When and why do governments promote women's rights? Through comparative analysis of state action in seventy countries from 1975 to 2005, this book shows how different women's rights issues involve different histories, trigger different conflicts, and activate different sets of protagonists. Change on violence against women and workplace equality involves a logic of status politics: feminist movements leverage international norms to contest women's subordination. Family law, abortion, and contraception, which challenge the historical claim of religious groups to regulate kinship and reproduction, conform to a logic of doctrinal politics, which turns on relations between religious groups and the state. Publicly-paid parental leave and child care follow a logic of class politics, in which the strength of Left parties and overall economic conditions are more salient. The book reveals the multiple and complex pathways to gender justice, illuminating the opportunities and obstacles to social change for policymakers, advocates, and others seeking to advance women's rights.

When we talk about sex-whether great, good, bad, or unlawful-we often turn to consent as both our erotic and moral savior. We ask questions like, What counts as sexual consent? How do we teach consent to impressionable youth, potential predators, and victims? How can we make consent sexy? What if these are all the wrong questions? What if our preoccupation with consent is hindering a safer and better sexual culture? By foregrounding sex on the social margins (bestial, necrophilic, cannibalistic, and other atypical practices), Screw Consent shows how a sexual politics focused on consent can often obscure, rather than clarify, what is wrong about wrongful sex. Joseph J. Fischel argues that the consent paradigm, while necessary for effective sexual assault law, diminishes and perverts our ideas about desire, pleasure, and injury. In addition to the criticisms against consent leveled by feminist theorists of earlier generations, Fischel elevates three more: consent is insufficient, inapposite, and riddled with scope contradictions for regulating and imagining sex. Fischel proposes instead that sexual justice turns more productively on concepts of sexual autonomy and access. Clever, witty, and adeptly researched, Screw Consent promises to change how we understand consent, sexuality, and law in the United States today.

Gultan Kisanak, a Kurdish journalist and former MP, was elected co-mayor of Diyarbakir in 2014. Two years later, the Turkish state arrested and imprisoned her. Her story is remarkable, but not unique. While behind bars, she wrote about her own experiences and collected similar accounts from other Kurdish women, all co-chairs, co-mayors and MPs in Turkey; all incarcerated on political grounds. The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics is a one-of-a-kind collection of prison writings from more than 20 Kurdish women politicians. Here they reflect on their personal and collective struggles against patriarchy and anti-Kurdish repression in Turkey; on the radical feminist principles and practices through which they transformed the political structures and state offices in which they operated. They discuss what worked and what didn't, and the ways in which Turkey's anti-capitalist and socialist movements closely informed their political stances and practices. Demonstrating Kurdish women's ceaseless political determination and refusal to be silenced - even when behind bars - the book ultimately hopes to inspire women living under even the most unjust conditions to engage in collective resistance.

What does it mean to speak of 'men' as a gender category in relation to law? How does law relate to masculinities? This book presents the first comprehensive overview and critical assessment of the relationship between men, law and gender; outlining the contours of the 'man' of law across diverse areas of legal and social policy. Written in a theoretically informed, yet accessible style, Men, Law and Gender provides an introduction to the study of law and masculinities whilst calling for a richer, more nuanced conceptual framework in which men's legal practices and subjectivities might be approached. Building on recent sociological work concerned with the relational nature of gender and personal life, Richard Collier argues that social, cultural and economic changes have reshaped ideas about men and masculinities in ways that have significant implications for law. Bringing together voices and disciplines that are rarely considered together, he explores the way ideas about men have been contested and politicised in the legal arena. Including original empirical studies of male lawyers, the legal profession and fathers' rights and law reform, alongside discussions of university law schools and legal academics, and family policy and parenting cultures, this innovative, timely and important text provides a unique and important insight into the relationship between law, men and masculinities. It will be required reading for academics and students in law and legal theory, socio-legal studies, gender studies, sociology and social policy, as well as policy-makers and others concerned with the changing nature of gender relations.

Anarchism & Sexuality aims to bring the rich and diverse traditions of anarchist thought and practice into contact with contemporary questions about the politics and lived experience of sexuality. Both in style and in content, it is conceived as a book that aims to question, subvert and overflow authoritarian divisions between the personal and political; between sexual desires categorised as heterosexual or homosexual; between seemingly mutually exclusive activism and scholarship; between forms of expression such as poetry and prose; and between disciplinary categories of knowledge. Anarchism & Sexuality seeks to achieve this by suggesting connections between ethics, relationships and power, three themes that run throughout. The key objectives of the book are: to bring fresh anarchist perspectives to debates around sexuality; to make a queer and feminist intervention within the most recent wave of anarchist scholarship; and to make a queerly anarchist contribution to social justice literature, policy and practice. By mingling prose and poetry, theory and autobiography, it constitutes a gathering place to explore the interplay between sexual and social transformation.This book will be of use to those interested in anarchist movements, cultural studies, critical legal theory, gender studies, and queer and sexuality studies.

