Taking a cross-cultural perspective, this book explores how privatization and globalization impact contemporary feminist and social justice approaches to public responsibility. Feminist legal theorists have long problematized divisions between the private and the political, an issue with growing importance in a time when the welfare state is under threat in many parts of the world and private markets and corporations transcend national boundaries. Because vulnerability analysis emphasizes our interdependency within social institutions and the need for public responsibility for our shared vulnerability, it can highlight how neoliberal policies commodify human necessities, channeling unprofitable social relationships, such as caretaking, away from public responsibility and into the individual private family. This book uses comparative analyses to examine how these dynamics manifest across different legal cultures. By highlighting similarities and differences in legal responses to vulnerability, this book provides important insights and arguments against the privatization of social need and for a more responsive state.

While there is no shortage of studies addressing the state's regulation of the sexual, research into the ways in which the sexual governs the state and its attributes is still in its infancy. The Sexual Constitution of Political Authority argues that there are good reasons to suppose that our understandings of state power quiver with erotic undercurrents. The book maintains, more specifically, that the relationship between ideas of political authority and male same-sex desire is especially fraught. Through a series of case studies where a statesman's same-sex desire was put on trial (either literally or metaphorically) as a problem for the good exercise of public powers, the book shows the resilience and adaptability of cultural beliefs in the incompatibility between public office and male same-sex desire. Some of the case studies analysed are familiar ground for both political/constitutional history and the history of sexuality. The Sexual Constitution of Political Authority argues, however, that only by systematically reading questions of institutional politics and questions of sexuality through each other will we have access to the most interesting insights that a study of these trials can generate. Whether they involve obscure public officials or iconic rulers such as Hadrian and James I, these compelling fragments of queer history reveal that the disavowal of male same-sex desire has been, and partly remains, central to mainstream understandings of political authority.

Judicial Education has greatly expanded in common law countries in the past 25 years. More recently it has become a core component in judicial reform programs in developing countries with gender attentiveness as an element required by donor agencies. In civil law jurisdictions judges schools have long played a role in the formation of the career judiciary with a focus on entry to the judicial profession, in some countries judges get an intensive in-service education at judicial academies. Gender questions, however, tend to be neglected in the curricula. These judicial education activities have generated a significant body of material and experience which it is timely to review and disseminate. Questions such as the following require answers. What is the current state of affairs? How is judicial education implemented in developed and developing countries all around the world? Who are the educators? Who is being educated? How is judicial education on gender regarded by judges? How effective are these programs? The chapters in this book deal with these questions. They provide a multiplicity of perspectives. Six countries are represented, of these four are civil law countries (Germany, Argentina, Japan, Bosnia and Herzegovina) and two are common law countries (Canada; Uganda). This book was previously published as a special issue of International Journal of the Legal Profession.

This book presents a feminist historical materialist analysis of the ways in which the law, policing and penal regimes have overlapped with social policies to coercively discipline the poor and marginalized sectors of the population throughout the history of capitalism. Roberts argues that capitalism has always been underpinned by the use of state power to discursively construct and materially manage those sectors of the population who are most resistant to and marginalized by the instantiation and deepening of capitalism. The book reveals that the law, along with social welfare regimes, have operated in ways that are highly gendered, as gender - along with race - has been a key axis along which difference has been constructed and regulated. It offers an important theoretical and empirical contribution that disrupts the tendency for mainstream and critical work within IPE to view capitalism primarily as an economic relation. Roberts also provides a feminist critique of the failure of mainstream and critical scholars to analyse the gendered nature of capitalist social relations of production and social reproduction. Exploring a range of issues related to the nature of the capitalist state, the creation and protection of private property, the governance of poverty, the structural compulsions underpinning waged work and the place of women in paid and unpaid labour, this book is of great use to students and scholars of IPE, gender studies, social work, law, sociology, criminology, global development studies, political science and history.

