Feminist legal theory and practice: rethinking the relationship

This article aims to contribute to the question of how to conceptualise the relationship between theory and practice in feminist scholarship in law. It looks in detail at the implications of different issues raised in a recent debate between Anne Bottomley and Ngaire Naffine on the existence of a “legal feminist orthodoxy”. I critique the dominance of ethics over politics and join Bottomley in her attack upon “the ethics of respect for the other”, albeit from a different position. I then look at the ways in which the problem of “essentialism” is being rethought from a feminist perspective.     

re-negotiating reproductive technologies: the ‘public foetus’ revisited

In debates over abortion, the foetus and the woman have been continually positioned as antagonists. Given the stakes involved in such debates about personal integrity, individual responsibility, life and death, it is no wonder that many radical feminist authors have concentrated on refocusing the attention on women and away from the disembodied foetus. Such writers have worked hard to decode and deconstruct the public foetus in our midst and have mobilized interpretative tools such as cultural criticism to contextualize the production and consumption of foetal images. Barbara Duden's book, The Public Foetus, is an important and interesting contribution to this effort, which is still taken up by authors writing in this field. Duden's strategy is to seek to remind us (and in particular those who are involved in reproductive medicine) that pregnancy is concentrated in the embedded pregnant woman rather than the disembodied ‘public foetus’ and she attempts to retrieve the embodied woman as the site of pregnancy through what Michaels has termed a ‘fetal disappearing act’. While this may create as many problems for women as it resolves, I would argue that, while the ‘public foetus’ continues to loom large in the politics of abortion and women's positions in relation to the new reproductive technologies remain contested, Duden's work remains important in the continuing debate about how women's reproductive freedom can be continually re-negotiated and re-established.     

Pink Chaddis and SlutWalk Couture: The Postcolonial Politics of Feminism Lite

The SlutWalk campaigns around the world have triggered a furious debate on whether they advance or limit feminist legal politics. This article examines the location of campaigns such as the SlutWalk marches in the context of feminist legal advocacy in postcolonial India, and discusses whether their emergence signifies the demise of feminism or its incarnation in a different guise. The author argues that the SlutWalks, much like the Pink Chaddi (panty) campaign in India, provide an important normative and discursive challenge to a specific strand of feminism based on male domination and female subordination in the area of sexuality and also speaks to the emergence of consumer agency in the very heart of pleasure in the neo-liberal moment. It serves as a space clearing gesture, a form of feminism ??lite??, rather than offering a transformative or revolutionary politics, and thus enables the possibility of feminist theoretical positions in a postcolonial context that have hitherto been marginalised or ignored in feminist legal advocacy in India to emerge.     

‘Happy Abortionists’

Recent feminist scholarship about abortion in Australia has focused on the politics of abortion as it is played out in the law, the media, public discourse and political debate. This article seeks to offer new angles on the politics of abortion by focusing on the provision of abortion services and in particular the position of doctors in relation to abortion in Australia since the early 1990s. It crafts a theoretical framework to think about the place of doctors, and their patients, in abortion provision and sketches a history of doctors over the last two decades. It is based in a small interview project conducted by the author in 2013 and uses interviews to supplement documentary evidence with ‘inside information’ about local histories and the micro-politics of decision-making in order to build an account of the multifaceted position of doctors in relation to abortion. It also uses the interviews to build a picture of the subjectivity of doctors who play a crucial part in the provision of abortion services. It argues that the ‘pro-choice versus anti-abortion’ spectrum is inadequate for understanding the multiple negotiations that doctors make in relation to abortion. Responsibility is devolved, often to the individual, albeit in sometimes resistant environments. Neoliberal female consumer citizens, empowered by as well as subordinated to dominant discourses, are often oblivious to the history and politics that make abortions available. Some doctors, although caught up in these forces, claim to be ‘happy abortionists’.     

