Dancing on the head of a pin? Foetal life and the european convention

The case of Vo v. France represents the latest phase of the European Court of Human Rights’ thinking on the scope of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to life) in relation to foetal life where a foetus had been lost owing to a medical accident. The Court by a majority decided that, “even assuming” Article 2 applied to the instant case (albeit to the life of the pregnant woman rather than that of the foetus), it had not been violated. While the facts in Vo were extreme and exceptional, the Court will shortly hear the case of D v. Ireland concerning access to abortion for foetal anomaly, an application made under Articles 3, 8, 10 and 14 of the European Convention. If the case of D were declared admissible, the Court would then have to consider whether a denial of access to abortion for foetal anomaly constitutes inhuman and degrading treatment contrary to Article 3, or an interference with a pregnant woman’s right to respect for private life under Article 8 (and if so, how the doctrine of the margin of appreciation applies). The Grand Chamber precedent of Vo displays ambivalence about whether Article 2 should apply to foetal life, and its resort to the “even assuming” formula spared Member States the difficulty of having to justify their various abortion regimes, by reference to this Article. It remains to be seen whether in a case like D that is directly concerned with abortion, the Court will take a more definite stance on the correct balance to be struck between the State’s interest in protecting foetal life and the Convention rights of pregnant women. Vo v. France [G.C.], judgment of 8th -July 2004, no. 53924/00; D v. Ireland [4th section], no. 26499/02, oral hearing on admissibility and merits, 6 September 2005     

‘Where There’s a Will There’s a Woman’: Exploring the Gendered Nature of Will-Making

This paper explores the gendered nature of the formal will-making process. Longer female life expectancy means that women often make the final decision regarding the disposal of relational assets. Inheritance is thus identified as a rare opportunity for them to enjoy power and control over family wealth. There are, however, questions as to whether that enjoyment may be inhibited by the presence of men. Drawing on a series of interviews conducted with professional legal practitioners this paper discusses how, when couples seek will-making advice together, that process is largely dominated and driven by women. It argues that this situation is primarily attributable to a combination of the multi-faceted nature of will-making and, crucially, women’s position and role within the family. Having identified the possibilities available to women to exercise power and authority over men in this context, the paper concludes with a brief consideration of the potential implications for both practitioners and policy-makers.     

‘Sable venus’, ‘she devil’ or ‘drudge’? British slavery and the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities,c. 1650–1838

Abstract

In this article, the author addresses the problem of how much historians can understand about the identities of individuals living in a different epoch in time, in relation to what has been termed the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities in slavery and freedom. A central argument is that stereotypes of black women were highly gendered and clustered around contradictory representations, particularly the ‘Sable Venus’, ‘She Devil’ and passive ‘drudge’. Thus, the persistence of an African-centred ‘woman's culture’ and strategies of resistance, collaboration and survival are vital to understanding black women's self-defined (as opposed to white attributed) identities. The first section examines the relationship between gender, race and culture in the mediation of African and slave women's identities. This is followed by a critical deconstruction of the ‘Sable Venus’ and interrelated black and white gendered identities in colonial slave society. The final section analyses the importance of the ‘She Devil’ in representing the resistant slave woman who defied the ‘fabulous fiction’ of white stereotyping of black women. A wide time span is adopted in order to analyse how black women's relationship to the gendered power structures underpinning colonial slavery shifted over time, as did ‘white visions’ of their identities. Unifying themes are the central location black women had in the development of colonial relations between black and white and the implications of contact at the harsh interface of African and European cultures for black women's gendered identities.     

‘Because they're a couple she should do what he says’: Young People's justifications of violence: heterosexuality,gender and adulthood

This article is based upon research that explored how 89 eleven- and twelve-year-olds understood and explained men's violence against women. The research found that young people examined the motivations of individual male perpetrators though the context of heterosexuality. For the young people, adulthood appeared to generate a more rigid framework of heterosexuality, where the gender differences begin to exemplify inequality upon which justifications can be based. Young people's justifications can be collated into the themes of: heteronormativity, the endorsement of marriage, restrictive gender roles and blaming women for the violence. Violence is justified because inequality is not questioned – it is endorsed and taken for granted as being part of an adult heterosexual relationship. This has implications for young people's own existing and anticipated relationships.     

Beating the bounds: how does ‘open source’ become a seed commons?

