Trickster Humour in Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home: Negotiating Arab American Muslim Female Sexuality

Randa Jarrar’ s A Map of Home (2008), a major contemporary Arab American woman's novel, utilizes trickster humour as a way to resist the ideological manufacture of the Muslim female body propounded by US orientalism, Islamist orthodoxy and secular Arab patriarchy. Current scholarship on A Map of Home has not examined the relationship between humour and contemporary female sexuality. Focusing mostly on authorial tone, this article reads the novel's narrator-protagonist, Nidali Ammar, as a trickster figure, who resists being perceived as a cultural heroine and in doing so disrupts the sacredness of social conventions. The trickster A Map of Home celebrates, and Nidali enacts, prompts readers to laugh at key cultural norms shaping the Muslim female body in post-9/11 US sculpture. This inquiry examines a range of interconnected sexual themes—most notably, ‘proper’ sexual boundaries, orientations and codes of virginity—to illustrate how trickster humour fosters Arab American women's agency.     

Teachers as Builders of Respectful School Climates: Implications for Adolescent Drug Use Norms and Depressive Symptoms in High School

Positive school climates have been found to have favorable effects on adolescent health risk behaviors and mental health outcomes. However, the mechanisms by which teacher behavior may promote such effects in high schools have not been extensively studied. Based on social control theory and a social developmental-contextual model, it was predicted that by respecting students’ points of view and decision making capabilities, teachers can help build respectful school climates that encourage healthy norms of behavior. Structural equation modeling with a nationally representative sample of 476 youth ages 14–18 supported the model. Adolescents who reported higher teacher support and regard for student perspectives in their high schools were more likely to see their schools as having respectful climates and healthy norms of drug use which was associated with lower levels of personal drug use. Students in such schools also reported greater social belonging and fewer symptoms of depression.

Biologising Paternity,Moralising Maternity: The Construction of Parenthood in the Determination of Paternity Through the Courts in Portugal

This article explores how the Portuguese legal system’s efforts to determine paternity of children born outside legal marriage, automatically initiated by the Registry Office when a birth registration does not indicate the father, reveal cultural models which reinforce the naturalisation of the differences between mothers and fathers, with significant effects on the social construction of parental roles and on expectations of family organisation and female sexual behaviour. The article relies on ethnographic data drawn from direct observation of court proceedings for the determination of paternity, as well as interviews with judges and prosecuting counsels all over the country. It is argued that judicial practices in the specific context of courtroom investigations of paternity reinforce gender inequalities in two interrelated ways. On the one hand, they are strengthened in the discursive practices performed during the course of the interactions between judges, prosecuting counsels and the mother of the child, as well as the alleged father. On the other hand, the normative model of family life and the dominant ideology of women’s and men’s relationships, which emphasise women’s socially subordinate position, are revealed by the selective use of DNA testing in paternity cases, based on the judge’s evaluation of the mother’s sexual behaviour. The article argues that legal attempts to establish the paternity of children born outside marriage—though based on novel technical and supposedly objective procedures—tend, nevertheless, to reproduce the prevailing patriarchal structures.

Child marriage,human rights and international norms: the case of legislative reform in Trinidad and Tobago

Abstract

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child entered into force in 1990. It condemns child marriage, violence and discrimination against children and enjoins tutelage for their education and health. Implementing such principles in national legislation sometimes conflicts with local norms relating to respect for cultural and religious traditions. This was the case of Trinidad and Tobago, a multicultural and multi-religious society that legally sanctioned child marriage until 2017. The paper makes two unique contributions to the literature. First, using the literature on child marriage and the obligations under international conventions, the paper creates a child marriage conceptual framework with the main normative positions on child marriage. Second, using the framework, it explores the normative motivations underlying the domestic legal reform debates held in parliament between 2015–2017. The paper uses the conceptual framework to explain the transformations in the traditional positions of local religious and ethnic groups, provides evidence of norm penetration from the international to a local multicultural setting and furthers the literature on international human rights norm penetration and contestation.     

