This book explores, for the first time in an edited collection, the intersection of three key research areas - women, madness and the law - and advances the debates on how law and the 'psy' sciences play a critical role in regulating and controlling women's lives.

This book explores, for the first time in an edited collection, the intersection of three key research areas - women, madness and the law - and advances the debates on how law and the 'psy' sciences play a critical role in regulating and controlling women's lives.

This book comes about as a result of the problems that face contemporary feminists who teach, research, and write about the law. The goal of the editors in this volume is to build on, and empirically flesh out, the feminist argument that law cannot be thought of as simply a determining force in the defining of 'woman,' but the law must be thought of as a site of struggle. Traditionally, feminist research takes the view that law produces effects that discipline, control, and regulate women. This book will avoid these depictions of law as a malevolent actor, and will instead concentrate on the struggles over meanings about gender. The editors and contributors to this volume explore and analyse law as a 'gendering practice.' This 'gendering practice' assumes that law is a practice that interacts with other practices to produce meanings about gender. The editors' analysis focuses on and illustrates the complex and often contradictory workings of legal discourse. The book will demonstrate how legal discourse participates in the defining and construction of 'woman' and thereby reproduces the social relations of power that we find in contemporary law. While they may focus on diverse aspects of the law, all of the contributors address the same issue in their respective analyses: how legal struggles over meanings about gender are reproduced, legitimized, and refashioned.

Extensive welfare, law, and policy reforms characterized the making and unmaking of Keynesian states in the 20th century. This collection highlights the gendered nature of these regulatory shifts and, specifically, the roles played by women - as reformers, welfare workers, and welfare recipients - in the historical development of welfare states. The contributors are leading feminist socio-legal scholars from a range of disciplines in the US, Canada, and Israel. Collectively, their analyses of women, law, and poverty speak to long-standing and ongoing feminist concerns: the importance of historically informed research, the relevance of women's agency and resistance to the experience of inequality and injustice, the specificity of the experience of poor women and poor mothers, the implications of changes to social policy, and the possibilities for social change. Such analyses are particularly timely as the devastation of neo-liberalism becomes increasingly obvious. The current world crisis of capitalism is a defining moment for liberal states - a global catastrophe that concomitantly creates a window of opportunity for critical scholars and activists to reframe debates about social welfare, work, and equality, and to reinsert the discourse of social justice into the public consciousness and political agenda of liberal democracies. (Series: Onati International Series in Law and Society)

Extensive welfare, law, and policy reforms characterized the making and unmaking of Keynesian states in the 20th century. This collection highlights the gendered nature of these regulatory shifts and, specifically, the roles played by women - as reformers, welfare workers, and welfare recipients - in the historical development of welfare states. The contributors are leading feminist socio-legal scholars from a range of disciplines in the US, Canada, and Israel. Collectively, their analyses of women, law, and poverty speak to long-standing and ongoing feminist concerns: the importance of historically informed research, the relevance of women's agency and resistance to the experience of inequality and injustice, the specificity of the experience of poor women and poor mothers, the implications of changes to social policy, and the possibilities for social change. Such analyses are particularly timely as the devastation of neo-liberalism becomes increasingly obvious. The current world crisis of capitalism is a defining moment for liberal states - a global catastrophe that concomitantly creates a window of opportunity for critical scholars and activists to reframe debates about social welfare, work, and equality, and to reinsert the discourse of social justice into the public consciousness and political agenda of liberal democracies. (Series: Onati International Series in Law and Society)

A wide range of perspectives on how Canadian criminal law, civil law, and policing strategies treat ecological transgressions are included in this introduction to the serious consequences of environmental crime, often perceived as an upper-class, "soft" crime.

In this timely volume, contributors from various disciplines analyze reaction and resistance to feminism in several areas of law and policy - child custody, child poverty, sexual harassment, and sexual assault - and in a number of institutional sites, such as courts, legislatures, families, the mainstream media, and the academy. Collectively, their studies paint a complicated, often contradictory, picture of feminism, law, and social change, offering feminists and activists empirically grounded knowledge to develop legal and political strategies for change.

In this timely volume, contributors from various disciplines analyze reaction and resistance to feminism in several areas of law and policy - child custody, child poverty, sexual harassment, and sexual assault - and in a number of institutional sites, such as courts, legislatures, families, the mainstream media, and the academy. Collectively, their studies paint a complicated, often contradictory, picture of feminism, law, and social change, offering feminists and activists empirically grounded knowledge to develop legal and political strategies for change.

This book examines Canadian experiences of social control, moralregulation, and governmentality during the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. Informed by the wealth of theoretical andhistorical writings that have recently emerged on these subjects, thecontributors explore diverse state, social, legal, and human encounterswith the regulation of lives in British Columbia and Canadian history.Incest in the criminal courts, racial-ethnic dimensions of alcoholregulation, public health initiatives around venereal disease, and theseizure and indoctrination of Doukhobor children, among other issues,are examined in these nine original essays.