New legislation and recommended working practices demand that every organisation considers carefully the health of its workforce. Occupational Health: A Practical Guide for Managers offers a comprehensive view of health and safety issues at work. The range of people it aims to appeal to reflects the interdisciplinary nature of this subject. Personnel professionals, managers and occupational health practitioners alike will find it an invaluable resource.

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This study challenges the notion that closeted secrecy was a necessary part of social life for gay men living in the shadow of the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. It reconstructs a surprisingly open network of queer filiation in which Henry James occupied a central place. The lives of its satellite figures - most now forgotten or unknown - offer even more suggestive evidence of some of the countervailing forms of social practice that could survive even in that hostile era. If these men enjoyed such exemption largely because of the prerogatives of class privilege, their relative freedom was nevertheless a visible rebuke to the reductive stereotypes of homosexuality that circulated and were reinforced in the culture of the period. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of Henry James and queer studies, readers of late Victorian and modern literature, and those interested in the history and social construction of gender roles.

In the United States, one in four women will be victims of domestic violence each year. Despite the passage of federal legislation on violence against women beginning in 1994, differences persist across states in how domestic violence is addressed. Inequality Across State Lines illuminates the epidemic of domestic violence in the U.S. through the lens of politics, policy adoption, and policy implementation. Combining narrative case studies, surveys, and data analysis, the book discusses the specific factors that explain why U.S. domestic violence politics and policies have failed to keep women safe at all income levels, and across racial and ethnic lines. The book argues that the issue of domestic violence, and how government responds to it, raises fundamental questions of justice; gender and racial equality; and the limited efficacy of a state-by-state and even town-by-town response. This book goes beyond revealing the vast differences in how states respond to domestic violence, by offering pathways to reform.

In the United States, one in four women will be victims of domestic violence each year. Despite the passage of federal legislation on violence against women beginning in 1994, differences persist across states in how domestic violence is addressed. Inequality Across State Lines illuminates the epidemic of domestic violence in the U.S. through the lens of politics, policy adoption, and policy implementation. Combining narrative case studies, surveys, and data analysis, the book discusses the specific factors that explain why U.S. domestic violence politics and policies have failed to keep women safe at all income levels, and across racial and ethnic lines. The book argues that the issue of domestic violence, and how government responds to it, raises fundamental questions of justice; gender and racial equality; and the limited efficacy of a state-by-state and even town-by-town response. This book goes beyond revealing the vast differences in how states respond to domestic violence, by offering pathways to reform.

To what extent is the legal subject gendered? Using illustrative examples from a range of jurisdictions and thematically organised chapters, this volume offers a comprehensive consideration of this question. With a systematic, accessible approach, it argues that law and gender work to co-produce the legal subject. Cumulatively, the volume's chapters provide a systematic evaluation of the key facets of the legal subject: the corporeal, the functional and the communal. Exploring aspects of the legal subject from the ways in which it is sexed and sexualised to its national and familial dimensions, this volume develops a complete account of the various processes through which legal orders produce gendered subjects. Across its chapters, each theoretically ambitious in its own right, this volume outlines how the law not only acts on the social world, but genders it.

To what extent is the legal subject gendered? Using illustrative examples from a range of jurisdictions and thematically organised chapters, this volume offers a comprehensive consideration of this question. With a systematic, accessible approach, it argues that law and gender work to co-produce the legal subject. Cumulatively, the volume's chapters provide a systematic evaluation of the key facets of the legal subject: the corporeal, the functional and the communal. Exploring aspects of the legal subject from the ways in which it is sexed and sexualised to its national and familial dimensions, this volume develops a complete account of the various processes through which legal orders produce gendered subjects. Across its chapters, each theoretically ambitious in its own right, this volume outlines how the law not only acts on the social world, but genders it.

Legal scholars, economists, and international development practitioners often assume that the state is capable of 'securing' rights to land and addressing gender inequality in land tenure. In this innovative study of land tenure in Solomon Islands, Rebecca Monson challenges these assumptions. Monson demonstrates that territorial disputes have given rise to a legal system characterised by state law, custom, and Christianity, and that the legal construction and regulation of property has, in fact, deepened gender inequalities and other forms of social difference. These processes have concentrated formal land control in the hands of a small number of men leaders, and reproduced the state as a hypermasculine domain, with significant implications for public authority, political participation, and state formation. Drawing insights from legal scholarship and political ecology in particular, this book offers a significant study of gender and legal pluralism in the Pacific, illuminating ongoing global debates about gender inequality, land tenure, ethnoterritorial struggles and the post colonial state.