Gender, citizenship and human reproduction in contemporary Italy

This article examines how the recently introduced law on assisted reproduction in Italy, which gives symbolic legal recognition to the embryo, came about, and how a referendum, which would have repealed large sections of it, failed. The occupation of the legal space by the embryo is the outcome of a crusade by a well-organised alliance of theo-conservatives. These groups see in reproductive medicine an uncontrolled interference with their notion of the natural order of things. Such a worldview requires a total ban on stem cell research, limitation of access to reproductive technologies and repressive laws to govern the area. This conservative dream scenario has come closer to being realised by the introduction of a law doing all of these things in the name of the protection of “Life”. In the case of this law, the “life” to be protected is the embryo. In the name of “Life”, scientific advances and individual liberty have been curbed. The politics of embryo citizenship is a politics which values the yet to come over the here and now, purgation over pleasure, and the transcendent over the material.     

Advocating for the Right: Alliance Defending Freedom and the Rhetoric of Christian Persecution

In this article I trace the legal and cultural advocacy work of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the single largest Christian conservative legal organisation operating in the US today. I begin by locating ADF strategy within the longer history of Christian persecution rhetoric articulated by the Moral Majority during the 1970s and 1980s. I then analyse both legal and cultural outputs of the organisation in two key cases: the so-called bathroom bills limiting transgender access to public facilities in several states, and the service denial of florist Barronelle Stutzman. I argue that by emphasising the perceived vulnerability of white cisgender women and girls in these cases, ADF litigators and cultural producers advance a narrow conception of religious freedom rights located in the specific cultural politics of neoliberal, white evangelicalism. As a result, while these cases have been legislative and policy failures for ADF they nevertheless provide useful insight into the rhetorical project of Christian persecution.

     

Northern Ireland's Abortion Law: The Morality of Silence and the Censure of Agency

This article explores the context within which abortion law and discourse in Northern Ireland must be situated and understood, relying in part on post-modern insights into the wider and long-term implications of feminists engaging law and by examining the strategies employed in Northern Ireland around the issue of abortion. In 2001,the Family Planning Association (Northern Ireland) took legal action to force the devolved government to defend at a procedural level the unequal and uncertain form of common law abortion regulation for Northern Ireland. The authors examine the strategy of this review as well as the response of the High Court, suggesting that while it may begin to challenge the legitimacy of abortion law, feminists and pro-choice advocates must prepare for challenges beyond that, the greatest being the cultural challenge. The courts, legislators and other public and political institutions(including the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition) consistently explain the law's lack of provision for women with reference to the `pro-life' majority views of Northern Irish people. The authors question the legitimacy of this claim in a cultural climate of intimidation against the expression of alternative views. Women will continue to be marginalised and devalued in this debate if the silencing of the pro-choice community and bodies responsible for protecting human rights is not redressed. A case is therefore made for a reconceptualisation of the abortion debate from the perspective of women's agency, which, alongside litigation and other strategies, is necessary to overcome the cultural censure that currently prevents meaningful dialogue. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Emancipatory rural politics: confronting authoritarian populism

A new political moment is underway. Although there are significant differences in how this is constituted in different places, one manifestation of the new moment is the rise of distinct forms of authoritarian populism. In this opening paper of the JPS Forum series on ‘Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, we explore the relationship between these new forms of politics and rural areas around the world. We ask how rural transformations have contributed to deepening regressive national politics, and how rural areas shape and are shaped by these politics. We propose a global agenda for research, debate and action, which we call the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI, www.iss.nl/erpi). This centres on understanding the contemporary conjuncture, working to confront authoritarian populism through the analysis of and support for alternatives.     

Silences: Irish women and abortion.

