Is There a “Singles Tax”? The Relative Income Tax Treatment of Single Households

The existence of a "marriage tax," in which many married couples pay more taxes when married than their combined taxes as single individuals, is well known. However, largely lost in the attention devoted to married taxpayers is the treatment of single taxpayers. This article examines the relative tax treatment of single and married taxpayers. Various types of representative taxpayers are constructed, and the difference in income taxes paid by single taxpayers and married taxpayers is calculated. These calculations show that there is a "singles tax"; that is, a single individual typically pays a greater income tax liability than a married couple with identical income, especially when the main transfer programs are considered.     

Ex-Offenders, the Labour Market and the New Public Administration

Policy makers are increasingly recognizing the importance of helping ex-offenders into employment. This article outlines the disadvantages faced by those with a criminal record in the labour market and evaluates several approaches to meeting the needs of ex-offenders seeking work. It finds that, despite recent policy developments, the changing nature of British public administration is undermining the ability of practitioners to respond appropriately to the needs of ex-offenders. The article concludes that the real concern of policy makers is to show that they are doing something about the social context of criminal behaviour while at the same time drawing attention away from the increasingly centralized and authoritarian nature of our public agencies.     

Paying for Violence? Spousal Abuse and Son Preference in India

We find a puzzling correlation in the data on domestic violence and children’s outcomes in India. Using the 2005–2006 National Family and Health Survey, we see that girls in families experiencing spousal violence are less worse off than boys when only fathers report a son preference while the gender bias reverses when only mothers report having a son preference. To shed light on the puzzle in the data, we present a non-cooperative theoretical framework based in economic theories of domestic violence, whereby differing parental son preference and bargaining over investments in girl and boy children potentially explains the observed relationship.     

#RepealedThe8th: Translating Travesty,Global Conversation,and the Irish Abortion Referendum

Why does #RepealedThe8th matter for feminist legal studies? The answers seem obvious in one sense. Feminism has long constituted itself through the struggle for sexual and reproductive justice, and Irish feminism has contributed a significant ‘legal win’ with the landslide vote of approval for lifting abortion restrictions in the referendum on the 25th May 2018. That win comes at a global moment when populist legal engagement is doing significant damage in countries that regard themselves as world leaders, and beyond. #RepealedThe8th offers Ireland, and the world, the actuality that the popular vote, and everything that contributes to it, could be something else. Repeal shows how legal tools like the vote may be made into an expression of care for reproductive lives. This expression is important in recognizing pregnant people as knowing agents who are best placed to decide, and in seeking to do justice to those who contribute to everyday reproductive life. But repeal, like the many who brought it into being, has multiple meanings. #RepealedThe8th matters because it is a moving process of socio-legal translation, which draws on a collective energy, ‘repeal energy’, to turn the travesty that was the Eighth Amendment and all it represents into a search for the rest of reproductive life. In opening up the meaning of the vote, much like feminists elsewhere have opened up the meaning of the strike, Irish feminists have turned public mourning over past mistreatment into a series of reproductive connections. This is not a strategy that can be rolled out. Figuring out #RepealedThe8th will take many tellings. Rather we need to give repeal, and repealers, room to breathe and rest. We need to feel our way through repeal’s production of legal change so that this success is not reduced to some generic transferable set of legal instructions. I begin by reflecting on repeal as a process of feminist socio-legal translation, which shows us how legal change comes about through the motivation of collective joy, the mourning of damaged and lost lives, the sharing of legal knowledge, and the claiming of the rest of reproductive life.     

Wench Tactics? Openings in Conditions of Closure

Picking up the question of what FLaK might be, this editorial considers the relationship between openness and closure in feminist legal studies. How do we draw on feminist struggles for openness in common resources, from security to knowledge, as we inhabit a compromised space in commercial publishing? We think about this first in relation to the content of this issue: on image-based abuse continuums, asylum struggles, trials of protestors, customary justice, and not-so-timely reparations. Our thoughts take us through the different ways that openness and closure work in struggles against violence, cruel welcomes, and re-arrangements of code and custom. Secondly, we share some reflections on methodological openness and closure as the roundtable conversation on asylum, and the interview with Riles, remind us of #FLaK2016 and its method of scattering sources as we think about how best to mix knowledges. Thirdly, prompted by the FLaK kitchen table conversations on openness, publishing and ‘getting the word out’, we respond to Kember’s call to ‘open up open access’. We explain the different current arrangements for opening up FLS content and how green open access, the sharedit initiative, author request and publisher discretion present alternatives to gold open access. Finally drawing on Franklin and Spade, we show how there are a range of ‘wench tactics’—adapting gifts, stalling and resting—which we deploy as academic editors who are trying to have an impact on the access, use and circulation of our journal, even though we do not own the journal we edit. These wench tactics are alternatives to the more obvious or reported tactic of resignation, or withdrawing academic labour from editing and reviewing altogether. They help us think about brewing editorial time, what ambivalence over our 25th birthday might mean, and how to inhabit painful places. In this, we respond in our own impure, compromised way to da Silva’s call not to forget the native and slave as we do FLaK, and repurpose shrapnel, in our common commitments.     

Gender,Sexuality and the Theory of Seduction

Fletcher seeks to readdress the sex-gender-sexuality distinctions and the Lacanian theorization of sexual difference in the framework of Jean Laplanche's generalized theory of primal seduction. In particular he addresses the double-bind of phallocentrism, as outlined by Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell, that seems to be entailed by the requirements of a symbolic, constructionist account of the unconscious and the divided subject. He argues that Laplanche's generalized theory of seduction elaborates an account of the formation of the unconscious as a separate mental system and of the sexual drives as a result of the signifying relations with the other, the adult other of personal pre-history, and of the consequent entry into symbolization. This moment of seduction/translation/primal repression is rigorously distinguished from the secondary moments of the Oedipus and castration complexes which are conceived as secondary forms of binding and translation of the enigmatic signifiers implanted by the adult (which includes assignations of gender). Fletcher argues that the symbolic, constructionist requirement is met - no castration without representation - without its reversal as in Lacanian theory into the very different, phallocentric position - no representation without castration. This has important implications for the theorization of dissident sexual subjectivities as well of the specificity of female sexuality.     

Water privatization,hegemony and civil society: What Motivates Individuals to Protest About Water Privatization?

The article takes the case of protest against water privatization in Ireland to show that protestors with high levels of instrumental motivation as opposed to ideological motivation are more likely to protest. In order to explain this we uniquely combine Klandermans’ social psychology of protest with Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. By bridging these two bodies of theory, we provide an interdisciplinary account of the reason why protestors serve to uphold the exact power structures they intend to challenge. We argue that for water movements to be successful they must focus equally on both their instrumental and ideological motivations to ensure that power structures are confronted. This would enable movements to devise a coherent counter-hegemonic discourse, which is essential to contest the dominant global hegemony of water marketization.     

The social construction of electronic space

Computer‐mediated communication is a phenomenon of post‐industrial society. As a consequence of the interactivity and persistent textual nature of this form of communication, new spaces of sociality are constructed which can be analysed and interpreted with the epistemologies and methodologies utilised in understanding more conventional places. This approach reveals that electronic spaces are constructions firmly tied to the cultural and social experiences of ‘real‐world’ existences. Electronic identities, then, are built from this wide base of experience and ‘real‐world’ identity rather than, as is sometimes claimed, begun afresh. These connections to understood material culture and the prevalence of the typed word in electronic spaces permits a digital archaeology, inspired by material culture studies, which is both revealing of the users of these spaces as well as the wider social constructions of post‐industrial society.