Feminist Reform Research Articles

Feminist Academics as Nomadic Subjects: Reconceptualizing Women in Universities

From a feminist perspective, it is more than a little axiomatic to say that highereducation has traditionally produced and reproduced, naturalized and valorizedspecific sets of behavior, specific forms of knowledge and specific versions ofintellectual practice which celebrate that which is coded as masculine at theexpense of that which is produced as feminine.The production of this opposition is attendant on the primacy of the westerncultural separation of the public from the private and the celebration of all that isassociated with the first term at the expense of all that is subsumed under thesecond. This, in turn, is based on the construction of masculinity as synonymouswith rationality, intellect, reason, culture and the production of femininity as all thatis not male: in this binaristic logic women are irrational, emotional and nurturing.Braidotti (1994a) summarizes the situation well when she writes:the universalistic stance, with its conflation of the masculine to represent thehuman and the confinement of the feminine to a secondary position of devalued"otherness", rests upon a classical system of dualistic oppositions, such as, forinstance; nature/culture, active/passive, rational/irrational, masculine/feminine.Feminists argue that this dualistic mode of thinking creates binary differences onlyto ordain them in a hierarchical scale of power relations. (p. 155)Consistent with this logic, the university has been naturalized as a homogeneousmale institution: the true home, if you like, of the 'enlightened male subject'.Women's marginality within academic environments manifests itself in diverse andcomplex ways. Women have been consistently absent, not just from theclassrooms, offices, and meeting places of Academe, but also from the discourses,texts, and subjects on which a university education is based (Rich, 1979). Thereare fewer women academics in universities than men, they tend to be concentratedin the lower employment categories, and by extension, more likely to be engaged inteaching than in research. Women have been under represented on decisionmaking bodies, and have encountered a 'glass ceiling' in attempts to achievepromotion (Porter, 1995).The phallocentric nature of university environment has prompted significant debateamong feminists in academia and given rise to a wide range of activities designed,in one way or another, to challenge the dominant masculinist culture. Despite manyyears of effort, however, universities remain male dominated environments withinwhich women continue to be employed at lower levels, on shorter contracts, andwith narrower career prospects.In other words, there exists a significant gap between the hopes many of us heldfor the future of women in universities and the current (on-going) realities faced bythose of us working in these environments. It is this gap and what it tells us aboutthe on-going need for feminist reform in academic circles that has inspired thispaper. More specifically, we are interested in using the work of feminist scholar RosiBraidotti as a basis for identifying a particular 'mindset' that is valuable for thinkingabout the on-going challenges associated with the cultural transformation ofuniversity environments. We will illustrate the need for and value of these mindsetsthrough a discussion of one particular university, and one specific attempt bywomen within that university to improve women's participation in research activity.This introduction, then, is followed by four main sections. In the first, wedemonstrate the ways in which our case site, Central Queensland University,reflects the same kind of phallocentric ideologies that can be seen to characterizeuniversity environments more generally. In the second, we outline some of themajor (feminist) strategies developed within this university to improve women'sresearch activity and discuss some of the differences of opinion concerning how thisis best achieved. In the third section, we will explore what it is that Rosi Braidotti'smodel of nomadic subjectivity offers to those women engaged in the work ofcultural transformation, and in the fourth and final section, we will provide a briefexample of how nomadic consciousness can shape the day-to-day practice ofwomen academics.As any exploration of gender and its consequences necessitates analysis of theparticular context within which women are located, it is necessary for us to beginthis paper with a brief overview of the particular university that we will be using toillustrate our points.Section one: An old problem in a new context

Introduction

In this second issue of volume 100 of Soundings, we are continuing our ReSoundings section, reprinting an earlier article from Soundings representing a significant scholarly contribution to its field. Our ReSoundings selection for this issue is Rosemary Radford Ruether's “The Feminist Critique in Religious Studies,” originally published in 1981, describing the purposes and stages of the feminist push toward equal status in theological doctrine and church leadership. Contemporary scholar of religious history, Tamara Van Dyken, provides some retrospective context for both Ruether's essay and the ongoing feminist theological project it describes. Van Dyken's essay places the Ruether piece in relation to the cultural conversation—within and beyond the academy—about feminism and religion with a case study on feminist reform efforts in one particular protestant denomination. Three additional articles offer new perspectives on enduring critical conversations. Michael Istvan's “The Manner of Blackness in Nella Larsen's Passing” contributes to contemporary discussions on race and essentialism by offering a new reading of the awareness of racial identity in this classic novella. Nicholas Freisner's “Emerson's Transcendentalism of Common Life” works to redefine our perception of Emerson's stance on religion by recognizing how Emerson himself was engaged in a significant redefinition of religion. Finally, Peter Moe's innovative collage essay, “Breathing, Parsing, Praying,” draws on stylistic theories from poetry and writing studies to offer insight and spur reflection on the embodied experience of communal prayer. All of these pieces embrace the scholarly tradition of re-seeing classic texts to both refresh and deepen our experience of them.

