Nicastro on Redefining Women's Subjectivity Between Law and Revolution: A Foucauldian Analysis of Olympe de Gouges' 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Female Citizen @alessia_ncs @GVAGrad

Alessia Nicastro, Geneva Graduate Institute, has published Redefining Women's Subjectivity Between Law and Revolution: A Foucauldian Analysis of Olympe de Gouges' 1791 Declaration of The Rights of Woman and Female Citizen. This paper has been accepted and presented by the author at the 11th International Conference on Gender and Women's Studies held on 13th July 2024 online, organized by the University of Mumbai, the International Center for Research and Development (ICRD), and Unique Conferences Canada. Here is the abstract.

This contribution investigates how Olympe de Gouges' "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen” (1791) contributed to reshape women’s subjectivity in international law and to advance a feminist vision of this field. Drawing upon Foucault's notions of subject, power, and resistance, this paper analyses how De Gouges' Declaration functioned as a political and discursive tool that disrupted the dominant gender relations of power embedded in legal discourses of the time. By claiming women's equality and citizenship, de Gouges’ work paved the way to the recognition of women as both political and legal subjects. The author concludes that de Gouges' Declaration was pivotal for revealing the androcentric character of the embryonic human rights law (which were only les droits de l'homme) and for highlighting the inherent contradictions in the Revolutionary ideals of equality, citizenship, and freedom.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Houghton, Murray, and O'Donoghue on Kenstituent Power: An Exploration of Feminist Constitutional Change in Greta Gerwig's Barbie @ruth_houghton @NCLLawSchool @aoifemod @BarbieFemCon @qubschooloflaw

Ruth Houghton and C. R. G. Murray, both of Newcastle Law School, and Aoife O'Donoghue, Queen's University, Belfast School of Law, are publishing Kenstituent Power: An Exploration of Feminist Constitutional Change in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie in Feminist Theory (2024). Here is the abstract.

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie explores the influence of childhood dream worlds and toys over adult life, and the singular importance of a toy which represents an empowered woman. But this story plays out against the backdrop of deep societal challenges. That the subject matter of the film is light does not detract from its cultural significance; it enhances its reach and thereby its influence. Constitutional change, property, dissent, inequality and revolution are not the B-plot of the film, they suffuse every scene and motivate its major characters. In this article we explore the significance of BarbieLand as a supposed embodiment of a feminist utopia and the extent to which Gerwig is confronting viewers with difficult questions about authority and just governance in the RealWorld.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Craig and Dhonchak on A Feminist Theory of Moral Rights, Creative Agency, and Attribution @craigcarys @AnupriyaDh_19 @Elgar_Law @OsgoodeNews @NLUDofficial

Carys J. Craig, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, and Anupriya Dhonchak, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford; National Law University, Delhi, are publishing Against Integrity: A Feminist Theory of Moral Rights, Creative Agency, and Attribution in the Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Moral Rights (Ysolde Gendreau, ed., Edward Elgar) (Forthcoming).

The term “moral rights” captures a collection of personal rights of the author that run parallel to economic copyright interests. These moral rights include the right of attribution (the right to be associated with the work as its author) and the right of integrity (the right to object to modifications of the work that may prejudice the author's honor or reputation). It is generally agreed that moral rights occupy a unique place (the moral high ground, if you will) within the copyright realm, reflecting an intimate and ongoing personal connection between the author and their work that is deserving of acknowledgement and respect. Yet it is not generally recognized that feminist theory has something to say about the nature of this intimate personal connection and the rights that it seemingly entails. This Chapter explores insights that feminist theories can bring to the study and development of moral rights protections in copyright law. We begin by explaining why certain facets of conventional moral rights theory (typically based on the writings of Kant and Hegel) are ill-suited to—indeed inconsistent with—a feminist approach in both concept and effect. Conceptually, they demand and support an individualized and romanticized conception of the (patriarchal) author-figure. In practice, to the extent that strong moral rights of integrity and association limit dialogic engagement and transformation of protected works, they risk suppressing the kind of critical and counter-hegemonic expression that is vital to a feminist political agenda. Employing alternative feminist conceptions of situated selfhood, relationality, and dialogic authorship, we then explore what it might mean to reimagine moral rights in a way that resists claims to exclusion and control, but reflects the personal, social, and political value of creative agency. We present a limited defense of the right of attribution on these terms, and conclude with a call for attribution as feminist praxis.

