Feminist Legal Scholars Research Articles

From east to west, can feminist legal strategies be transformative? Post-disaster to everyday times of crisis

This article engages with a key question raised by feminist legal scholars from the east to the west: whether women should or should not engage in rights strategies? Are rights systematically exercised to reproduce patriarchal, dominant sites of justice, or do rights constitute a multiple and relational force which may transform sites of justice? The experience of women’s engagements with law in South Asia has created a diversity of critical legal knowledge and scholarship reflecting the pluralism of both women’s identities and needs based on caste, religion, class and sexuality across an array of legal spaces from the family, community and state. Women in South Asian scholarship have complicated the notion of the homogenous legal subject and the static dominant site of justice. In this article I return to my underpinning field research whilst living and working within an earthquake affected area of Maharashtra, India in the post-crisis rehabilitation period (1993–1998). This research explored how women exercised their rights to reconstruct lives at different tiers of justice: in public policy, private legislation and the non-formal sphere of community relations to deconstruct the concept of rights existing within a static framework of justice. Drawing upon feminist discourse across the east to the west, I have analysed the role of rights in post-disaster sites to understand how women move from victims to survivors, beneficiaries to contributors and objects to agents of change to inform contemporary research on how women in post-domestic violence situations may exercise rights to reconstruct their lives in times of crisis in the UK. Through this analysis I argue that rights may be empowering if one can exercise one’s right to identity as agency, resources as capacity and location as mobility, as a three dimensional strategy to transform the framework in which one is situated. Over the last decade, I have actively applied this transformative methodology to create an alternative relational, intersectional and holistic legal paradigm, to transform sites of justice, in times of every day crisis, through the CLOCK/ All India Access to Justice Strategy.

The happy and anxious lives of (feminist) legal scholarship: an interview with Prabha Kotiswaran

This interview with Prabha Kotiswaran, Professor of Law and Social Justice at King’s College, London focuses, among others, on the many dimensions of postcolonial feminist legal education and scholarship; her own scholarly journey across three continents; insights into the gendered nature of academic labor; the lived dimensions of her feminism, the limitations and possibilities of emerging forms of feminisms in the wake of #MeToo; on her own scholarship on sex work; the misreading of governance feminism; the tradition of materialist feminism; her current project on law and social reproduction; and the imperative for strengthening solidarity between the women’s and labor movements in India.

Outlawing the Myth: Legouvé’s Medea in Victorian England from the Lens of Feminist Literary Jurisprudence

Feminist literary jurisprudence explores the intersection of literature, law and feminism. While the feminist legal scholarship has widely focused on Victorian fiction, the theater produced in nineteenth-century England has been largely overlooked in this field of criticism. This paper reads for the law Ernest Legouvé’s Medea a Tragedy in Three Acts, in Verse (1855), a play that retells the classical Euripidean filicidal episode. In this task I hope to contribute to this scholarly area by focusing not only on Victorian theater but also on the figure of Legouvé who, despite his influence on the women question, has been virtually ignored in this literary field. The French playwright was a political activist and self-declared feminist who devoted his public life to the defense of women’s rights and who strongly advocated for equalitarian laws for both sexes. The close reading of the tragedy pinpoints a wide range of legal rights in the field of family law with respect to motherhood, marriage, private property, divorce, child custody and alimony, showing that Legouvé used Medea to challenge the contemporary patriarchal legal system that governed family relationships in his time.

On the Record: Nicolette Naylor & Sibongile Ndashe

Recent local and global developments have turned the spotlight on the role of law in addressing sexual harassment in the workplace. Almost four decades after feminist legal scholars pushed for law that recognises that sexual harassment constitutes a form of discrimination that is legally actionable, it is important to take stock of the success and limits of the law. In a context where the law is increasingly accused of complicity in shielding abusers by (mis)applying sexual harassment policies to exonerate the perpetrators or fail to hold institutions to account where they claim that their hands are tied because complainants do not want to lay formal complaints. Nicolette Naylor (Director, Ford Foundation for Southern Africa) and Sibongile Ndashe (Executive Director: The Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa [ISLA]) discuss the role of the law against the backdrop of the successes of campaigns like the #MeToo movement that encourage survivors to speak out outside of the by unmasking and publicly naming perpetrators. The conversation was originally presented as an ISLA Conversation between Nicolette and Sibongile on 10 July 2018 in Johannesburg.