Notably absent from the public debate on abortion in Ireland have been the voices of women who have experienced induced abortion. Interviews with six acquaintances of the author who underwent abortion identified four themes underlying women's post-abortion silence. First, women fear public condemnation and personal rejection. Second, women are concerned that any emotional ambivalence they express about the abortion experience will be misconstrued as anti-abortion sentiment. Third, women worry that speaking out about their experience would be upsetting to friends and family. Fourth, women report frustration about the lack of a suitable public forum for voicing the complexities inherent in the abortion issue. The women's perception that their experience did not fit neatly with the rhetoric of either pro- or anti-abortion groups caused them to feel alienated from a political discourse that tends to depersonalize abortion. Although none of the women regretted the abortion decision, they continued to struggle with unresolved conflicts over taking responsibility for ending some form of life. A cycle has been created in which women do not feel safe to discuss their personal experiences until a more favorable political climate exists, yet the public perception of abortion is unlikely to change until more women's voices are heard. Feminist leaders are urged to address this dilemma.     

Making space: an exchange about women and the performance of free noise

This article considers the spatial politics of contemporary performance spaces constructed through DIY, improvised noise scenes. Noise (as something performed) is often categorized as “experimental,” “free,” or “avant garde.” It carries associations of emancipation, eschewing as it does conventional musical training, and the constraints of formal compositional and linguistic expression. Unfolding as a debate between the two authors, this article reflects on the contributions post-structural feminist theory brings to an understanding of where and how women practitioners negotiate noise-performance spaces. By considering noise as a conceptual object as well as noise as sonic performance, and by reflecting on debates around radical democracy, the authors debate the issue of female-only performance spaces and their implications on what we can express and how we might be understood. This contribution seeks to initiate further debate on the inherent complexities of how women create and negotiate spaces of noise performance in the face of normative assumptions and associations that have simplified the debate – for example, that the loud, discordant, and arrhythmic is obnoxious, dangerous, and historically a masculine domain.     

THE SEXUAL SUBALTERN IN CONVERSATIONS “SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN”: LAW AND THE OLD POLITICS OF COLONIALISM

Ratna Kapur’s recent book entitled Erotic Justice proposes a new politics of postcolonialism whereby the sexual subaltern disrupts the normative principles of the universal, liberal, legal domain. Kapur traces legal strategies regarding censorship, sex-work, homosexuality, sexual harassment, trafficking and migration which travel a treacherous path, countering allegations of ‘unIndian’ and Western practice with cultural histories of ‘authentic’ sexual legitimacies, towards a new politics of desire. Kapur frames her analysis through postcolonial feminist theory as providing a tool for feminist struggle, yet distinct from and disruptive of a liberal project of global sisterhood. This review deeply values the role of the sexual subaltern which disrupts the tenets of a linear, progressive liberalism. Drawing upon Indian feminist and Western feminist perspectives, the review considers how the distinct position of the postcolonial sexual subaltern subject informs the generic role of law as a tool constructing relations of domination regarding gender, sexuality, caste, property and religion. Kapur observes that both the West and the Hindu Right have engaged with liberal legal principles. This engagement, I argue, exposes and informs law as a historical and contemporary tool of gendered legal colonialism, for sisters to disrupt across the Western and Eastern terrains.Review of Ratna Kapur’s Erotic Justice, Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism, London: Glasshouse Press, 2005, 219 pp., ￡26, ISBN 1-90438-524-9     

‘Everyone needs a holiday from work,why not mothers?’ Motherhood,Feminism and Citizenship at the Australian Royal Commission on Human Relationships, 1974–1977

The Royal Commission on Human Relationships was an initiative of the Whitlam government, instigated in 1974 to investigate ‘the family, social, educational, legal and sexual aspects of male and female relationships’, with particular attention to the concept of ‘responsible parenthood’. The Commission heard evidence from thousands of Australians on a broad range of topics, and given the Royal Commission's origins in the 1973 Federal Parliamentary debate over abortion, it is perhaps unsurprising that motherhood featured so prominently in submissions presented to the Commission. In this article it is argued that mothers’ submissions to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships reveal the ways that social and cultural meanings of motherhood were being contested in 1970s Australia. Rather than making claims for rights in the established language of maternal citizenship, many women deployed their private experiences of mothering to argue that the state should facilitate their access to both paid employment and time away from mothering. These mothers argued for equal citizenship rights, challenging the reproductive compact that had long been central to maternal citizenship. The submissions reveal the ways that mothers (and their critics) drew upon both new and old meanings of motherhood to articulate new cultural and political possibilities for motherhood and citizenship in 1970s Australia.     