Laura Micheletti Puaca. Searching for Scientific Womanpower: Technocratic Feminism and the Politics of National Security, 1940–1980. xiii + 261 pp., illus., bibl., index. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. $34.95 (paper).

Laura Micheletti Puaca. <i>Searching for Scientific Womanpower: Technocratic Feminism and the Politics of National Security, 1940–1980</i>. xiii + 261 pp., illus., bibl., index. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. $34.95 (paper).

The Late-Victorian Feminist Community

The Late-Victorian Feminist Community Jana Smith Elford (bio) Late-victorian feminism has often been considered a backwater of collective action. The movement has been characterized by scholars as “a fractured collectivity of groups and webs of affiliation marked by disagreement as much as by consensus” (Felski 147), with political action “in a faltering state of suspension” (Beaumont 97). Yet the fact that the feminism of the period represented a “fractured collectivity” does not mean it was politically ineffective. On the contrary, the degree to which late-Victorian feminism constituted a network rather than a singular movement provided unique strengths and opportunities. Feminists of the period—writers, activists, social reformers, and thinkers—petitioned for the improved status of women by advocating egalitarian marriage and comradeship between the sexes, improved working conditions for women, and political and legal enfranchisement. They moved sometimes together and sometimes in parallel, encountering and influencing each other’s ideas through shared connections to particular places, social organizations, and individuals. Late-Victorian feminism was informed by education advancements of the mid-Victorian period. In Britain, mid-Victorian feminists Emily Davies, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Anne Jemima Clough, and Josephine Butler made considerable advances in the higher education of women, establishing Girton and Newnham Colleges, at Cambridge University, in 1869 and 1871, respectively. Middle- and upper-class women deemed superfluous by British society took advantage of burgeoning opportunities for study and established new egalitarian communities premised on critical thought and well-considered ideas. Although some are less well-remembered than others, women belonging to the late-Victorian feminist reform community included, among others, Eleanor Marx Aveling (Karl Marx’s daughter and a member of the Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist League, and the Woman’s Trade Union League); Emma Brooke (a founding member of the Fabian Society and author of the 1894 novel A Superfluous Woman); Clementina Black (secretary of the Women’s Trade Union Association, president of the Women’s Industrial Council, and executive committee member of the National Anti-Sweating League); Mona Caird (president of the Anti-Vivisection League, member of the Pioneer Club and the Theosophical Society, and author of the inflammatory 1888 article “Marriage”); Annie Besant (theosophist, socialist, and proponent of birth control); Katharine St. John Conway (Glasier) (theosophist and founding member of the Independent Labour Party); Jane Hume Clapperton (novelist and social theorist); Isabella Ormston Ford (author, speaker, and founding member of the International Labour Party); Henrietta Müller (labour activist, suffragette, anti-war advocate, and contributor to the Westminster Review); Margaret Harkness (author of the socialist-feminist novels [End Page 32] A City Girl [1887], Out of Work [1888], and In Darkest London [1889]); and Olive Schreiner (author of the 1883 novel The Story of An African Farm; the 1890 evocative and widely influential collection of feminist visions, Dreams; and the 1911 Women and Labour). Such women depended on a network of like-minded women and men for support and companionship. In effect, feminist reformers invented new communities of their own—communities that were defined not by marital status but by a mutual desire to transform late-Victorian society. Not adhering to a single or monolithic feminist agenda, these women were involved in various and multiple overlapping social reform clubs and organizations, some with what we might see today as opposing ideological perspectives. Many of these organizations were located in London but had connections extending well beyond the limits of the metropolis. They included political groups such as the Fabian Society, the Independent Labour Party, the Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist League, the Women’s Liberal Association, the Women’s Trade Union League, and the Women’s Labour League. They also included clubs formed in response to “the woman question,” such as the Men and Women’s Club and the Pioneer Club, as well as spiritual or religion-based associations, such as the Fellowship of the New Life and the Theosophical Society. Late-Victorian feminists were also affiliated with the periodical networks of the day, including the mainstream Westminster Review and Nineteenth Century, socialist periodicals such as the well-known Labour Leader, and the woman-centred Women’s Penny Paper (which later became The Woman’s Herald). For feminist Emma Brooke...

Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times, Vol. 2, ed. by Beverly Greene Bond and Sarah Wilkerson Freeman

Reviewed by: Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times, Vol. 2, ed. by Beverly Greene Bond and Sarah Wilkerson Freeman Sara Brooks Sundberg Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times. Volume 2. Edited by Beverly Greene Bond and Sarah Wilkerson Freeman. Southern Women: Their Lives and Times. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. [xiv], 425. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-3743-2; cloth, $89.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-3742-5.) In this second volume about Tennessee women in the University of Georgia Press series Southern Women: Their Lives and Times, the editors have selected sixteen essays that examine how Tennessee women not only reflected but also changed their times. Building on the first volume, which included essays on women from as early as the 1700s, this volume is divided equally into two parts focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. African American and white women are examined in essays that explore themes ranging from “the interconnectedness of race, class and gender” to the activism of feminist reformers (p. 2). Some authors highlight individual women’s lives, while others examine the activities and experiences of groups of women. Taken together, the essays represent geographic regions throughout the state, and they expose female perspectives on the history of the state and the nation. Part 1 opens with two essays that focus on two groups of women whose lives are difficult to reconstruct: enslaved women and “common white women in farming households” (p. 36). Both essays glean important information from an array of public documents to highlight, among other topics, the significance of migration and labor in shaping women’s lives. African American women, both slave and free, most often experienced forced migration into Tennessee from North Carolina, and the restrictive laws and regulations governing slavery and racial distinctions reflected those they left behind. Similar to pioneer farm women on other frontiers, white farm women came to Tennessee in search of opportunities that were often balanced against painful separation from their families. Both groups of women made substantial contributions to the economy of the region: enslaved women through plantation production and reproduction, and white farm women through textile production. The Civil War and its aftermath serve as the backdrop for the remaining five essays in Part 1, as the authors explore the many ways Tennessee women participated in the construction of social spaces and historical memory during and after the war. For example, in “‘Graceless Yankee Tramps and Secesh She-Devils’: Union Soldiers and Confederate Women in Middle Tennessee,” Laura Mammina explores interactions between Union soldiers and Confederate women that challenged gentlemanly and ladylike behavior and “called into question traditional notions of masculine and feminine behavior, revealing them to be permeable and ambiguous” (p. 63). In “Forming a ‘Sisterhood Chain’: Women, Emancipation, and Freedom Celebrations in Tennessee,” Antoinette G. van Zelm shows how freedwomen celebrated emancipation publicly alongside freedmen and how their participation in these public events forged an influential sisterhood rooted in “women’s emancipation experiences” (p. 81). Additionally, in “The Right to Be a Lady: Ida B. Wells and Social Reform,” Sarah L. Silkey explains how Wells fought against the marginalization of middle-class African American women by insisting on being seated in the ladies’ car on passenger railways, among other issues. Wells’s claim of respectability challenged segregation of social spaces and [End Page 717] demonstrates the complex intersection of race, class, and gender in turn-of-the-twentieth-century efforts for reform. Part 2 turns the reader’s attention to the twentieth century and Tennessee women’s “audacious” activism (p. 177). Sarah Wilkerson Freeman’s introductory essay for this section concludes “that Tennessee women provided the cutting edge of women’s rights activism and interracial cooperation in the South, making Tennessee exceptional” (p. 180). There is much useful information in these essays. Three of the nine focus on individual women active in temperance, suffrage, prostitution, and education reform efforts. Other essays, such as Elton H. Weaver III’s “‘Working with Our Own Hands’: Church of God in Christ Women in Tennessee, Early 1900s–1950s,” analyze the work of groups of women. Richly contextualized, Weaver’s essay argues that women from the Church of God...

‘The Defection of Women’: the New Zealand Contagious Diseases Act repeal campaign and transnational feminist dialogue in the late nineteenth century

Over the past decade, historians have situated feminist reformers’ efforts to dismantle the British imperial contagious diseases apparatus at the heart of the transnational turn in women's history. New Zealand was an early emulator of British prostitution regulations, which provoked an organised repeal campaign in the 1880s, yet the colony is seldom considered in these debates. Tracing the dialogue concerning the repeal of contagious diseases legislation between British and New Zealand feminists in the 1890s, this article reaffirms the salience of political developments in the settler colonies for metropolitan reformers. A close reading of these interactions, catalysed by the Auckland Women's Liberal League's endorsement of the Act in 1895, reveals recently enfranchised New Zealand women's desire to act as model citizens for the benefit of metropolitan suffragists. Furthermore, it highlights the asymmetries that remained characteristic of the relationship between British feminists and their enfranchised Antipodean counterparts.

Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933. By Jill Suzanne Smith (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2013) 221 pp. $69.95 cloth $27.95 paper

Smith’s book is an exciting contribution to the growing scholarship about the history of prostitution in modern Germany. With the intent of moving beyond the standard dichotomy of victim/villain, Smith uses myriad sources to sketch a vibrant picture of women in Berlin’s sex trade from the Kaiserreich to the end of the Weimar Republic. In doing so, she argues that cultural texts (popular novels, plays, social-hygiene films, police records, and sociopolitical essays) should be read not only as reflections of their historical time periods but as important shapers of contemporary debate and discourse.For instance, Chapter 1 uses two Otto Erich Hartleben plays, Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (Berlin, 1900) and August Bebel’s influential Die Frau under der Sozialismus (Berlin, 1879) to examine fin-de-siècle debates about bourgeois marriage, “free love,” and prostitution. Smith concludes that although the authors use the sex trade to criticize the institution of bourgeois marriage, none of them is “truly able to imagine a world in which women can be both sexually and economically autonomous” (62).Similarly, in Chapter 2, Smith examines the writings of the prominent German feminists Anna Pappritz, Helene Stöcker, and Hanna Bieber-Böhm to inform her reading of Margarete Böhme’s bestselling novel of 1905, Diary of a Lost Girl. Thus does Smith confirm what several other scholars have contended, that Germany was home to a vibrant and multifaceted reform culture in the early years of the twentieth century. For instance, although many feminist reformers placed the blame for sex-trade conditions at the feet of male johns and pimps, opinions about the culpability of female sex-trade workers were constantly shifting.In Chapter 3, Smith focuses on such cultural artifacts as cinematic works, cabaret performances, and a visitor’s guide to “naughty” Berlin to illustrate the links between gendered public spaces, male anxiety, and female emancipation in the Weimar metropolis. In Chapter 4, Smith uses fictional works to gauge the effects of the controversial 1927 Law to Combat Venereal Diseases. As in earlier chapters, she uncovers a multiplicity of experience, which confirms one of her overarching arguments, that texts examining female prostitution should not be read “simply as indicator[s] of women’s oppression”; in fact, a reading of diverse cultural texts “reveals the fragility of gender relations and new modes of sexual expression in the Weimar era without resorting to defeatist conclusions” (184).Berlin Coquette is an innovative interdisciplinary work that succeeds in illustrating the complicated nature of the urban German prostitution trade in the years before and after World War I. Smith defends the book’s narrow geographical focus by qualifying Berlin as “one of the quintessential modern cities of twentieth-century Europe” (3). Although this label is tough to dispute, a sole focus on the German capital ignores rich sources in cities such as Munich, Hamburg, and Dusseldorf, let alone the smaller cities and towns that sought to deal with “prostitution problems” in their own ways. That said, Smith’s work will be read with interest by scholars and students of German history and literature, gender and sexuality, and culture and media studies.

Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War by Margaret Humphreys (review)

Reviewed by: Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War by Margaret Humphreys Bobby Wintermute (bio) Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War. By Margaret Humphreys. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Pp. 385. Cloth, $34.95.) In the introduction to Marrow of Tragedy, Margaret Humphreys takes care to note how the tragic events of the American Civil War continue to resonate personally, with at least two of her forebears losing their lives during the conflict. This “foolish, overwhelming cataclysm” exacted a cruel toll from its participants, not only in terms of lives lost to battle and disease, but also in the long suffering of the war’s sick and wounded survivors, not to mention the anguish of the surviving families of those who marched to the drum (19). And yet Humphreys—Duke University’s Josiah Charles Trent Professor of the History of Medicine—takes inspiration from this familial legacy to craft something long overdue for scholars, students, and [End Page 323] aficionados alike—an intelligent, insightful, and comprehensive study of the human dimension of the Civil War’s impact on both the individual soldier and the larger communities affected and influenced by the war. Building on the framework of the “war and society” perspective—what some have also called the “new ‘new military history’”—Humphreys seeks to present the Civil War as an event transpiring on several existential planes simultaneously. Rather than focus exclusively on the well-defined threads of the American Civil War as a blood-soaked contest populated by soldier victims and caregivers of varying degrees of competency, she strives to link the home front—a generally feminized space where philanthropies competed with the state for access to the resources needed to treat the war’s victims—with the larger questions of professional expertise and legitimate authority in matters of medicine and public health that were arising over the course of the war. This is no easy task. While military history as a field has made great strides in recent years, numerous practitioners still resist calls for incorporating social- and cultural-based historical analysis, particularly if such approaches challenge long-established conventions. Even within the context of military medicine studies, mainstream popular histories continue to focus on the heroic therapeutic narratives, ignoring more salient trends in public health, institutional management, and the lingering residual effects of war on its participants. These are but a few of the challenges Humphreys confronts in her well-conceived study. Operating from the premise that war and the work of healing and treating its damaged participants is a deeply intimate social exchange, Humphreys considers Civil War medicine as an exchange dominated by existing concepts of gender identification. The military physician and the uniformed enlisted hospital orderly both performed services—nurturing, succoring, salving—that were long identified in antebellum society as feminized activities. Only after the full scope of the human disaster was realized did attitudes change, when in 1868 military physicians were granted rank with its full prerogatives and privileges. In acquiring rank, the army doctor likewise acquired legitimate authority as a peer officer—with his practice and duties likewise recontextualized as being sufficiently masculine to warrant formal recognition by the line establishment and the War Department. The transformative experience was not limited to military personnel, however. Humphries addresses the civilian interactions with the Union military establishment relatively early in her narrative. Beginning with the question of female participation in the military medical effort, she [End Page 324] very quickly dispenses with the largely resolved arguments about nursing. Instead she considers the more serious issues of female physicians in the military hospital, describing this encounter as the more genuine venue for anticipated change by feminist reformers. Female physicians were not always welcomed in military hospitals, nor were they accepted by their uniformed male peers—the backlash against Dr. Mary Walker’s award of the Congressional Medal of Honor presented as the most egregious example—but the very fact of the female expert presence in military hospitals served to advance their postwar efforts to claim legitimacy. Other civilian encounters with the military establishment—those involving the U.S. Sanitary Commission, local health committees in occupied southern...