On the Record: Nicolette Naylor & Sibongile Ndashe

Recent local and global developments have turned the spotlight on the role of law in addressing sexual harassment in the workplace. Almost four decades after feminist legal scholars pushed for law that recognises that sexual harassment constitutes a form of discrimination that is legally actionable, it is important to take stock of the success and limits of the law. In a context where the law is increasingly accused of complicity in shielding abusers by (mis)applying sexual harassment policies to exonerate the perpetrators or fail to hold institutions to account where they claim that their hands are tied because complainants do not want to lay formal complaints. Nicolette Naylor (Director, Ford Foundation for Southern Africa) and Sibongile Ndashe (Executive Director: The Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa [ISLA]) discuss the role of the law against the backdrop of the successes of campaigns like the #MeToo movement that encourage survivors to speak out outside of the by unmasking and publicly naming perpetrators. The conversation was originally presented as an ISLA Conversation between Nicolette and Sibongile on 10 July 2018 in Johannesburg.

Studying women legal scholars: the challenges of life history

ABSTRACTBiographies of prominent women often advance inquiries that lead to easy and uninteresting conclusions that their subject should be celebrated or ignored. In contrast, this article argues for more life histories of women legal scholars that bring out the complexity of their lives. It suggests three ways to execute this work that guard against the making of simple binary conclusions. First, it argues that these studies should be open inquiries that present a range of views of their subject, from both the past and present, and encourage audiences to form their own judgments. This approach will help both reader and scholar to recognise their biases. Second, it makes a case for treating legal scholars differently from pure educators, scholars or lawyers. It suggests that their unique role should inform the work’s central inquiries. Finally, it argues that unearthing a subject’s attitude towards feminism and feminist legal scholarship can be done in ways that strengthen the work’s contribution to the history of the discipline.

On the record: Nicolette Naylor and Sibongile Ndashe discuss local and global developments on sexual harassment and the role of the law in responding

Recent local and global developments have turned the spotlight on the role of law in addressing sexual harassment in the workplace. Almost four decades after feminist legal scholars pushed for laws which recognise that sexual harassment constitutes a form of discrimination that is legally actionable, it is important to take stock of the success and limits of the law. In recent times the law has increasingly been accused of complicity in shielding abusers by (mis) applying sexual harassment policies to exonerate the perpetrators, or failing to hold institutions to account over claims that their hands are tied because victims do not want to lay formal complaints. Nicolette Naylor (Director, Ford Foundation for Southern Africa) and Sibongile Ndashe (Executive Director: The Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa [ISLA]) discuss the role of the law against the backdrop of the successes of campaigns like the #MeToo movement, which encourage survivors to speak out by unmasking and publicly naming perpetrators. The conversation was originally presented as an ISLA Conversation between Nicolette and Sibongile on 10 July 2018 in Johannesburg.

The use of international women’s human rights law in addressing gender-based violence in KosovoAriana Qosaj-MustafaThe use of international women’s human rights law in addressing gender-based violence

SEER Journal for Labour and Social Affairs in Eastern Europe , Seite 117 - 126

Abject Labours, Informal Markets: Revisiting the Law's (Re)Production Boundary

Feminist legal scholarship has for long richly contributed to the project of gendering labour law. In this article, I consider the efforts of both feminists and women workers alike to have abject forms of labour recognized as valuable labour and as legitimate work. I consider women in three sectors, namely, sex work, exotic dancing and commercial surrogacy and pursue two lines of inquiry. The first line of inquiry is to articulate why the work of these women ought to be recognized as legitimate work. In other words, I build on feminist efforts in the context of social reproduction to redraw what they call the production boundary to in turn critique feminists’ own reluctance to include within this production boundary the reproductive labour of women like sex workers, dancers and surrogates. In effect, I ask what it means to redraw what I call the 'reproduction boundary'. My second line of inquiry assesses the implications of this recognition of reproductive labour for labour law. How has labour law acknowledged the labours of these women in the past? Is it possible for labour law to accommodate the demands of these women workers and if so in what ways can it do so and what are the strengths and drawbacks of a labour law model in this context?