In response to ongoing plant genetic enclosures, the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) is creating a ‘protected commons’ for seed. It is a project, I argue, that reflects characteristics of a growing transnational commoning movement. From the Zapatistas to seed wars, such movements draw attention to commons not simply as a resource, but as a dynamic and evolving social activity: commoning. In the US, OSSI includes 38 plant breeders, 48 seed companies and 377 crop varieties. Yet challenges remain for OSSI to gain wider legitimacy for ‘freed seed’, to build trust in a moral pledge, and to establish fair guidelines for which people and which seed can participate in making the commons. Using the metaphor of ‘beating the bounds’ – a feudal practice of contesting enclosures – I ask how OSSI defends the commons in intersecting arenas. The first way is legal, as OSSI negotiates a move from contract law toward moral economy law. Next is epistemic, as an informal breeder network revitalizes farmer knowledge, while proving more structurally able and culturally equipped to lead commoning efforts. Finally, I reflect on the nature of boundary beating itself, aided by Global South movements. Seed sovereignty perspectives suggest room for a pluriverse of commons to grow.     

‘Medieval Working Practices’? British Agriculture and the Return of the Gangmaster

The Select Committee Report reviewed here outlines both the fact of and the dynamics structuring the return to British agriculture of the gangmaster system. Wrongly described by some observers as an aspect of a developing capitalism, by conservative historiography as benign/non-coercive, and by the present British government as the resurgence of ‘medieval working practices’, this highly exploitative form of labour contracting was condemned earlier, by the 1867 Children's Employment Commission. Then, as now, it involved the recruitment/control of casual workers, and is currently based on much the same kinds of coercive mechanisms as its nineteenth century counterpart. Rather than being a pre- or non-capitalist relic, however, the gangmaster system corresponds to the restructuring of the rural labour process by cost-cutting agribusiness enterprises and commercial farmers. As such, it is argued here, it represents the authentic face of a twenty-first century capitalist agriculture.     

‘The Woman was a Stranger’: childbirth and community in eighteenth-century England*

On 17 December 1766 James Field stood accused at the Old Bailey of the ‘wilful murder of a new born child, by casting it into a tub of water’. The case was exceptional in many ways—not only was the accused male but he and his family had removed themselves from the network of neighbourly interactions that characterised lower status life in this period. As a result, the court's deposition statements record ideas of belonging and community with unusual clarity. Using Field as a case study, this article explores the involvement of the local community in the experience of childbirth in the eighteenth century. It will argue that childbirth had an active role in the creation of neighbourhood, and momentarily captured shifting eighteenth-century understandings of community.     

Jean Batten and ‘the Accident of Sex’

Through the critical analysis of visual and verbal texts, this essay offers a sighting of New Zealand aviator Jean Batten—one of the greatest women solo flyers of the twentieth century to ‘disappear’. Unlike US flyer Amelia Earhart whose disappearance some miles off Howland Island in the South Pacific prompted endless search and research, Jean Batten’s disappearance from stage and page of flight history engendered no such interest until the late 1980s when a documentary film (1988) and the first book‐length biography (1990) were published by Ian Mackersey. Although important contributions to understanding Jean Batten’s place in aviation history of the twentieth century, Mackersey’s construction of Batten’s life relies heavily upon a psychological interpretation of character and action that is largely removed from and uninformed by gendered history. Hence, an important aim of this essay is to offer an analysis of the impact ‘the accident of sex’ (a phrase coined by Earhart) and the performance of gender had and continues to have upon ‘the life’ of Jean Batten.     

‘Throbb[ing] with a consciousness of a knowledge that appalled her’: Embodiment and Female Subjectivity in the Desert Romance

This article examines the relationship between the desert and embodiment in E. M. Hull’s international best-seller The Sheik (1919). This novel, a desert romance, has been the focus of feminist scholarship for decades because of its controversial rape narrative. Drawing on theories of embodiment, in particular the work of Elizabeth Grosz, the author interrogates how the desert is paradoxically presented as a space of liberation and oppression within which female sexuality could be explored despite the gendered violence of pre-existing patriarchal frameworks. Ultimately, the author provides a reading of Diana in terms of her transition from an androgynous ‘girl’ to a sexually desiring, seemingly feminized ‘woman’, and examines the connotations associated with this. The author establishes a connection between the transient nature of the desert and the liberation offered to women within this liminal space. Through an in-depth examination of the protagonist Diana’s corporeal subjectivity over the course of the novel, the author positions The Sheik as offering a voice to female sexuality and erotic fantasy, demonstrating Hull’s depiction of the desert as an appropriation of that space through which to explore female desires. This opens up new understandings of what constituted innovative literature in interwar Britain and marks Hull’s book, with its overtly erotic content and specific focus on female desire, as a political and social departure.     