‘Male sexual politics and men's gender practice’

The responses to feminism and women's liberation, which men make when we define ourselves as ‘supportive’ of women's demands, are problematic. There continues to be debate within gender politics around the polarization ‘men's liberation’ and ‘men against sexism’, and critiques made from within various feminist understandings of, in particular, ‘men's liberationist’ preoccupations. The assumptions and contitutuent practices within the discourse of men's sexual politics in general are described and analyzed, rather than such debates reproduced. The assumption of ‘the sexual’ which men bring to our politics, and how our sexual politics is defined through these assumptions, is opened up. In particular, men's sexual politics seems precisely ‘male sexual politics’, in that it is defined through masculinist understanding of the sexual. Men's sexual politics is also male sexual politics, and our assumptions about the political, including the attempt to live from theory to action, are also instrumental in the ‘how’ of men's sexual politics.     

the reinvention of feminism in Pakistan

This article argues that there has been a significant turn in the discourse of feminist politics in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The author suggests that the rise of a new feminism – rooted in Islamic discourse, non-confrontational, privatized and personalized, whose objective is to ‘empower’ women within Islam – is not a post-9/11 development but rather a result of unresolved debates on the issue of religion within the progressive women's movement. It has been due to the accommodation of religion-based feminist arguments by the stronger secular feminist movement of the 1980s that paved the way for its own marginalization by giving feminist legitimacy to such voices. The author argues that the second wave of feminism may have become diluted in its effectiveness and support due to discriminatory religious laws, dictatorship, NGO-ization, fragmentation, co-option by the state and political parties in the same way as the global women's movement has. Yet it has been the internal inconsistency of the political strategies as well as the personal, Muslim identities of secular feminists that have allowed Islamic feminists to redefine the feminist agenda in Pakistan. This article voices the larger concern over the rise of a new generation of Islamic revivalist feminists who seek to rationalize all women's rights within the religious framework and render secular feminism irrelevant while framing the debate on women's rights exclusively around Islamic history, culture and tradition. The danger is that a debate such as this will be premised on a polarized ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ Muslim woman, such that women who abide by the liberal interpretation of theology will be pitted against those who follow a strict and literal interpretist mode and associate themselves with male religio-political discourse. This is only likely to produce a new, radicalized, religio-political feminism dominating Pakistan's political future.     

Here Versus There: Creating British Sexual Politics Elsewhere

This reflection draws upon two recent ‘moments’ in British sexuality politics—a series of Parliamentary debates on Global LGBT rights and Brighton Pride’s campaign to ‘Highlight Global LGBT Communities’. It contrasts these two moments in order to demonstrate how, at a time when LGBT rights have ostensibly been ‘won’ in the UK, there is an increasing tendency to shift focus to the persecution of SOGI minorities elsewhere in the world. This shift in focus sets up a binary of here versus there that is politically persuasive but ultimately limited and limiting. By reflecting on the way that this growing trend of creating sexual politics elsewhere occurs in two very different locations in British politics and activism, we seek to begin a conversation about the relational affects of placing sexual politics ‘elsewhere’.     

