倾听参与发展--试论女性主义研究视角对弱势群体关照的意义

当前,大量弱势群体伴随着我国的社会转型和经济转型应运而生,数量庞大的弱势群体已严重影响到社会的稳定和健康发展,对弱势群体的多方面关照是社会发展和文明进步的显著标志。女性主义“对妇女进行研究”、“与妇女一起研究”、“为妇女而研究”的独特视角为我们对弱势群体的关照提供了有益启示。     

Expert Evidence As Context: Historical Patterns and Contemporary Attitudes in the Prosecution of Sexual Offences

In H.M. Advocate v. Grimmond ¹ the judge in a Scottish High Court trial refused permission for expert psychological evidence to be admitted on behalf of the Crown in a prosecution involving sexual offences against two children. The Crown had sought to lead an expert witness to explain to the jury about patterns of disclosure in child sexual abuse cases. The case was remarkable, not so much for the strict application of the longstanding rule in R. v. Turner that constrains the use in the courtroom of expert evidence from the behavioural sciences, but for the way in which the arguments presented by the Crown in Grimmond resonate with enduring feminist critiques regarding the treatment of women in rape trials. The theoretical issues raised by the decision include the quest for context to counter rigid evidential frameworks, and the choice of a child sexual abuse case as the medium for challenging the boundaries of the admissibility of expert evidence in the courtroom. The ramifications of Grimmond are tangible as legislation intended to benefit children and women has already been enacted by the Scottish Parliament to ameliorate the effects of the decision. This article suggests that while this legislation should be given a cautious welcome it remains to be seen whether the heralded benefits will actually materialise. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A Defining Moment: A Feminist Perspective On The Law of Sexual Harassment in the Workplace in the Light of the Equal Treatment Amendment Directive

This article considers, from a feminist perspective, the introduction of the European Equal Treatment Amendment Directive (E.T.A.D.) and its impact on the law of sexual harassment in the United Kingdom. Since feminists identified sexual harassment as a problem for women in the 1970s, feminist legal scholars have focused their attention on the law as a means of redressing it. Bringing claims in the U.K. has been difficult because of the absence of a definition of sexual harassment and reliance in the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 on a comparator approach. These problems are illustrated by the recent House of Lords decision in Pearce v. Governing Body of Mayfield Secondary School(2003). The failure of the House of Lords in Pearce to understand sexual harassment as an issue of substantive equality for women makes the introduction of the European law all the more the pressing. The author discusses the implications of the changes embodied in the E.T.A.D. in the light of feminist theory. She argues that the changes envisaged constitute welcome developments which will make it easier to remedy workplace sexual harassment. However, it is also likely that problems will remain for women in establishing sexual harassment claims, particularly if concepts of reasonableness and unwelcome behaviour continue to form part of the legal definition. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

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.     

Deaf to women: Rhodes’s refusal to hear women or his own feminine voice within – a reading of Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland

E.D. Morel’s chapter, ‘The story of Southern Rhodesia’, in his signal text The black man’s burden (1920), provides intertextual reference to Olive Schreiner’s work Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897) in discussing libertarian thought and distinguishing aspects of male/female authorship. Schreiner’s feminist perspective affords her a wider purview of colonialist prerogatives than those exhibited by several contemporary male observers or commentators. The figure of Jesus, as pictured in her neglected political/moral parable, far from being ironic, sentimental or evangelical in purpose, embodies her ideal balance of female and male qualities. Schreiner relies on this redemptive icon both in an ethical and gendered sense to project new understanding and enlightenment onto the strife of the day, which allows her, in turn, to expose and critique Rhodes’s male deafness both to women and his own feminine nature. By contrast, Halket’s conversion, his feminisation, holds up the alternative of hope versus Rhodes’s predatory male soul and final moral damnation.     

The sex of participatory democracy. An analysis of the theoretical approaches and experiences of participatory democracy from a feminist viewpoint

The generalist theory of participatory democracy and the non-essentialist feminist approach to forms of democratization have developed in parallel despite sharing an agreement to work towards more shared forms of managing power. The origin of this disunity lies, partly, in the first theoretical body's tendency to present citizen participation as a tool for democratizing the neutral and universal public space. As a result, both theoretical bodies have parallel points of view regarding the elements that structure women's participation. This article explores, through the qualitative analysis of two experiences of participatory democracy in which the feminist viewpoint has been unequally incorporated (Porto Alegre's participatory budgeting?Porto Alegre PB?and the 15M movement), the relationship between the parallel development of the general proposals of the two theoretical bodies and the elements that restrict the participation of women in the practice of participatory democracy.     