This volume provides an alternate history of health law by rewriting key judicial opinions from a feminist perspective. Each chapter includes a rewritten opinion penned by a leading scholar relying exclusively on court precedents and scientific understanding available at the time of the original decision accompanied by commentary from an expert placing the case in historical context and explaining how the feminist judgment might have shaped a different path for subsequent developments. It provides a map of the health law field-where paternalism, individualism, gender stereotypes, and tensions over the public-private divide shape decisions about informed consent, medical and nursing malpractice, the relationships among health care professionals and the institutions where they work, end-of-life care, reproductive health care, biomedical research, ownership of human tissues and cells, the influence of religious directives on health care standards, health care discrimination, long-term care, private health insurance, Medicaid coverage, the Affordable Care Act, and more.

This volume provides an alternate history of health law by rewriting key judicial opinions from a feminist perspective. Each chapter includes a rewritten opinion penned by a leading scholar relying exclusively on court precedents and scientific understanding available at the time of the original decision accompanied by commentary from an expert placing the case in historical context and explaining how the feminist judgment might have shaped a different path for subsequent developments. It provides a map of the health law field-where paternalism, individualism, gender stereotypes, and tensions over the public-private divide shape decisions about informed consent, medical and nursing malpractice, the relationships among health care professionals and the institutions where they work, end-of-life care, reproductive health care, biomedical research, ownership of human tissues and cells, the influence of religious directives on health care standards, health care discrimination, long-term care, private health insurance, Medicaid coverage, the Affordable Care Act, and more.

This book explores the emergence of African Union (AU) law as a legal order and its implications for existing order in the region. As an authoritative text on the development of AU law, the book covers such pertinent issues as legislative powers, competences, direct effect in AU law, subsidiarity, interventionism, and enforcement of laws.

Olufemi Amao argues that there is a gradual movement from intergovernmentalism to supranationalism in the African Union legal order, and explores how this trajectory gradually and incrementally de-emphasises the discourse on nation state sovereignty; a concept that has caused many problems in the African context. Drawing upon EU law as a comparison, the book also examines how the development of supranationalism affects crucial issues such as human rights, democratic reforms, territorial matters, tribal and religious disputes, and economic relations.

As a comprehensive examination of the development of law within a union, this book will be of great interest and use to students, scholars and practitioners in international law, international relations, and African studies.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 2. The development of the concepts of African Law and African Union Law 3. Ascertaining the Sources of African Union Law: A Needle in a Haystack? 4. Membership of the African Union 5. African Economic and Business Law: Green Shoots in the New Economic Legal Order 6. Peace, Security, the Rule of Law and African Union Law 7. Human Rights in the African Union Law 8. Economic, Social & Cultural Rights and Group Rights in the African Union Law 9. Custom, Morality and African Union Law: The Case of Sexual Orientation in Africa 10. Enforcement of African Union Law 11. Conclusions

This book offers a comprehensive examination of the ways in which the criminal justice system of England and Wales has regulated, and failed or refused to regulate, lesbianism. It identifies the overarching approach as one of silencing: lesbianism has not only been ignored or regarded as unimaginable, but was deliberately excluded from legal discourses. A series of case studies ranging from 1746 to 2013 from parliamentary debates to individual prosecutions shed light on the complex process of regulation through silencing. They illuminate its evolution over three centuries and explore when and why it has been breached. The answers Derry uncovers can be fully understood only in the context of surrounding social and legal developments which are also considered. Lesbianism and the Criminal Law makes an important contribution to the growing bodies of literature on feminism, sexuality and the law and the legal history of sexual offences.

Access to medical treatment for trans youth occupies a haphazard and dynamic legal landscape. In this comprehensive scholarly analysis of the historical and current legal principles, Steph Jowett examines the medico-legal nexus of regulation of this healthcare in Australia and in England and Wales. This is informed by an in-depth discussion of the medical literature on treatment for trans youth, including clinical guidelines, the outcomes of treatment and outcomes for trans youth who are unable to be treated. With illustrative examples and clear language, Jowett argues that legal barriers to clinical practice should be congruent with and reflect the current state of medical knowledge. Not only does Jowett assess the extent to which key legal decisions have been consistent with medical knowledge in the past, but she offers a nuanced, comparative perspective that will inform reform efforts in the future.