The Laws of Social Reproduction: A Lesson in Appropriation

This article offers insights into the law’s appropriation of women’s reproductive labour, namely, the intimate labours that they typically carry out in the context of marriage to biologically, socially, emotionally and culturally reproduce members of the household by offering a range of goods and services. Feminist legal scholars have long demonstrated the law’s failure to recognise, much less value, such reproductive labour. Where the law does recognise such labour, feminists argue that it is largely within the parameters of the institution of heterosexual marriage to the exclusion of other organisational forms. The article extends this line of feminist legal critique to reveal feminists’ own reluctance within the debates on social reproduction to recognise the reproductive labour performed by women outside the family and explicitly for the market. Through a cross-sectoral comparison of the law’s regulation of three such sectors of women’s abject labour, namely, sex work, bar-dancing and commercial surrogacy, the article demonstrates how, despite their regulation through criminal law, licensing law and contract law, there are several structural similarities in the political economies of these sectors. Consequently, any change in the rule network pertaining to any one sector of women’s reproductive labour affects women in that sector but also in other sectors. The article argues that it is only through an examination of the deep interconnectedness between sectors of women’s reproductive labour that feminists can assess whether an alternative regulatory matrix would further women’s claims to economic justice.

The Social Life of Abortion Law: on Personal and Political Pedagogy.

The current contribution seeks to start a conversation around our pedagogical practice in respect of abortion law. Centralising the traditional portrayal of abortion law within the medical law curriculum, this essay highlights the privileging of a very particular storyline about abortion. Exploring the terrain in evaluating medical law methodologies, this essay highlights the illusion of 'balance', 'objectivity', and 'neutrality' that emerges from current pedagogy in light of how abortion law is framed and in particular what is excluded: women's own voices. Focusing on a number of 'exclusions' and 'silences' and noting how closely these mirror dominant discourse in the public sphere, this essay highlights the irony of a curriculum that reflects, rather than challenges, these discursive gaps. Arguing that the setting of a curriculum is inevitably political, ambitions for delivering a programme around abortion that is 'neutral', 'objective', or 'balanced' are dismissed. Instead, highlighting the problems of what is currently excluded, how materials are ordered, and the tacit hierarchies that lend legitimacy and authority to a particular way of 'knowing' abortion, this essay argues for a new curriculum and a new storyline-one which is supported by prior learning in feminist legal scholarship and a medical law curriculum in which the social, historical, geographical, and above all, personal is ever-present and central.

Why Feminism Matters to the Study of Law

Queen's University's Faculty of Law is home to Feminist Legal Studies Queen's (FLSQ), a research group that expands awareness and development of scholarship in feminist legal studies, enables the development of feminist legal scholars at Queen's, and fosters connections among feminists with an interest in law. In the fall of 2014, I had the privilege of returning to Queen's Law to give the first seminar in FLSQ's 2014–15 lecture series. I was tasked with providing some reflections on why feminist legal theory matters. Some of the people attending the talk were also enrolled in the Queen's Feminist Legal Studies Workshop. The readings assigned for those students were (1) Toni Pickard's (retired Queen's law faculty member) wonderful introduction to law students at Queen's from 1987, 1 (2) Patricia Monture's (a graduate of Queen's) 2004 piece, “Women's Words,” 2 and (3) Ruthann Robson's (lesbian legal theorist and class critic) piece “To Market, To Market.” 3 What follows is the text from that talk.