Download the chapter from SSRN at the link.

Call For Papers: Applied Feminism and Privacy, Twelfth Feminist Legal Theory Conference, April 2-3, 2020

The Center on Applied Feminism at the University of Baltimore School of Law seeks paper proposals for the Twelfth Feminist Legal Theory Conference. We hope you will join us for this exciting conference on April 2 and 3, 2020. The theme is Applied Feminism and Privacy. As always, the conference focuses on the intersection of gender and race, class, gender identity, ability, and other personal identities. Dr. Leana Wen, President and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, will deliver the Keynote.

CALL FOR PAPERS APPLIED FEMINISM AND PRIVACY

The Center on Applied Feminism at the University of Baltimore School of Law seeks paper proposals for the Twelfth Feminist Legal Theory Conference. We hope you will join us for this exciting conference on April 2 and 3, 2020. The theme is Privacy. As always, the conference focuses on the intersection of gender and race, class, gender identity, ability, and other personal identities. We are excited that Dr. Leana Wen, President and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, has agreed to serve as our Keynote. We are at a critical time for a broad range of privacy issues. State level abortion bans have put a spotlight on the importance of decisional privacy to women’s equality. Across America, advocates are fighting for reproductive justice and strategizing to preserve long-settled rights. At the same time, our informational privacy is increasingly precarious. Data brokers, app designers, and social media platforms are gathering and selling personal data in highly gendered ways. As a result, women have been targeted with predatory marketing, intentionally excluded from job opportunities, and subject to menstrual tracking by marketers and employers. In online spaces, women have been objectified, cyber-stalked, and subject to revenge porn. With regard to physical privacy, the structural intersectionality of over-policing and mass incarceration impacts women of color and other women. And while a man’s home may be his castle, low-income women are expected to allow government agents into their homes – and to turn over reams of other personal information -- as a condition of receiving state support. In addition, families of all forms are navigating the space of constitutionally-protected family privacy in relation to legal parentage, marriage and cohabitation, and child welfare systems. We seek submissions of papers that focus on the topic of Applied Feminism and Privacy. We will interrogate multiple aspects of privacy, including its physical, decisional, informational, and family dimensions. This conference aims to explore the following questions: Is privacy dead, as often claimed? If so, what does this mean for women? How can privacy reinforce or challenge existing inequalities? How has feminist legal theory wrestled with privacy and what lessons can we draw from past debates? What advocacy will best advance privacy protections that benefit women? How do emerging forms of surveillance impact women? Can intersectional perspectives on privacy lead to greater justice? Who defines the “right to privacy” and what do those understandings mean for women? How is privacy related to other values, such as autonomy, anti-subordination, vulnerability, justice, and equality? We welcome proposals that consider these questions and any other related questions from a variety of substantive disciplines and perspectives. The Center’s conference will serve as a forum for scholars, practitioners, and activists to share ideas about applied feminism, focusing on connections between theory and practice to effectuate social change. The conference will be open to the public. To submit a paper proposal, by Friday, November 1, 2019, please complete this form and include your 500 word abstract: https://forms.gle/k4EPNLaYmEvo4KHUA We will notify presenters of selected papers by early December. About half the presenter slots will be reserved for authors who commit to publishing in the annual symposium volume of the University of Baltimore Law Review, our co-sponsor for this conference. Thus, the form requests that you indicate if you are interested in publishing in the University of Baltimore Law Review's symposium issue. Authors who are interested in publishing in the Law Review will be strongly considered for publication. The decision about publication rests solely with the Law Review editors, who will communicate separately with the authors. For all presenters, working drafts of papers will be due no later than March 20, 2020. Presenters are responsible for their own travel costs; the conference will provide a discounted hotel rate as well as meals. We look forward to your submissions. If you have further questions, please contact Prof. Margaret Johnson at majohnson@ubalt.edu. For additional information about the conference, please visit law.ubalt.edu/caf.

New From Edward Elgar: Research Handbook on Feminist Jurisprudence @ElgarPublishing

New From Edward Elgar:

Research Handbook on Feminist Jurisprudence (Robin West and Cynthia Grant Bowman, eds., 2019).