Gender &amp; Justice: Why Women in the Judiciary Really Matter. By Sally J. Kenney. New York and London, UK: Routledge, 2013. 310 pp. $35.95 paper.

Gender & Justice: Why Women in the Judiciary Really Matter. By Sally J. Kenney. New York and London, UK: Routledge, 2013. 310 pp. $35.95 paper.Political scientist Sally J. Kenney's recent book, Gender & Justice: Why Women in the Judiciary Really Matter, does more than simply make the case for a gender diverse judiciary. She also suggests how to accomplish this by using case studies from a variety of countries as examples of what has and has not worked. Ultimately relying on arguments used to diversify American juries, Kenney criticizes some feminists' strategies, including reliance on argu- ments that women will somehow judge cases differently. Instead, Kenney persuasively makes the case that using arguments that gender diversity strengthens the legitimacy of the judiciary is more effective and does not lead to the same essentialist pitfalls that result from arguments regarding differences between male and female judging.Kenney suggests that gender is best understood as a social process (p. 41). Arguments about differences between men and women are both essentialist and not supported by the work of political scientists who examine American judges' voting patterns. As Kenney's painstaking review of the literature shows, she is correct in this assessment. Aside from sex discrimination cases, there is little evidence that women decide cases differently than men. Yet, political scientists and other feminists continue to focus their efforts on this difference. Kenney acknowledges concerns that if women do not make a difference in case outcomes, why bother appointing them (p. 43)? It takes Kenney several chapters to address this question.Kenney takes the reader through some examples of attempts to diversify the bench, including the experience of state and federal court judges, and judges in the United Kingdom and European Court of Justice (ECJ). Kenney begins with Rosalie Wahl, the first woman justice appointed to the Supreme Court of Minnesota. Wahl's case marshaled the emotions of women in Minnesota, cre- ating a harmonic convergence whereby the governor, who was committed to appointing a woman, had the backing to make Wahl's appointment a reality. Kenney's reliance on emotions as a rallying point is somewhat ironic. While eschewing essentialism, Kenney suggests that women candidates are most successful when they emotionally connect with other women and feminist men. This plays into stereotypes that women are more emotional and less rational, a misperception (along with the myth that women are less qualified) often used to keep women off the bench.Using the Carter Administration as an example, Kenney's chapter on the federal bench is particularly edifying in identifying a successful strategy for appointing women. President Carter appointed a record number of non-traditional judges. The com- bination of an executive branch that was dedicated to diversity, including insiders within the administration who persistently pushed for women judges, along with pressure from outsider femi- nist groups, led to these successes. Kenney is clear that feminists who argue against becoming insiders, because the inside is inher- ently patriarchal, are wrongheaded. As the Carter example shows, insiders can act as valuable allies in bringing about feminist reforms, including diversifying the bench.In Chapters 5 and 6, Kenney moves to the experience of the United Kingdom and the ECJ. These chapters are somewhat con- fusing to read because Kenney jumps back and forth in time in describing various attempts to appoint female judges. …