‘Bridging the Divide’: An Interview with Professor Rashida Manjoo, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women

Violence against women has been a topic engaging feminist legal scholars for a long time, with a renewed feminist advocacy emerging to highlight sexual violence experienced by women during the armed conflicts in the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the early 1990s. One of the most important legal developments to emerge from this has been the creation of the office of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its Causes and Consequences (UN Special Rapporteur), as part of a series of developments at the UN level that finally accorded explicit recognition to violence against women as a human rights concern. In May 2015, Dr. Daniela Nadj interviewed UN Special Rapporteur, Professor Rashida Manjoo, during her visit to give the annual lecture at the Criminal Justice Centre, Queen Mary, University of London. The interview, an edited version of which is presented here, addressed broad themes including the meaning of liberation for women, especially in a post-conflict setting, the pervasive socio-economic inequality faced by women as an enduring obstacle to equality around the world, the normativity gap on violence against women, academic activism, and the politics of legal information.

Twenty Years of Feminist Legal Studies: Reflections and Future Directions

Editor’s note: On Saturday 18 May 2013, the Editorial Board of Feminist Legal Studies hosted an afternoon event at the University of Kent, Canterbury to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the journal. The event also marked the transition from the journal’s original home at Kent Law School to a new editorial board comprised of feminist academics from thirteen institutions across the UK. The event included a roundtable reflecting on the past 20 years of feminist legal scholarship and its future directions. Sarah Lamble edited this transcript of the roundtable. Speakers included past and present Editorial Board Members: Joanne Conaghan (University of Bristol), Emily Grabham (University of Kent), Rosemary Hunter (Queen Mary, University of London), Sarah Keenan (SOAS, University of London), Yvette Russell (Queen’s University Belfast) and Sally Sheldon (University of Kent). Participants in the discussion included: Samia Bano (SOAS, University of London), Nicola Barker (University of Kent), Kate Bedford (University of Kent), Brenna Bhandar (SOAS, University of London), Davina Cooper (University of Kent), Didi Herman (University of Kent), Loveday Hodson (University of Leicester), and Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmiths, University of London). Yvette Russell: Welcome to this great event for the twentieth anniversary of Feminist Legal Studies (FLS). I’d like to thank our hosts, Kent Law School, for their hospitality, and our publisher Springer who have contributed to the event today, and also to Nicky [Barker] for all of the work she has done organising this event. Thanks also to Brenna [Bhandar] for organising the second panel session [on feminist theory] and to research support staff at Kent Law School, who helped organise this. Fem Leg Stud (2014) 22:109–130 DOI 10.1007/s10691-014-9266-0

Obscuring sexual crime: examining media representations of sexual violence in Megan’s law

Sexual violence remains a pervasive and persistent social problem. In 1996, Congress enacted Megan’s Law, dictating mandatory community notification and potential civil commitment for those deemed by the State to be dangerous sexual offenders. In 2013, Megan’s Law continues to influence the treatment of sexual offenders under law and the social construction of a highly publicized, yet statistically rare, sexual crime – the rape and murder of a young female child by a depraved male stranger. This influence highlights the extent to which this personalized crime bill shapes the social construction of sexual violence in terms of sex and gender systems. This paper examines how sex and gender shape media discourses of the sexual offender and victim that are mobilized in the legislative debate on Megan’s Law. Drawing on theoretical ideas from cultural studies and feminist legal scholarship, we employ discourse analysis to analyze the legislative debate on Megan’s Law. We find that high-profile media images of sex offenders and victims are relied on to construct a singular image of sexual violence, whereby a child is victimized by an adult sexual predator. These images draw on traditional, conservative notions of gender and sexuality.

Legal Feminism and the Post-Racism Fantasy

In 1993, the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law published a special issue on racism in an effort to “shift paradigms” in feminist legal scholarship in Canada. This article examines scholarship published in the journal since that time to evaluate to what extent this aspiration has been realized. Although some progress has been made, feminist theorizing around racism and colonialism is not being undertaken as a matter of course. Rather, this theorizing is pursued most often when an issue has obvious significance to racialized women. The author explores why feminists, and white feminists in particular, still do not regularly integrate the impact of racism and colonialism into their writing and the potential consequences of this choice. She argues that ignoring the role of racism and colonialism in legal scholarship perpetuates systems of domination, which feminism should be aggressively dismantling and thus impedes the feminist project. The author ultimately questions whether theorizing without meaningful analysis of the role of racism, colonialism, and other sites of oppression can still be considered feminist.