‘Lovers of liberty’?Prostitution and the Politics of Choice in Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin

This article explores the way in which Emma Donoghue’s novel Slammerkin (2000) reflects long-standing feminist debates surrounding prostitution. We argue that not only does Donoghue’s portrayal of prostitution resist the pro versus anti dichotomy in which feminist perspectives on sex work are so often narrowly situated, but Slammerkin also foregrounds the complexity with which the politics of choice intersects with women’s decision to sell their bodies.     

Visualising the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’: emotion work and the representation of orgasm in pornography and everyday sexual interactions

Visual representations of orgasm – whether in the flesh or mediated through a screen – are produced in a context of intense uncertainty about whether what is being seen represents an authentically experienced bodily event. Despite detailed scientific scrutiny and close attention to bodily signs, the authenticity of women's orgasm remains a site of cultural anxiety and contested gender politics. This uncertainty is exacerbated by the construction of female orgasm as inherently invisible or un-see-able, and ‘faking’ orgasm as a prevalent social practice. Drawing on existing literature from psychology, sociology and porn studies, this theoretical paper explores the problem of visually representing orgasm in the context of these uncertainties, and examines how the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ is structured by discourses of authenticity. Pornography and everyday sexual interactions provide ideal contexts for exploring the practices of producing and consuming visual representations of embodied experience because both necessitate a see-able orgasm which consumers/lovers can read as ‘real’. This paper demonstrates that considerable interpretative work is necessary to read the female body as authentically orgasmic in the context of cultural uncertainty, and that distinctions between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ are continually reworked. Drawing on the contrast between ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ acting (Hochschild, 1983), I argue that the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ cannot be established by recourse to unmediated bodily experience, and instead, researchers should consider how and when this distinction has traction in the world and the implications of this for gendered power relations, subjectivities and practices.     

‘You do manage it so well that I cannot do better’: the working life of Elizabeth Jeake of Rye (1667–1736)

This article contributes to the debate around early modern women’s work. It concerns not waged labour but rather the unpaid contributions made by women to both home and the business undertaken by their husband. It focuses on Elizabeth Jeake, the wife of Samuel Jeake, a merchant from the Sussex port of Rye. Through the letters exchanged between the family, it explores Elizabeth’s skilled work in support of her husband. This included giving instructions to contractors, gathering and disseminating business and investment information, negotiations with Samuel’s business partners and acquaintances, managing property and tenants, negotiating credit relationships and purchasing and selling commodities.     

‘But most of all mi love me browning’: The Emergence in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Jamaica of the Mulatto Woman as the Desired

One of the most common threads in the Caribbean tapestry races which have populated the region over the last five centuries largely through forced or voluntary migration, is that there have emerged mixtures of the different racial groups. A large proportion of Caribbean women and men are referred to euphemistically as ‘mixed race’. The terms used to describe people of mixed race vary by territory and have been incrementally added to or changed over time. The original nomenclatures such as sambo, musteephino, mulatto, creole, etc. have been replaced at present to include terms like brown skin, mulatto, clear skin, light skin, red-nigger, dougla and browning. The title of the article comes from a contemporary dancehall song in Jamaica in which the black singer, Buju Banton, unwittingly echoes an unspoken yet shared notion of female desirability in the Caribbean: a preference for ‘brown’ as opposed to black women or unmixed women. In the ongoing constructions of femininity in the region, class and skin colour have intersected with race to produce hierarchies and stereotypes of femininity based on racial mixing. Drawing on some of the historical data available, particularly that of the pioneering research in this area produced by Lucille Mathurin in 1974, this article interrogates some aspects of miscegenation in the Jamaican past, to configure these with gender, race and class relations in the present. The article does not attempt to arrive at conclusive findings but to contribute to the ongoing process in the region, and elsewhere, of differentiating the category ‘woman’ in historiography and sociology.     

‘Blackberrying in the Sun’? Modernism and the Ageing Woman in Rhys’s Good Morning,Midnight, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent

Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West break with tradition in re-envisioning the aging woman. No longer content with representing the forlorn dowager or the redundant females of Gaskell’s Cranford, these writers challenge earlier representations while also confronting modernism itself. Instead of focusing on youth, they ‘make it [modernism] new’ by carefully detailing the various ways ageism and sexism make us ‘the other’, as they speak out against the interlocking oppressions of ageism and sexism. Whereas Rhys underscores what it means to be an impoverished, aging woman, Woolf and Sackville-West shift their concerns to the ways in which their characters come to terms with aging. For Woolf, there is both a sense of mourning and a sense of celebration as Clarissa attempts to unite her world through her ‘offering’ of parties that ‘defy’ the Gods. In contrast, Sackville-West’s dutiful Lady Slane claims her independence for the first time in her life, as she refuses the ways in which her children infantilize her.