The Research Handbook on Feminist Jurisprudence surveys feminist theoretical understandings of law, including liberal and radical feminism, as well as socialist, relational, intersectional, post-modern, and pro-sex and queer feminist legal theories. Featuring contributions from a diverse team of prominent scholars, this Research Handbook illuminates the ways in which feminist scholarship has enriched understandings of law’s sometimes subordinating structures and the ways in which law can be interpreted or changed so as to promote the equality, liberty, wellbeing, and interests of women. The expert contributors offer a vast range of feminist perspectives on law, including liberal, radical, and post-modern feminism, and explore the implications of these theoretical stances for understandings of the nature of law, legal change, and the relationship between law and politics. Chapters analyse the influence of feminist legal theories on doctrinal areas of law including US constitutional and civil rights law, international law, and various areas of private law. This insightful book will be of interest to law students, legal scholars, and scholars of political and moral philosophy seeking to understand the entire body of feminist legal scholarship from the early 1970s to the present, as well as its variants, and relationships among different theoretical perspectives.

 

Bouclin on Women in Prison Movies as Feminist Jurisprudence @sbouclin @utpjournals

ICYMI:

Suzanne Bouclin, University of Ottawa, Common Law Section, has published Women in Prison Movies as Feminist Jurisprudence, at 21 Canadian Journal of Women and the Law (2010). Here is the abstract.

In comparison to the significant body of research around audience reception and generic conventions of, as well as the progressive or regressive assumptions behind and the legal meaning-making potentialities within, prison movies, women in prison movies (WIPs) have received far less theoretical or critical attention. This is noteworthy from a feminist law and society perspective that aims to link questions of popular culture to broader issues of gendered social stratification and social conflict. On one level, WIPs can be read as an overt critique of the masculinism of the prison genre. In the traditional prison movies, women appear in flashback sequences as supportive wives, girlfriends, mothers, and/or deceitful vixens that coerce, frame, or seduce men into lives of crime. In WIPs, female characters move from the margins of the story to its centre. On another level, WIPs problematize broader legal, economic, and political apparatuses that operate to criminalize women without the well-rehearsed and recognizable markers of social power. They invite viewers to look beyond abstracted statistics about female “criminality” through believable – though not exactly realistic – accounts of the manner in which the law operates to criminalize particular women.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call For Applications: St. Mary's Unviersity, PhD Fellowship (Studentship), Feminist Legal History or Cultural Legal Studies. Closing Date Feb. 26, 2017 @ThomGiddens @YourStMarys

Via @ThomGiddens

PhD Studentship - Feminist Legal History, or Cultural Legal Studies

St Mary's University, Twickenham - Centre for Law and Culture

Qualification type:	PhD
Location:	Twickenham
Funding for:	UK Students, EU Students
Funding amount:	£13,000
Hours:	Full Time

Placed on:	12th December 2016
Closes:	26th February 2017

School of Management and Social Sciences
Applications are invited for a three-year PhD studentship at the Centre for Law and Culture, St Mary’s University, Twickenham, beginning October 2017, working with Dr Judith Bourne and/or Dr Thomas Giddens.
The Centre for Law and Culture is an interdisciplinary hub for research at the intersections of law, justice, and the humanities. It aims to incubate and promote research crossing and challenging traditional legal boundaries from across critical and cultural legal studies. Visit www.stmarys.ac.uk/law-and-culture
The studentship provides full-time PhD home/EU student fees (£4,020 pa), £13,000 pa bursary, and £300 pa conference attendance budget. Applicants should have a Masters with Distinction, or with Merit and a distinction in the dissertation.
Details of Research Areas
A single PhD Studentship is available in either:

• Feminist legal history, or
• Cultural legal studies

Applications that traverse or combine these areas are also welcome.
Feminist Legal History
Feminist legal history is committed to uncovering women’s legal agency and how women have used the law to change their position. Feminist lawyers and historians have long recognised the contradictions at the heart of efforts to transform the law in ways that serve women’s interests. They demonstrate women’s denial of legal rights, women’s use of law to gain rights, and how, empowered by law, women worked to change gendered legal realities.
Applications are encouraged in (but not limited to) the following areas:

• The development and impact of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919
• The legal networks developed by women before 1919
• Comparative studies of ‘self-publicising’ hearings heard by the Bar Council and Inns of Court, 1919-1940
• The pre-1919 lobbying carried out for women’s admission to the legal profession
• Women ‘outside’ lawyers pre-1919
• The history of the involvement of women in law
• The barriers to women’s promotion in law