In Policing the Womb, Michele Goodwin explores how states abuse laws and infringe on rights to police women and their pregnancies. This book looks at the impact of these often arbitrary laws which can result in the punishment, incarceration, and humiliation of women, particularly poor women and women of color. Frequently based on unscientific claims of endangering a fetus, these laws allow extraordinary powers to state authorities over reproductive freedom and pregnancies. In this book, Michele Goodwin discusses real examples of women whose pregnancies have been controlled by the law and what has led to the United States being the deadliest country in the developed world for a woman to be pregnant.

This book explores cultural constructs, societal demands and political and philosophical underpinnings that position women in the world. It illustrates the way culture controls women's place in the world and how cultural constraints are not limited to any one culture, country, ethnicity, race, class or status. Written by scholars from a wide range of specialists in law, sociology, anthropology, popular and cultural studies, history, communications, film and sex and gender, this study provides an authoritative take on different cultures, cultural demands and constraints, contradictions and requirements for conformity generating conflict. Women, Law and Culture is distinctive because it recognises that no particular culture singles out women for 'special' treatment, rules and requirements; rather, all do. Highlighting the way law and culture are intimately intertwined, impacting on women - whatever their country and social and economic status - this book will be of great interest to scholars of law, women's and gender studies and media studies.

Demands for redress of historical injustice are a crucial component of contemporary struggles for social and transnational justice. However, understanding when and why an unjust history matters for considerations of justice in the present is not straightforward. Alasia Nuti develops a normative framework to identify which historical injustices we should be concerned about, to conceptualise the relation between persistence and change and, thus, conceive of history as newly reproduced. Focusing on the condition of women in formally egalitarian societies, the book shows that history is important to theorise the injustice of gender inequalities and devise transformative remedies. Engaging with the activist politics of the unjust past, Nuti also demonstrates that the reproduction of an unjust history is dynamic, complex and unsettling. It generates both historical and contemporary responsibilities for redress and questions precisely those features of our order that we take for granted.

* Offers an international and intersectional view of interpersonal violence and responses to it * Suitable for a wide range of scholars and students in the disciplines of criminal justice, law, human rights, social justice, social work, nursing, criminology, sociology, nursing, medicine, and political or public affairs * Devotes special attention to developing countries where there is lack of a consistent legal definition of domestic violence and where violence against women is widely considered as a private matter

More than fifty years of civil rights legislation and movements have not ended employment discrimination. This book reframes the discourse about the "glass ceiling" that women face with respect to workplace inequality. It explores the unspoken, societally held beliefs that underlie and engender workplace behaviour and failures of the law, policy, and human nature that contribute "panes" and ("pains") to the "glass ceiling." Each chapter identifies an "unspoken belief" and connects it with failures of law, policy, and human nature. It then describes the resulting harm and shows how this belief is not imagined or operating in a vacuum, but is pervasive throughout popular culture and society. By giving voice to previously unvoiced - even taboo - beliefs, we can better address and confront them and the problems they cause.

Quotas for women in government have swept the globe. Yet we know little about their capacity to upend entrenched social, political, and economic hierarchies. Women, Power, and Property explores this question within the context of India, the world's largest democracy. Brule employs a research design that maximizes causal inference alongside extensive field research to explain the relationship between political representation, backlash, and economic empowerment. Her findings show that women in government - gatekeepers - catalyze access to fundamental economic rights to property. Women in politics have the power to support constituent rights at critical junctures, such as marriage negotiations, when they can strike integrative solutions to intrahousehold bargaining. Yet there is a paradox: quotas are essential for enforcement of rights, but they generate backlash against women who gain rights without bargaining leverage. In this groundbreaking study, Brule shows how well-designed quotas can operate as a crucial tool to foster equality and benefit the women they are meant to empower.

Ishita Pande's innovative study provides a dual biography of India's path-breaking Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929) and of 'age' itself as a key category of identity for upholding the rule of law, and for governing intimate life in late colonial India. Through a reading of legislative assembly debates, legal cases, government reports, propaganda literature, Hindi novels and sexological tracts, Pande tells a wide-ranging story about the importance of debates over child protection to India's coming of age. By tracing the history of age in colonial India she illuminates the role of law in sculpting modern subjects, demonstrating how seemingly natural age-based exclusions and understandings of legal minority became the alibi for other political exclusions and the minoritization of entire communities in colonial India. In doing so, Pande highlights how childhood as a political category was fundamental not just to ideas of sexual norms and domestic life, but also to the conceptualisation of citizenship and India as a nation in this formative period.