How human rights principles, like the right to gender identity, freedom, integrity and equality, respond to the concerns of different groups of adults and children who experience gender harm due to the binary conception of sexuality and gender identity is the overall theme of this book. The Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity are analysed in the light of the dynamic jurisprudence of different human rights treaty bodies. Whether and how the status quo of gender duality is reproduced, in spite of international law's growing recognition of the multiplicity of sexualities and gender identities, is discussed. How transgender men, in countries that permit legal gender change, have been successfully prosecuted for gender fraud by female partners claiming to be unaware of their gender history is given attention. While human rights discourse related to LGBTI persons so far has been moulded on the experiences of adults this book gives voice to the concerns of gender-non confirming children. The jurisprudence of the Child Rights Committee, with focus on the complex social and legal issues faced by gender non-confirming children, is addressed. Through narratives, that give voice to these children's experiences, the book demonstrates how the legal gender assigned at birth impacts on their feeling of recognition, self-confidence and self-respect in the private, social, and legal spheres. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Nordic Journal of Human Rights.

This book integrates women's history and legal studies within the broader context of modern European history in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sixteen contributions from fourteen countries explore the ways in which the law contributes to the social construction of gender. They analyze questions of family law and international law and highlight the politics of gender in the legal professions in a variety of historical, social and national settings, including Eastern, Southern, Western, Northern and Central Europe. Focusing on different legal cultures, they show us the similarities and differences in the ways the law has shaped the contours of women and men's lives in powerful ways. They also show how women have used legal knowledge to struggle for their equal rights on the national and transnational level. The chapters address the interconnectedness of the history of feminism, legislative reforms, and women's citizenship, and build a foundation for a comparative vision of women's legal history in modern Europe.

Arguing that law must be looked at holistically, this book investigates the 'hidden gender' of the so-called neutral or objective legal principles that structure the law addressing violence against women. Adopting an explicitly feminist perspective, it investigates how legal responses to violence against women presuppose, maintain and perpetuate a certain context that may not in fact reflect women's experiences. Carline and Easteal draw upon relevant legislation, case law and secondary studies from a range of territories, including Australia, England and Wales, the United States, Canada and Europe, to contextualize and critique different policy responses. They go on to examine the potential and limits of law, making recommendations for best practice models of policymaking and law reform. Aiming to help improve government, community and legal responses to women who experience violence, Shades of Grey - Domestic and Sexual Violence Against Women: Law Reform and Society will assist law-makers, academics, policymakers and a wider audience in understanding the complexities of violence against women.

First published in 1997, this book marks a culmination of a three year research programme focused upon the incidence of domestic violence in Leicester. The study examined the levels of violence, the details of applicants and respondents and the nature of complaints, as well as the policies applied and the problems faced by those enforcing the law. The books sets the findings in the context of the policies on protection of victims of domestic violence, the problems they face and protection after 1997. This book will be of interest to those studying law, social work, sociology and women's studies.

Questions of gender have strongly influenced the development of international refugee law over the last few decades. This volume assesses the progress toward appropriate recognition of gender-related persecution in refugee law. It documents the advances made following intense advocacy around the world in the 1990s, and evaluates the extent to which gender has been successfully integrated into refugee law. Evaluating the research and advocacy agendas for gender in refugee law ten years beyond the 2002 UNHCR Gender Guidelines, the book investigates the current status of gender in refugee law. It examines gender-related persecution claims of both women and men, including those based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and explores how the development of an anti-refugee agenda in many Western states exponentially increases vulnerability for refugees making gendered claims. The volume includes contributions from scholars and members of the advocacy community that allow the book to examine conceptual and doctrinal themes arising at the intersection of gender and refugee law, and specific case studies across major Western refugee-receiving nations. The book will be of great interest and value to researchers and students of asylum and immigration law, international politics, and gender studies.