In the Aftermath of Critique We Are Not in Epistemic Free Fall: Human Rights, the Subaltern Subject, and Non-liberal Search for Freedom and Happiness

The article challenges the claim that human rights, which have constituted one of the central tools by which to establish the truth claims of modernity, can produce freedom and meaningful happiness through the acquisition of more rights and more equality. Third World, postcolonial and feminist legal scholars have challenged the accuracy of this claim, amongst others. The critiques expose the discursive operations of human rights as a governance project primarily concerned with ordering the lives of non-European peoples, rather than a liberating force; and that the pre-given rational subject of human rights is contingent and one of the prime effects of power. I examine the problems with the liberal humanism of human rights by examining not only how it is linked to a specific understanding of the `good life’, freedom and happiness, but also how it closes off other emancipatory possibilities. The acquisition of human rights as objects that an individual has by virtue of being human, represent the terminal limits of human rights, rather than the moment when the human subject becomes empowered and liberated. I draw on queer affect theory to make a critique of happiness, to which I argue human rights are linked, and how the failed or unhappy subaltern subject exposes its normative composition. I discuss the resulting depth of the despair produced from the realisation that this political project cannot realise its promise of freedom and meaningful happiness, compelling a `turn away’ from human rights as an emancipatory project and a `turn towards’ other non-liberal philosophical traditions, in the search for alternative understandings of and space for freedom and happiness. I explore these possibilities specifically within the philosophical tradition of non-dualism (Advaita).

Clio’s Forgotten Consciousness: History and the Question of Feminist Critique in Law

This paper interrogates the relationship between historiography and the feminist project in law and in particular explores the absence of historical inquiry from feminist critiques in law. It identifies three modalities of such critique and argues that all three, in being predicated upon a belief in the oppressive nature of the relationship between women and law, have remained steadfastly attached to the present. As a result, critical inquiry is limited to the negative effects law has upon women’s social being, rather than concentrating upon law itself. This limitation, the paper argues, has served to strip the feminist legal scholar of the capacity for self-reflective historical inquiry and, in so doing, to narrow the critical horizons of modern feminist legal scholarship.

Do Feminists Need an Economic Sociology of Law?

Feminist legal scholars have long exposed the mutually constitutive relationship between the market and the social sphere, particularly, of the family, as mediated by the state. A peculiar division of labour has emerged in American feminist legal theorizing on the market in the context of care work, on the one hand, and sex work on the other. Care is valorized, thus entrenching the family‐market dichotomy while the sex‐work debates view the market as a source of harm and violence and therefore to be eliminated from the social. This produces a problematic feminist understanding of the market and generates legal reforms that produce unintended consequences for women themselves. The article offers an economic sociology of law pursued in legal ethnographic terms as a way of revitalizing contemporary feminist legal thought on the market and, indeed, the economy, illustrating its use in the context of international anti‐trafficking law and transnational surrogacy.

Space and Law, Gender and Land: Using CEDAW to Regulate for Women’s Rights to Land in Vanuatu

International laws such as The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) promise a universal system of rights to varied people in varied places. In many Pacific states this has been translated to mean that women should have the same privileges as men to control, possess and use land. This could not be further from the truth as evidenced by women’s experiences in Vanuatu, which bring home the visible and invisible spaces of international law. The insights of legal geographers into the spatialised dimensions of social, political and economic activities, together with those of feminist legal scholars into the gendered nature of law, are invaluable in understanding how some spaces are prioritized while others are devalued. We rely on these insights to uncover the prioritized legal spaces of Vanuatu and to locate them against the lived-in spaces of Vanuatu’s women. Becoming aware of the multispatiality of law is the first step in contemplating a landscape where justice can play a part.