Fact-sensitive political theory

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to argue for the importance of attention to facts in normative theorising. I discuss the problems that arise from both not displaying such attention (as some idealists do) and from doing so in the wrong way (as, for example, realists do). I propose a different brand of theorising – fact-sensitive political theory, which aims to avoid these two problems by paying attention to key facts while retaining a solid normative anchoring in abstract normative principles. The merit of abstract vs. non-abstract reasoning is that the normative debate is not torn between two distinct ends of a spectrum in the way the idealist–realist debate is. By contrast, the locus of the investigations is vertical in the sense that abstract and concrete normative discussions are given equal status and can co-exist compatibly. One of the main differences between abstract and concrete normative principles is whether abstract or concrete facts are considered necessary for the determination of the normative principles. The fact-sensitive account of normativity is neither realist nor non-ideal: it is an ambitious and demanding normative theory that contains both abstract and concrete normative reasoning. The fact-sensitive account of political theory meets the two criteria set out in this article: to integrate concrete and empirical facts about the subject matter and to subject the selection of facts to theoretical and methodological discussion and justification.     

治安秩序结构下的警察权威重塑路径

在我国的社会转型期,警察执法过程中遇到重重困难和阻挠,执法权威受到挑战。治安权威在治安秩序结构中与治安规范、治安实体共同组成一个相互联系、相互作用、密不可分的动态整体。因此,从治安秩序结构角度看,要实现重新树立警察权威的目标就要在强化治安权威本身的前提下,借助于完善治安规范,并从治安实体着手以达到重塑和巩固警察权威的目的,从而真正实现人民警察在维护社会治安秩序、打击违法犯罪等方面的作用,推动构建公平公正的法治环境与和谐稳定的社会环境。     

论物权性强制性规范与债权合同的效力——以抵押人擅自转让抵押物为视角

依据区分原则,物权法中的强行性规定仅为物权是否在当事人间发生变动的依据,其对作为物权变动原因的债权合同效力并无影响。《合同法》第52条第5项中的强制性规定,除了公法中的行为规范外,尚包含私法中的强行性规定且为合同法中的强行性规定,而不包括物权法中的强行性规定。因此,抵押人未经抵押权人同意擅自转让抵押物的合同有效,仅物权不发生变动。     

法律渊源词义考

The phrase "source of law" originated from the phrase" fons juris” in Roman law. In ancient Ureece there was no such conception as source of law, only an early idea of the origin of law, mainly because the legal profession had not come into existence. The Roman concept of fons juris was born from legal practice, which originally meant the forum where judges selected and found rules to resolve disputes. In the Middle Ages Western Europeans inherited some of the ideas of Roman f ons juris and developed them in their own way. In the Modern times, the concept of the source of law was changed because the statute law became the only form of law as the result of the rise of rationalism, the establishment of nation states and the separation of powers. The modern codification movement only changed the forms of the source of law, not the concept of the source of law. To define the concept of the source of law, one needs to understand exactly what is meant by "law" and“source" in the phrase‘fons j uris’.In short, the source of law is a gathering of diversified norms, from which judges find what they need to decide cases.     

我国农村金融问题及法律规制

构建和谐社会和建设社会主义新农村的战略方针,将"三农问题"摆在了现代化发展的最前沿。本文分析了我国农村金融立法的现状及存在的问题,并结合国外农村立法的经验,提出在我国应构建农村正规金融与非正规融资相结合的金融架构形式。在完善农村金融法律制度建设过程中,应走综合立法与分业立法相结合的道路。我国农村金融市场应尽快实现稳定发展,竞争适度的局面。     

Revisiting the Role of Private Military and Security Companies

Abstract

This essay addresses the role of private military and security companies (PMSCs) in security governance. In this context, it offers a historical overview of some of the main developments in the evolution of private warfare and critically discusses some of the key challenges confronting the quest for holding PMSCs accountable in accordance with international human rights and humanitarian norms.