Alfred Russel Wallace's Medical Libertarianism: State Medicine, Human Progress, and Evolutionary Purpose

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), naturalist and explorer of South America and the Malay Archipelago, secured his place in history by independently discovering the theory of natural selection. His letter outlining the theory was sent from Ternate in eastern Indonesia and received at Down House, according to Charles Darwin (1809-82), on June 18, 1858, prompting the now-famed evolutionist to rush his languishing manuscript to press. Wallace's contributions to evolutionary biology, biogeography, and anthropology are well known, but his medical views have received far less attention. Within the context of a strident populist antivaccination movement and an ominous elitist eugenics campaign, Wallace took his stand, which revealed itself in a libertarianism that defended traditional socialist constituencies (the working poor, the lumpenproletariat, and feminist reformers) against state-mandated medical interventions. Rather than viewing Wallace as a heterodox contrarian, this article argues that his positions were logical outgrowths of his medical libertarianism and evolutionary and social theories.

Pathways, race and gender responsive reform: Through an abolitionist lens

In this article we take stock of a recent moment in penal history in Victoria, Australia, where agencies have implemented gender responsive policies to address the disproportionate growth in women’s prison numbers, and in particular the overrepresentation of women constructed as ‘culturally diverse’. We draw upon abolitionist and intersectional frames to provide a theoretical critique of this political event. Our analysis extends beyond the unitary frame of gender, which has until recently dominated critiques in this area, to highlight the ways in which racializing logics are reproduced through such policies and practices. We explore the implications of the adoption of the criminological notion of pathways through the language of liberal feminist reform, which signifies a reinvestment in the myth of individual rehabilitation. The consequences of these discursive practices include the reproduction of pathologizing and risk-focused practices that can only yield more racializing, interventionist and expansionist responses within correctional spaces.

Sexual assault in Canada: law, legal practice, and women's activism

Sexual Assault in Canada is the first English-language book in almost two decades to assess the state of sexual assault law and legal practice in Canada. Gathering together feminist scholars, lawyers, activists and policy-makers, it presents a picture of the difficult issues that Canadian women face when reporting and prosecuting sexual violence. The volume addresses many themes including the systematic undermining of women who have been sexually assaulted, the experiences of marginalized women, and the role of women’s activism. It explores sexual assault in various contexts, including professional sports, the doctor–patient relationship, and residential schools. And it highlights the influence of certain players in the reporting and litigation of sexual violence, including health care providers, social workers, police, lawyers and judges. Sexual Assault in Canada provides both a multi-faceted assessment of the progress of feminist reforms to Canadian sexual assault law and practice, and articulates a myriad of new ideas, proposed changes to law, and inspired activist strategies.

Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism by Antoinette Burton (review)

Reviewed by: Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism by Antoinette Burton Mark Hampton (bio) Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism by Antoinette Burton; pp xxii + 392. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. $28.99 paper; $106.07 cloth. As mrinalini Sinha notes in the foreword to this collection of essays, their author, Antoinette Burton, is among a small number of scholars whose work’s impact “has been nothing short of transformative as regards the ways in which scholars study empires and imperialism” (xi). In such books as Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (1995), At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (1998), and After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (2003), Burton has done much to break down the distinction between imperial and domestic histories, to undermine the assumption that cultural transmission proceeded outward from the British Isles to colonial peripheries, and to uncover the interplay between empire and nation. In Empire in Question, Burton assembles fourteen essays originally published between 1994 and 2008, bookending them with a reflective introduction and a final essay that examines the place of British imperialism within globalization. Taken collectively, these essays constitute an excellent introduction to Burton’s scholarship and, as such, to the development of the field of modern British history over the past two decades. The book is divided into two sections, one more theoretical or political, the other more overtly historical—though, as Burton points out (and demonstrates), this distinction is somewhat artificial. The first section includes essays that situate the study of imperial history within the late twentieth-century and early twentieth-first-century political cultures of both Britain and America. The essays argue both for broadening the definition of what “counts” as an archive and for shedding the binary between empire and home that itself constitutes a nineteenth-century “technology of imperial rule” (28). The section is animated not only by Burton’s engagement with contemporary historiography and politics but also by her awareness of her own position as a teacher of British imperial history in a North American university; the final chapter in this section, co-authored with her colleague Jean Allman, includes a sample syllabus for a postgraduate seminar on gender and colonialism. In the second section, several case studies demonstrate the decentred and transnational character of modern British imperial culture, as well as [End Page 215] the close connection between gender and empire. Some of the chapters, drawing on the research that produced Burton’s earlier monographs, show the role of maternal solicitousness toward Indian women in shaping the cause of late nineteenth-century British feminist reform “at home.” These include chapters illuminating Mary Carpenter’s Six Months in India (1868), the campaign against Indian women’s seclusion in the zenana, and the trial of the child bride Rukhmabai, who refused to accept her arranged marriage to a man she deemed her intellectual inferior. Other chapters closely contextualize Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847)and Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink (1995) as colonial and post-colonial texts, as well as the controversy over Lord Salisbury’s gaffe in calling a Liberal candidate for Parliament, Dadabhai Naoroji, a “black man.” The final chapter in this section cites the influence of New Zealand’s welfare reform on early twentieth-century British reforms as an example of the multidirectional transmission of imperial culture. These chapters highlight the complexity of the interactions between class, gender, and race, as well as the fact that “discourses are products of concrete, material social conditions and struggles, even as they also shape the terms through which such conditions are experienced, articulated, and circulated throughout culture” (239). Whereas most of the chapters unite the domestic and the imperial into one mutually constitutive whole, the book’s stimulating final chapter, previously unpublished, takes issue with recent scholarship that treats Britain’s contribution to globalization as, in effect, a new kind of British exceptionalism. Rather than seeing globalization as a product of British imperialism, Burton argues, we should see it, even at the zenith of British expansion, as a decentred process in which the British Empire...