Groups seeking legal equality often take a victory as the end of the line. Once judgment is granted or a law is passed, coalitions disband and life goes on in a new state of equality. Policy makers too may assume that a troublesome file is now closed. This collection arises from the urgent sense that law reforms driven by equality call for fresh lines of inquiry. In unintended ways, reforms may harm their intended beneficiaries. They may also worsen the disadvantage of other groups. Committed to tackling these important issues beyond the boundaries that often confine legal scholarship, this book pursues an interdisciplinary consideration of efforts to advance equality, as it explores the developments, challenges, and consequences that arise from law reforms aiming to deliver equality in the areas of sexuality, kinship, and family relations. With an international array of contributors, After Legal Equality: Family, Sex, Kinship will be an invaluable resource for those with interests in this area.

This book addresses a growing area of concern for scholars and development practitioners: discriminatory gender norms in legally plural settings. Focusing specifically on indigenous women, this book analyses how they, often in alliance with supporters and allies, have sought to improve their access to justice. Development practitioners working in the field of access to justice have tended to conceive indigenous legal systems as either inherently incompatible with women's rights or, alternatively, they have emphasised customary law's advantageous features, such as its greater accessibility, familiarity and effectiveness. Against this background - and based on a comparison of six thus far underexplored initiatives of legal and institutional change in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia - Anna Barrera Vivero provides a more nuanced, ethnographic, understanding of how women navigate through context-specific constellations of interlegality in their search for justice. In so doing, moreover, her account of ongoing political debates and local struggles for gender justice grounds the elaboration of a comprehensive conceptual framework for understanding the legally plural dynamics involved in the contestation of discriminatory gender norms.

This book explores the shortcomings of the criminal justice system's response to sexual violence. Despite a plethora of legal and policy reforms, concerns remain regarding the conviction rates for rape and the extent to which cases fall out of the system. Ample research has highlighted the ongoing impact of 'rape myths' and the presence of an 'implementation gap' whereby policies, provisions and measures - proposed in order to improve the system's response - are frequently not brought into practice, nor utilised as expected. Rape and the Criminal Trial proposes a move beyond representational theory and towards New Materialism and affects, a school of thought which emphasises the importance of embodiment and the ontological intensive regime as necessary in order to generate radical new approaches for understanding this problematic status quo, and in order to move forward to the production of more effective solutions.

This book considers how a phenomenon as complex as coercive control can be criminalised. The recognition and ensuing criminalisation of coercive control in the UK and Ireland has been the focus of considerable international attention. It has generated complex questions about the "best" way to criminalise domestic abuse. This work reviews recent domestic abuse criminal law reform in the UK and Ireland. In particular, it defines coercive control and explains why using traditional criminal law approaches to prosecute it does not work. Laws passed in England and Wales versus Scotland represent two different approaches to translating coercive control into a criminal offence. This volume explains how and why the jurisdictions have taken different approaches and examines the advantages and disadvantages of each. As jurisdictions around the world review what steps need to be taken to improve national criminal justice responses to domestic abuse, the question of what works, and why, at the intersection of domestic abuse and the criminal law has never been more important. As such, the book will be a vital resource for lawyers, policy-makers and activists with an interest in domestic abuse law reform.

Set in different national contexts (Brazil, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Laos, Norway, Thailand) and in different social science disciplines, the chapters of this volume aim at questioning anti-trafficking policies and their practical impact on sex work regulation. Many actors, from media to researchers, from nonprofit organizations to law enforcement agencies, from "experts" to "reality tourists", contribute to produce knowledge on trafficking and sexual exploitation and thus to institutionalize it as a category of thought and action; by naming and framing perpetrators and victims, they make trafficking "come true" as a public problem. The book pays particular attention to the way the international expertise produced by these different actors and institutions on sexual exploitation and sex work impacts local control practices, especially with regard to law enforcement. The fight against trafficking as it gets institutionalized and put into practice then appears as a way to reaffirm a gendered and racialized public order. Building analytical bridges between different national contexts and relying on contextualized fieldwork in different countries, the book is of great interest for academics as well as for practitioners and/or activists working on sex and gender issues and migration policies. Also, it resonates with a broader literature on the construction of public problems in sociology and political science.

