpersonal relationships formed by Pandita Ramabai, an Indian Brahmin scholar who converted to Christianity in 1883 during her stay in England for higher studies, her little daughter Manorama who was baptized at the same time and Ramabai's spiritual mother, the Anglican Sister Geraldine who was deeply and possessively attached to Manorama. After situating motherhood in its international discursive context, the article examines the two tension-filled sets of motherhood and daughterhood inherent in this triad, with the help of Ramabai's published letters and correspondence which were compiled and edited by Geraldine (who made Ramabai's maternal inadequacies her dominant subtext) and of Manorama's unpublished letters to Geraldine, her ‘grandmother’. The article argues that a British missionary nun's successful exercise of the motherhood role which she spon taneously assumed towards an Indian convert was contingent upon the convert's adherence to the racially and culturally inferior stereotype and unquestioning submission to the new faith as well as to colonial authority. Such conformity and acceptance alone allowed deep ‘maternal’ bonding (overlooking racial differences) which was too fragile to withstand any contestation or exercise of agency by the convert. The overarching patriarchal ethos of the Church, internalized by the missionary nun, was also a significant determinant of her treatment of the women converts in various ways.     

‘Illegal Migrants’, Gender and Vulnerability: The Case of the EU’s Returns Directive

Feminist legal efforts to make sense of the external migration policies of the European Union (EU) have focused almost exclusively on the EU’s initiatives against trafficking in women. This article examines one of the more neglected areas of EU immigration policy—the return of ‘illegal immigrants’. It analyses the so-called 2008 Returns Directive in the light of the multidimensional inequalities experienced by migrant women, which affect their migration status and expose some of them to the threat of removal. Owing to insecurities over external migration, the Directive constructs even the most vulnerable migrants as a threat to be controlled and is likely to result in detrimental consequences for many migrants, and in particular already vulnerable women who are likely to be further disadvantaged by it.     

‘Hand in hand with the women,forward we will go’: welsh nationalism and feminism in the 1890s

This article explores the history of women's liberalism in Wales in the 1880s and 1890s, during the period of the Liberal nationalist movement known as Cymru Fydd or Young Wales. The Welsh Union of Women's Liberal Associations (WUWLA) was founded in 1892 to provide an important bloc of votes for the Progressive (Suffragist) faction in the Women's Liberal Federation, but its aims combined Liberal, Nationalist and feminist objectives. This article argues that briefly, and uniquely, in the 1890s, the WUWLA was able to bring together feminism and nationalism in British party politics, despite some opposition from its own nationalist members. The active intervention of women ensured that the masculinist language of nationalism shifted to an emphasis on equality of the sexes. In 1895, Cymru Fydd, embodied in the Welsh National Federation, espoused women's suffrage among its objects, and gave women's organisations special representation in its structures. This change is explored both through the writings and the events – a series of meetings and conferences – which led to the formation of both the WUWLA and the Welsh National Federation. But the weakness of liberalism at the end of the 1890s, together with divisions within Wales, meant that the new politics was short lived. The decline of women's national organisation after this period, though not fully explored here, can be linked to those problems, but also to the rifts created between Liberals, women and men, over the issue of women's suffrage in the Edwardian period.     

Regendering modernism: the woman artist in Irish women’s fiction

The period between 1922 and 1960 is often characterized as one of social and cultural stagnation in Ireland. Irish fiction was dominated by an avant-garde writing in exile and the local dominance of the short story. Attention to the non-canonical fiction of women during the period, however, reveals a literature that exceeds this paradigm. Meaney focuses on two novels, The Troubled House by Rosamond Jacob and As Music and Splendour by Kate O’Brien, which both feature women as artists. This figure provides in both cases a mode of combining a commitment to narrative realism with a self-reflexive exploration of the role of art, thus evading the fictional polarities of the period. The woman artist as fictional character also offers an opportunity to explore the relationship between gender, sexuality, politics and art. The linkage between sexual dissidence and aesthetic freedom is a persistent trope of modernism in the Irish context, even if it is often critically submerged under the figure of exile. Both The Troubled House and As Music and Splendour might be considered to be supplements to Irish modernism in the Derridean sense, ‘an originary necessity and an essential accident’. Through the figure of the woman artist, both of these marginal novels transgress the configurations of gender at the heart of that modernism’s aesthetic project. Both link transgressive sexuality with artistic production. In doing so they posit a very different relationship between sexuality, aesthetics and politics.     

Abnormal fears: the queer Arctic in Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter

With focus on queer resistance emanating from place, this article examines Michelle Paver’s 2010 novel Dark Matter: A Ghost Story, set in the 1930s and focused on an all-male expedition to Svalbard. As representatives of the norm, the fictional expedition members attempt to enforce heteronormative models of interpretation characterizing depictions of the Arctic, but several aspects blur the boundaries between previously discreet categories. Starting from Sara Ahmed’s discussions about spatial and existential orientation in Queer Phenomenology (2006), the article maps how the Arctic is imagined and perceived by Jack Miller, the novel’s protagonist. Although hoping that Svalbard will constitute a productive testing ground for a particular kind of inter-war, British masculinity, specificities of place represent a progressively more threatening transgression of what Jack perceives of as normal. The Arctic is thus initially constructed as a stable place; geographical particularities then overturn possibilities for Jack’s orientation, and supernatural occurrences finally violate boundaries between past and present, sane and mad. What Ahmed refers to as ‘queer moments’ that slant that subject’s perception of the world are in the novel produced by the actual as well as the supernatural Arctic: they highlight a continuous, geographically specific resistance to categorization.     

