Domestic Violence and the Gendered Law of Self-Defence in France: The Case of Jacqueline Sauvage

Legal responses to battered women who kill have long animated scholarly debate and law reform activity. In September 2012 after 47 years of alleged abuse, Frenchwoman Jacqueline Sauvage fatally shot her abusive husband three times in the back. The subsequent contested trial, conviction for murder, unsuccessful appeal and later presidential pardon of Sauvage thrust the French law of self-defence into the spotlight. The Sauvage case raises important questions surrounding the adequacy of the French criminal law in this area, the ongoing proliferation of gendered stereotypes in law and the need for reform. In the wake of the Sauvage case, this article provides a timely analysis of the gendered law of self-defence in France. Drawing from an in-depth analysis of the judgments imposed in the Sauvage case, this article examines the adequacy of French legal responses to battered women who kill and ignites an argument for further law reform.     

“In the Best Interests of the Child”: Mapping the (Re) Emergence of Pro‐Adoption Politics in Contemporary Australia

This article seeks to understand, in historical and international perspective, recent governmental initiatives that aim to reinstate adoption as a viable policy option for the care and placement of children in Australia, with reference to two recent reports of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Human and Family Services, Overseas Adoption in Australia: Report of the Inquiry into Adoption of Children from Overseas (2005), and The Winnable War on Drugs: The Impact of Illicit Drug Use on Families (2007) which raises adoption as a policy option for children of drug‐addicted parents. These reports appear to signal a discursive shift away from the anti‐adoption attitudes that have characterised the post‐1970s period in response to the Stolen Generations and other past adoption practices. It is argued that this change can be understood as having been pushed to the fore by the conservative family policy of the Howard era and further fostered by international trends in adoption policy.     

Adolescents’ Identity Formation: Linking the Narrative and the Dual-Cycle Approach

The narrative and dual-cycle approach conceptualize and operationalize adolescents’ identity formation in different ways. While the narrative approach focuses on the construction of an autobiographical life story, the dual-cycle approach focuses on the formation of identity commitments. Although these approaches have different emphases, they are conceptually complementary. Yet, their empirical links and distinctions have only scarcely been investigated. Empirical knowledge on these links in adolescence and across time has been especially lacking. In the present research, it was therefore examined whether key characteristics of adolescents’ narration (autobiographical reasoning and agency) were concurrently and prospectively related to engagement in the dual-cycle processes of commitment making, identification with commitment, exploration in breadth, exploration in depth, and ruminative exploration. The findings from a cross-sectional sample of 1,580 Dutch adolescents (M_age?=?14.7 years, 56% female) demonstrated that autobiographical reasoning was significantly positively associated with the commitment and more adaptive exploration processes (i.e., in breadth and in depth). In addition, agency was significantly positively associated with the commitment processes and exploration in depth. Yet, these associations between the narrative characteristics and dual-cycle processes were only weak. Subsequently, the findings from a two-year longitudinal subsample (n?=?242, M_age?=?14.7 years, 62% female) indicated that on average commitment strength remained stable but exploration increased across middle adolescence. A stronger increase in identification with commitment and adaptive exploration (i.e., in breadth and in depth) was predicted by a higher degree of agency in adolescents’ narratives. Overall, these findings indicate that both approaches to identity formation are associated, but the small size of these associations suggests that they predominantly capture unique aspects of identity formation. Both approaches could thus complement and inform each other.

     

The Archive Function

As Joan Wallach Scott warns in The Fantasy of Feminist History, the danger of depositing one's personal papers in an archive is that one's papers then become open to misinterpretation. In this article, Scott's fears are enacted in relation to another feminist theorist's archival collection, that of prominent Canadian scholar Barbara Godard who died before she could complete the process of donating her papers to the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University. Drawing on personal memories and eclectic textual traces, this article attempts to recover Godard's theory of the archive—a theory she never fully articulated in her lifetime, despite dedicating much of her time and energy to collecting and preserving her own words and the words and papers of her students and collaborators.     

A Voice for the Injured

This article analyses the nature and effect of the campaign against the Family Court led by social commentator Bettina Arndt from 1995 to 2006, in the context of the men's rights agenda and the politics of anti-feminist backlash. It documents the changes to Australian family law and the workings of the Family Court under the Howard government, as a result of this campaign, in order to understand the politics of backlash in the context of Wendy Brown's States of Injury theory of 1995. In this analysis, the conservative men's rights agenda is understood as a reaction to structural and economic adjustments associated with neoliberal reforms, especially labour market regulation. But this context, of structural adjustment, is distorted in the rhetoric and focus of campaigns characterised by anti-feminist backlash, such as that directed at the Family Court in Australia. The example of Arndt and her championing of men's rights in this arena is presented as a means by which to compare the different experiences and traditions of feminism in Australia and America, and the associated politics of backlash in each nation, all of which have had a profound influence on Arndt's outlook and work.