Rape in Chicago: Race, Myth, and the Courts

Spanning a period of four tumultuous decades from the mid-1930s through the mid-1970s, this study reassesses the ways in which Chicagoans negotiated the extraordinary challenges of rape, as either victims or accused perpetrators. Drawing on extensive trial testimony, government reports, and media coverage, Dawn Rae Flood examines how individual men and women, particularly African Americans, understood and challenged myths and claimed their right to be protected as American citizens--protected by the State against violence, and protected from the State's prejudicial investigations and interrogations. Flood shows how defense strategies, evolving in concert with changes in the broader cultural and legal environment, challenged assumptions about black criminality while continuing to deploy racist and sexist stereotypes against the plaintiffs. Uniquely combining legal studies, medical history, and personal accounts, Flood pays special attention to how medical evidence was considered in cases and how victim-patients were treated by hospital personnel. She also analyzes medical testimony in modern trials, tracing the evolution of contemporary rape kit procedures as shaped by legal requirements, trial strategies, feminist reform efforts, and women's experiences.

‘A Plural Thing’: Inventing a Feminist Brain-Based Subject of Law

A brain-based subject of law is emerging, in which neurological processes become a primary means of defining individual choice, behaviour, capacity and responsibility. This paper considers the impact of such a shift in legal subjectivity on feminist engagement with law. A reductionist take on the brain works to entrench narrow readings of law and discourage feminist reforms. However, emerging neurotechnologies such as brain scanning and neuropharmacology also have disruptive qualities that might be harnessed in the interests of feminist legal inventions and interventions. This paper looks to the disruptive aspects of neurotechnologies to argue for an alternative brain-based subjectivity in law, one that sees the brain as ‘open’: an organ that connects us to others, that is embedded in relationships and situated in a particular history and politics. Such an approach makes visible the gendered underpinnings of ‘neurolaw’ and allows for a brain-based legal subject that is open to feminist creativity.This is an open moment: although the outcome is far from clear, it is apparent that the brain is a plural thing, culturally speaking.

The Failure and Promise of Equity in Domestic Abuse Cases

In a generation, American law has experienced dramatic reforms in response to domestic abuse. Feminist activism prompted and has driven these reforms and a deeper cultural understanding of domestic abuse, and recent legal innovation has yielded more effective options for victims of domestic violence. Virtually all of these reforms built upon existing legal structures to afford specific process and remedies to victims of domestic abuse, but why were innovations necessary if existing legal structures could have intervened on their own extant authority? Customary, common law equity might have intervened effectively to interrupt violence in homes, to render injunctive relief for the protection of women and children, and to examine the dynamics of family violence. Despite this promise, equity failed for centuries as a means to protect victims of abuse in families. Now, equity has evolved, and society and culture are far better illuminated on matters of gender justice and the dynamics of intimate violence. Feminist reforms have taken root and flourished, and the law now empowers courts to intervene regularly in family matters. A persistent problem rises when lawmakers attempt to craft broad standards to address individualized, customized abuse. Equity can expand the tools available to courts to render justice for victims, especially victims who are not subject to physical violence. Equity can be an interstitial supplement when general law cannot accommodate unique, specific relationships that are abusive and violent. This Article considers why traditional, common law equity failed historically to address domestic abuse and examines how equity now intersects with other legal remedies for victims. It concludes with a call to refine and improve equity in light of an illuminated, modern understanding of domestic abuse and gender justice, while claiming the old moral demands of a good judicial conscience, one that will suffer no wrong without rendering adequate, preventative and moral relief.