Beneath the surface: the masculine self and body in Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea’

This article examines the relationship between the masculine self and male body in Sheridan Le Fanu’s short story ‘Green Tea’ (1872), using a masculinity studies lens to analyze Mr Jennings’ destabilized masculinity within the parameters of Victorian male gender norms. I highlight the interwoven relationship between the masculine self and the body through looking at the physical depiction of Jennings, arguing that Jennings’ masculinity, his masculine self, is imprisoned as a reflection of the physical body; a relationship echoing Victorian gender norms regarding masculinity and the body. In the story, a demon follows and watches Jennings, appearing when Jennings is engaged in activity. Focusing on the relationship between the demon’s manifestation and Jennings’ activity, I show that the demon’s presence results from Jennings’ nonconformity to traditional notions of the masculine self. Le Fanu’s emphasis on the demon’s gaze serves to criticize Jennings’ masculinity as Jennings becomes submissive to the demon’s presence; as a result, this submission is mirrored in Jennings’ deteriorating physical body and health. By positing the masculine self within the body, the story acts to highlight Victorian society’s rigid male gender norms and the penalization of bodies that undermine those ideals.     

Anna Kavan’s Ice and Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain: Repetition with a Difference

Abstract

While Anna Kavan’s work has been largely ignored by critics, the responses of those who have noticed her have been dominated by two assertions. First, many of those wishing to assert her importance and power have seen her work as sui generis, the result of her isolation from the surrounding literary culture. Second, numerous feminist critics have seen her work as reproducing the worst effects of patriarchal domination. This article, through a reading of Kavan’s final novel, Ice (1967), challenges both of these assessments of Kavan. It suggests that, if we notice and try to account for the similarities between Ice and a novel published two years earlier, Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain (1965), Kavan’s novel can be read as challenging patriarchal domination through a bold and innovative reworking of the reader’s ‘suspension of disbelief’.     

Elizabeth’s Pious Pilgrimage; or the Ghost in the Garden

Abstract

This article is an analysis of the ‘Pious Pilgrimage’ section of Elizabeth and Her German Garden from a psychoanalytical perspective, focusing on the uncanny sense of the spectrality of the living and its connection to gender identity. It also offers an intertextual reading, placing the passage in the context of ‘the ghost in the garden’ as a recurring trope in the English novel. When ‘Elizabeth’ returns to the garden of her childhood, she experiences two spectral encounters: an imagined glimpse of her grandfather’s ghost and an encounter with a doppelgänger in the shape of a real child with her own name, who makes her feel as if, like Shelley’s Magus Zoroaster, she has met her ‘own image walking in the garden’. She is not the only figure in English literature to do so: behind the kitchen garden where Elizabeth has her encounter we can feel the presence of the kitchen garden in Great Expectations, where Pip sees a prophetic vision and encounters a double in the form of a ‘pale young gentleman’. This same encounter with ‘the ghost in the garden which is not a ghost’ resurfaces in a number of later texts, of which the author discusses two instances: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and David Profumo’s The Weather in Iceland. These can be taken as positive and negative conceptions of the spectrality of the living: von Arnim’s ‘ghost in the garden’ is balanced between the two in a passage treading the boundaries of comic realism and Gothic horror.     

Power and Rights in the Community: Paralegals as Leaders in Women’s Legal Empowerment in Tanzania

What can an analysis of power in local communities contribute to debates on women’s legal empowerment and the role of paralegals in Africa? Drawing upon theories of power and rights, and research on legal empowerment in African plural legal systems, this article explores the challenges for paralegals in facilitating women’s access to justice in Tanzania, which gave statutory recognition to paralegals in the Legal Aid Act 2017. Land conflicts represent the single-biggest source of local legal disputes in Tanzania and are often embedded in gendered land tenure relations. This article argues that paralegals can be effective actors in women’s legal empowerment where they are able to work as leaders, negotiating power relations and resisting the forms of violence that women encounter as obstacles to justice. Paralegals’ authority will be realised when their role is situated within community leadership structures, confirming their authority while preserving their independence.     

woman’s reappearance: rethinking the archive in contemporary art—feminist perspectives

Recent debates in the field of contemporary art have underlined the political importance of creative reworkings of the past, especially for those subjects that have been traditionally marginalised. A feminist perspective has been nevertheless quite absent from such debates. This article addresses feminist uses of archival documents in the visual arts through the analysis of three works produced in the past two decades: The Fae Richard’s Photo Archive (1997) by Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye, Some Chance Operations (1998) by Renée Green and Queen of the Artists’ Studios (2004–2007) by Andrea Geyer. These works share an interest for women’s histories and representations by composing a series of documents (both factual and fictive) into complex narratives where history and subjectivity intersect.