It is unique in that it is designed and intended to be used to facilitate discussion and to disseminate awareness within real life settings - for example, in a staff room for Inset Days, or for social workers in their team meetings. This workbook has been written for anyone to be able to facilitate a session with colleagues, which takes between 1-3 hours depending on the facilitator and group's needs. The introduction details how to use the book and how to facilitate a training session using the material, including being aware of how people could be triggered by looking at this difficult subject. Will be of interest to all professionals who have a mandatory responsibility to report FGM cases such as qualified teachers, social workers, and health care professionals (nurses, midwives and health visitors particularly).

It is unique in that it is designed and intended to be used to facilitate discussion and to disseminate awareness within real life settings - for example, in a staff room for Inset Days, or for social workers in their team meetings. This workbook has been written for anyone to be able to facilitate a session with colleagues, which takes between 1-3 hours depending on the facilitator and group's needs. The introduction details how to use the book and how to facilitate a training session using the material, including being aware of how people could be triggered by looking at this difficult subject. Will be of interest to all professionals who have a mandatory responsibility to report FGM cases such as qualified teachers, social workers, and health care professionals (nurses, midwives and health visitors particularly).

Explores the relationship between sexuality and politics in Britain's recent political past. Includes four case studies to illustrate the arguments made. Important contribution to the understandings of sexuality, identity and inequalities, as well as of crisis and neoliberalism.

Each year, thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) asylum seekers apply for asylum in EU Member States.This book considers the position of LGBTI asylum seekers in European asylum law. Developing an encompassing approach to the topic, the book identifies and analyzes the main legal issues arising in relation to LGBTI people seeking asylum including: the underestimation of the relevance of criminalization of sexual orientation as well as the large scale violence against trans people in countries of origin by some European states; the requirement to seek State protection against violence even when they originate from countries where sexual orientation or gender identity is criminalized, or where the authorities are homophobic; the particular hurdles faced during credibility assessment on account of persisting stereotypes; and queer families and refugee law. The book gives a state of the art overview of law in Europe, both at the level of European legislation and at the level of Member State practice. While being largely focused on Europe, the book also takes into account asylum decisions from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States and is of relevance internationally, offering analysis of issues which are not specific to particular legal systems.

In Australia, the US, England, Scotland, Italy, France and in Egypt there have been repetitive calls to legislate against the practices of female circumcision described as female genital mutilation. But in western countries where anti-female genital mutilation legislation has been passed there has been little or no consultation with the communities in which the practices occur: documents are published only in English, and community responses are ignored or simply deemed biased or irrelevant. Opportunities for dialogue quickly turn into opportunities for education and legislation about the unacceptability of the practices. But why are communities denied their capacity to speak and influence political opinion and legal decision making? Why in an era of human rights, which heralds the importance of self-determination, freedom of expression and women's participation in political arenas, are women from these communities unable to engage in dialogue on this practice? Law's Cut on the Body of Human Rights considers how such assertive legislative responses, and this lack of curiosity and consultation with communities, points to a particular liberal investment the practices called female genital mutilation and what they signify. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Juliet Rogers examines the language of recent statutes and, where relevant, some of the accompanying policies and broader media debates, Female genital mutilation, she argues, elicits such a singular legal response insofar as it embodies that subjectivity against which the very subject of liberal law is imagined - and only imagined - to exist: in a state of non-mutilation, non-prohibition or, in a psychoanalytic idiom, non-castration.

Contributing an original dimension to the significant body of published scholarship on women in 16th-century England, this study examines the largest corpus of women's private writings available to historians: their wills. In these, female voices speak out, commenting on their daily lives, on identity, gender, status, familial relationships and social engagement. Wills show women to have been active participants in a civil society, well aware of their personal authority and potential influence, whose committed actions during life and charitable strategies after death could and did impact the health of that society. From an intensive analysis of more than 1200 wills, this pioneering work focuses on women from all parts of the country and all strata of society, revealing an entire population of articulate, opportunistic, and capable individuals who found the spaces between the lines of the law and used those spaces to achieve personal goals. Author Susan James demonstrates how wills describe strategies for end-of-life care, create platforms of remembrance, and offer insights into the myriad occupational endeavors in which women were engaged. James illuminates how these documents were not simply instruments of bequest and inheritance, but were statements of power and control, catalogues of material culture from which we are able to gauge a woman's understanding of her own reality and the context that formed her environment. Wills were tools and the way in which women wielded these tools offers new ways to look at England in the 16th century and reveals the seminal role women played in its development.