Student voice and the politics of listening in higher education

The promise of giving voice to under-represented and marginalized groups has been a mainstay of emancipatory agendas in educational research. It has been an especially influential focus in feminist and gender equity reform projects and is increasingly a feature of policies and programs directed to enhance youth participation and civic inclusion. Voice typically signals a concern with representation and empowerment and associated claims for transformation have been criticized on several grounds, from offering only superficial forms of inclusion to the problem of power in the selective bestowing of voice. Yet the appeal of voice remains powerful. What can be learnt from feminist and other critical attention to promoting voice in education; and what might be the challenges – limitations and benefits – of adopting a pedagogy and politics of voice as a strategy to promote equity and wider participation in higher education? I outline an argument for how we might re-frame voice as problem not so much of expression and representation, but of listening and recognition, and consider some of the implications of such a reframing for student equity strategies in higher education.

"You trade in a man for the man": Domestic Violence and the U.S. Welfare State

The Family Violence Option, an amendment that sought to mitigate the effects that "welfare reform" would have on victims of domestic violence, embodied the quintessential arguments for feminist reform. Accepting the larger transformations within the welfare system as inevitable, mainstream feminist activists chose to link their political claims to both a law and order agenda that emphasized criminalizing individual acts of violence rather than addressing structural violence and to neoliberal forms of governance that emphasized individual rehabilitation and labor discipline as the solutions to economic inequality. In analyzing the political struggle over the Family Violence Option during the mid-1990s, this essay demonstrates the many pitfalls of looking to the state to protect women from violence in a context in which the state is itself a major perpetrator of gendered violence and advocates instead for the necessity of feminist social movements that challenge rather than accommodate state violence.

"The Marriage of Choice and the Marriage of Covenance": A New England Puritan Views Risorgimento Italy

The 1861–1865 diary of Caroline Crane Marsh, wife of Abraham Lincoln's just appointed envoy to the new Kingdom of Italy, at its Turin capital, provides a fascinating window on to the world of the Italian Risorgimento and a unique comparative perspective on nineteenth-century social history. A highly educated, linguistically gifted New England bluestocking, Marsh's sympathetic ear made her the recipient of intimate revelations from Italy's leading figures throughout the fledgling nation's social and political spectrum. This essay stresses her depictions of and reflections on the lot of Italian women in their customary roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. As seen by a Yankee Puritan, the gender distinctions accepted by Italians, particularly the Piedmontese elites of Turin, contrasted utterly with Marsh's own. Assumed inferiority and submission to male authority, arranged and seemingly incompatible marriages, intense if often formulaic Catholic piety, a blind eye to conjugal infidelity, and closely chaperoned virtue in public places made for a self-contradictory brew of hypocrisy, deceit, and narrow conservatism, leavened, however, with cosmopolitan grace and charm. The aims of feminist reform in Italy are contrasted with those in America.

IX. From Sex to Gender and Back Again: Co-optation of a Feminist Language Reform

Rhoda Unger has made many important contributions to feminist psychology, but perhaps none was as daring in its time as her 1979 proposal that psychology change its way of talking about males and females, women and men, and the processes that created sex differences. She argued that the term ‘sex’ was being used too inclusively. Sex could refer to chromosomes, reproductive organs, intrapsychic characteristics that were thought to belong to men and women, or even the socially appropriate or expected behaviors of people that related to their biological sex classification. The many uses of the term led to confusion in interpreting and understanding differences that may have been present, and in overemphasizing differences at the expense of similarities. In her paper, Rhoda argued that the term ‘sex’ should be reserved for research that examines the biological and physiological aspects of maleness and femaleness, whereas the term ‘gender’ is appropriate for research that examines the nonphysiological aspects of sex that are culturally and socially determined. She astutely pointed out that researchers at that time had not successfully unconfounded sex and gender because they assumed that maleness and masculinity and femaleness and femininity were invariably closely related. She argued that using the term gender ‘makes it less likely that psychological differences between males and females will be considered explicable mainly in terms of physiological differences between them’ (p. 1093). One way of understanding the importance of the sex/gender distinction that Rhoda urged psychology to adopt is to view it as an example of feminist language reform (Pauwels, 1998). Feminist language reform originated in the 1970s as a reaction to the perceived prevalence of sexism and gender bias in language. Feminist reformers argued that women were omitted (e.g. by use of the generic