A personal issue: feminist standpoint theory,epistemologies of ignorance,and perceptions of HIV transmission among northern Tanzanian wildlife conservation professionals

Drawing on ten months of qualitative research from 2009/10, we present a case study of situated HIV transmission knowledge claims among wildlife conservation actors in northern Tanzania. Utilizing feminist standpoint theory and epistemologies of ignorance, this article explores why a single professional group consistently articulated divergent explanations of the causal forces shaping on-going HIV transmission dynamics. Elite respondents were more likely to consistently attribute viral transmission to individual-level behaviors, while non-elite conservation actors more often situated HIV transmission dynamics in relation to extra-personal structural forces. This case study reveals the experiential grounding of HIV-related knowledge claims; illuminates the partiality of authoritative knowledge and the intersections of practices of power, embodied understandings and socio-structural location with hierarchical matrices of status and privilege; disrupts the presumed accuracy of certain forms of knowledge by foregrounding the insights of those in positions of subordination; and exposes ineffectual HIV/AIDS interventions in northern Tanzania.     

Why does it happen? Explanations for men’s violence against women by women with interpersonal victimization histories

Men’s violence against women (MVAW) has been identified as a critical sociocultural problem. Gaining a better understanding of perspectives on the etiology of violence held by women with histories of male-perpetrated interpersonal violence provides insight into the processes of victimization and recovery. Furthermore, emerging research suggests that feminist beliefs may facilitate recovery and impact how survivors of MVAW perceive it. In this study, we aimed to explore, in women with histories of interpersonal violence, (1) the ways they explained the high prevalence of MVAW and (2) associations between the strength of their feminist beliefs and the participants’ explanations. Female college students (N = 32, ages 18–22) participated in qualitative interviews in which they were first presented with published statistics about the frequency of MVAW, then asked to provide explanations for the high prevalence of this phenomenon. Individual responses clustered into one or more of four factors: (1) societal influences, (2) blaming women, (3) familial influences, and (4) characteristics of men and women. The extent to which participants identified with feminist beliefs was associated with how they perceived their own victimization. Women who endorsed strong feminist beliefs more frequently cited societal influences on MVAW, whereas women who endorsed feminist beliefs less strongly were more likely to blame women for it and offered stereotypical views of women as passive and fragile.     

A ‘Post-Work’ World: Geographical Engagements with the Future of Work

This article reviews geographical research on labour market changes that pose a challenge to ‘work’ as a compelling category of analysis. Drawing inspiration from feminist scholarship that has sought to develop a frame for thinking about the concept of work so that other activities outside employment are recognised, it considers what everyday practices of work, including domestic and reproductive labour, can teach us about the realities and futures of contemporary capitalism. While ‘work’ has long served as a presumed norm or telos of ‘development’, this article considers the prospect of the ‘end of work’ and of a specific type of accompanying capitalist society. It outlines the challenges for policy making in bringing forth a ‘post-work’ world without cementing social and economic inequality.     

Nothing wasted: engaging values and the imagination. How can working with feminist speculative fictions enthuse and engage students with social justice and sustainability in an age of austerity?

In the context of contemporary higher education, post white paper, ‘Students at the heart of the system’ [BIS, 2011. Students at the heart of the system [online]. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31384/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf, (Accessed 5 Feb 2014), in which funding and commodification of learning and of students dominate university mission statements and agendas, it is crucial that we collaborate with our students to engage imagination and critical faculties with issues of value, and of social justice. Teaching and researching contemporary feminist speculative fictions and feminist critical practice offer a priceless opportunity to make a difference, to challenge the intellectual impoverishment that this new austerity brings with it. Learning and teaching research into threshold concepts and signature pedagogies combine here with feminist critical practice in a discussion of teaching two speculative fictions which engage criticality and values: Atwood [Atwood, 2003. Oryx and Crake. New York: Nan A. Talese.) and Hopkinson [Hopkinson, 1996. A habit of waste. Skin folk. New York: Aspect, 183–202] each of which critiques flawed societies using tropes of waste, and rejection of difference. Each suggests recovery from damage done in the name of austerity, and imagines futures for the critical imagination, social justice, self-worth and agency.