While there is no shortage of studies addressing the state's regulation of the sexual, research into the ways in which the sexual governs the state and its attributes is still in its infancy. The Sexual Constitution of Political Authority argues that there are good reasons to suppose that our understandings of state power quiver with erotic undercurrents. The book maintains, more specifically, that the relationship between ideas of political authority and male same-sex desire is especially fraught. Through a series of case studies where a statesman's same-sex desire was put on trial (either literally or metaphorically) as a problem for the good exercise of public powers, the book shows the resilience and adaptability of cultural beliefs in the incompatibility between public office and male same-sex desire. Some of the case studies analysed are familiar ground for both political/constitutional history and the history of sexuality. The Sexual Constitution of Political Authority argues, however, that only by systematically reading questions of institutional politics and questions of sexuality through each other will we have access to the most interesting insights that a study of these trials can generate. Whether they involve obscure public officials or iconic rulers such as Hadrian and James I, these compelling fragments of queer history reveal that the disavowal of male same-sex desire has been, and partly remains, central to mainstream understandings of political authority.

Arguing that law must be looked at holistically, this book investigates the 'hidden gender' of the so-called neutral or objective legal principles that structure the law addressing violence against women. Adopting an explicitly feminist perspective, it investigates how legal responses to violence against women presuppose, maintain and perpetuate a certain context that may not in fact reflect women's experiences. Carline and Easteal draw upon relevant legislation, case law and secondary studies from a range of territories, including Australia, England and Wales, the United States, Canada and Europe, to contextualize and critique different policy responses. They go on to examine the potential and limits of law, making recommendations for best practice models of policymaking and law reform. Aiming to help improve government, community and legal responses to women who experience violence, Shades of Grey - Domestic and Sexual Violence Against Women: Law Reform and Society will assist law-makers, academics, policymakers and a wider audience in understanding the complexities of violence against women.

Groups seeking legal equality often take a victory as the end of the line. Once judgment is granted or a law is passed, coalitions disband and life goes on in a new state of equality. Policy makers too may assume that a troublesome file is now closed. This collection arises from the urgent sense that law reforms driven by equality call for fresh lines of inquiry. In unintended ways, reforms may harm their intended beneficiaries. They may also worsen the disadvantage of other groups. Committed to tackling these important issues beyond the boundaries that often confine legal scholarship, this book pursues an interdisciplinary consideration of efforts to advance equality, as it explores the developments, challenges, and consequences that arise from law reforms aiming to deliver equality in the areas of sexuality, kinship, and family relations. With an international array of contributors, After Legal Equality: Family, Sex, Kinship will be an invaluable resource for those with interests in this area.

Law, Religion and Homosexuality is the first book-length study of how religion has shaped, and continues to shape, legislation that regulates the lives of gay men and lesbians . Through a systematic examination of how religious discourse influences the making of law - in the form of official interventions made by faith communities and organizations, as well as by expressions of faith by individual legislators - the authors argue that religion continues to be central to both enabling and restricting the development of sexual orientation equality. Whilst some claim that faith has been marginalized in the legislative processes of contemporary western societies, Johnson and Vanderbeck show the significant impact of religion in a number of substantive legal areas relating to sexual orientation including: same-sex sexual relations, family life, civil partnership and same-sex marriage, equality in employment and the provision of goods and services, hate speech regulation, and education. Law, Religion and Homosexuality demonstrates the dynamic interplay between law and religion in respect of homosexuality and will be of considerable interest to a wide audience of academics, policy makers and stakeholders.