The Faux Debate in North American Suffrage History

The history of the US women’s suffrage campaign in the twentieth century has often devolved into a debate about whether mainstream politics or militant agitation won the day. This article argues that this division—between those who credit Carrie Chapman Catt and her pragmatic approach and those who trumpet Alice Paul for her campaign of White House protests—is a faux debate. A reading of American history suggests that any political movement for social change—from civil rights to LGBTQ rights—requires a one-two punch. The inside politico engages the powers that be, courting sympathy, while the outside agitator throws rocks at the establishment’s gates, stirring fear about the risks of inaction. The coming centennial of the nineteenth amendment’s ratification offers an opportunity to assess whether this scholarly battle over credit is anything more than a historical distraction, and to lament the missing veins of scholarship lost in its gaze.     

between Islamophobia and post-feminist agency: intersectional trouble in the European face-veil bans

Women’s equality claims have occupied the forefront of the European debate on face-veil bans; most claims have been denounced as mere manipulation for anti-Islamic and/or anti-immigrant political agendas, and the dilemma between anti-sexist and anti-racist struggles has been argued to be false. This article examines how opportunistic manipulation of gender equality claims and the ‘ethnicisation’ of sexism have been assessed and confronted in the scholarly debate opposing the bans, as well as the impact that this debate has had on women’s equality claims and the intersectionality issue. I argue that the women’s oppression argument has not been fully considered, because it would have disrupted the anti-racist struggle due to unresolved problems with understanding intersectionality.     

‘Stepping back and moving in’: the role of the state in the contemporary food regime

In recent years, a number of middle-income countries and influential multilateral institutions have instigated actions that frame food system governance around social protection and rights. These state-centered mobilizations raise fundamental questions about how to portray the global politics of food. Since the late 1980s, analysts have largely concurred that US hegemony in the global politics of food has given way to diverse and volatile neo-liberalist and corporate-led food system governance. However, what should we make of a situation where state and supra-state actors are flexing their powers to reshape food systems in line with rights-based models? Should this be understood as reflexes which aim to preserve national order, at a time of intensified food and nutrition insecurities? Or, does it lay the foundations of a re-governed system which curbs and molds a corporate-led politics of food within frameworks of justice? This contribution responds to these questions by tracing the evolution of social protection and rights-based approaches to the politics of food at the multilateral level and in two influential jurisdictions (India and South Africa). We argue that these initiatives underline a robust and continuing role of state power in global food politics, albeit in a novel fashion compared to previous entanglements.     

White Women,Anti-Imperialist Feminism and the Story of Race within the US Women's Liberation Movement

ABSTRACT

Histories are re-writing what Sherna Berger Gluck famously called the ‘master historical narrative’ of the US WLM, especially in historicizing the efforts of feminists of colour. This paper echoes this by exploring how white feminists embraced racial justice politics, particularly during the early 1970s, when it is often assumed that white feminists failed to enact racial justice. In historicizing the efforts of white anti-imperialist feminists in greater Boston, I maintain that the ‘master historical narrative’ wrote not only black, Chicana and multiracial feminisms out of history, but that it skewed our understanding of the race politics of white, US feminists.     

ABORTION IN AUSTRALIAN ELECTIONS

This article focuses on the question of the salience of the issue of abortion in Australian elections; that is, whether it is an issue on which electors cast their vote, and whether it plays a role in changes in voting patterns. The issue of public attitudes to such primary women's rights and feminist issues as abortion has been important in Australia for many years, but there is no body of research literature here on the electoral salience of those attitudes to abortion. In contrast, a body of US literature indicates that attitudes to abortion there are of significance in predicting voters' choices at state and federal levels and that this significance has increased over time. My argument is that there are no significant patterns of voting or even of party identification that are dependent on parliamentary candidates' views on abortion in Australia, and that this has been the case for at least 30 years. My argument is made through exploring opinion polls and academic surveys; examining three anecdotal claims of electoral retribution; and looking in detail at the case of the defeat of Barry Simon in the 1980 federal election. My finding as to the non-salience of the issue of abortion among Australian voters has significance in terms of accurately identifying obstacles to feminist proposals for reform of abortion laws in Australia. One of the aims of the article is to dispel the myth that politicians who are pro-choice or who vote for abortion reform are likely to face electoral retribution on that score. That is, the feminist project of abortion reform is not a vote loser.