Cultural Legal Studies
Emerging from the tradition of studying law and humanities, cultural legal studies is an internationally growing area of legal study. From representations of law and justice in popular culture, to art as a form of jurisprudential knowledge, to the development of innovative jurisprudences based around particular cultural experiences, cultural legal studies is a burgeoning area of study, rich with potential, and ripe for the engagement of new and developing postgraduate researchers interested in engaging critically with law.
Applications are encouraged in, but not limited to, the following areas:

• law, legality, and justice in visual culture and media (including film, comics, games, popular culture, etc)
• the nature of cultural legal studies
• the form of legal knowledge
• legal aesthetics and the visuality of law and its institution

Additional Information
Possible roles include aiding in conference organisation and limited undergraduate teaching; the successful applicant should thus be located within Greater London during their studies.
To Apply
Download and complete a PhD application form and send, with a 3,000-4,000 word research proposal, two academic references, copies of your Master’s qualification(s), a current CV, and a cover letter, to:
Prof Mahendra Raj
School of Management and Social Sciences
St Mary’s University
Twickenham, TW1 4SX
Email: mahendra.raj@stmarys.ac.uk
Tel: 020 82404079
Enquiries
Informal enquiries regarding topic areas:

• Dr Judith Bourne (judith.bourne@stmarys.ac.uk – feminist legal history)
• Dr Thomas Giddens (thomas.giddens@stmarys.ac.uk – cultural legal studies)

Enquiries about application procedures and requirements: Prof Mahendra Raj (mahendra.raj@stmarys.ac.uk)
More here

A Conference on Feminist Legal Theory and Applied Feminism at the University of Baltimore School of Law, March 30-31, 2017

From the mailbox:

CALL FOR PAPERS

 APPLIED FEMINISM AND INTERSECTIONALITY: 

EXAMINING LAW THROUGH THE LENS OF MULTIPLE IDENTITIES

The Center on Applied Feminism at the University of Baltimore School of Law seeks paper proposals for the Tenth Anniversary of the Feminist Legal Theory Conference.  We hope you will join us for this exciting celebration on March 30-31, 2017.

This year, the conference will explore how intersecting identities inform -- or should inform -- feminist legal theory and justice-oriented legal practice, legal systems, legal policy, and legal activism. Beginning in 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw identified the need for law to recognize persons as representing multiple intersecting identities, not only one identity (such as female) to the exclusion of another (such as African American). Intersectionality theory unmasks how social systems oppress people in different ways.  While its origins are in exploring the intersection of race and gender, intersectionality theory now encompasses all intersecting identities including religion, ethnicity, citizenship, class, disability, and sexual orientation. Today, intersectionality theory is an important part of the Black Lives Matter and #SayHerName movements. For more information, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2015/09/24/why-intersectionality-cant-wait/. 

We seek submissions of papers that focus on the topic of applied feminism and intersecting identities.  This conference aims to explore the following questions: What impact has intersectionality theory had on feminist legal theory?  How has it changed law and social policy? How does intersectionality help us understand and challenge different forms of oppression?  What is its transformative potential? What legal challenges are best suited to an intersectionality approach? How has intersectionality  theory changed over time and where might it go in the future?

We welcome proposals that consider these questions from a variety of substantive disciplines and perspectives. As always, the Center’s conference will serve as a forum for scholars, practitioners and activists to share ideas about applied feminism, focusing on connections between theory and practice to effectuate social change. The conference will be open to the public and will feature a keynote speaker. Past keynote speakers have included Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Dr. Maya Angelou, Gloria Steinem, Senators Barbara Mikulski and Amy Klobuchar, NOW President Terry O’Neill, EEOC Commissioner Chai Feldblum, and U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner.

To submit a paper proposal, please submit an abstract by Friday October 28, 2016 to ubfeministconference@gmail.com. Your abstract must contain your full contact information and professional affiliation, as well as an email, phone number, and mailing address. In the “Re” line, please state: CAF Conference 2017. Abstracts should be no longer than one page. We will notify presenters of selected papers in November. About half the presenter slots will be reserved for authors who commit to publishing in the annual symposium volume of the University of Baltimore Law Review. Thus, please indicate at the bottom of your abstract whether you are submitting (1) solely to present or (2) to present and publish in the symposium volume. Authors who are interested in publishing in the Law Review will be strongly considered for publication. For all presenters, working drafts of papers will be due no later than March 3, 2017. Presenters are responsible for their own travel costs; the conference will provide a discounted hotel rate as well as meals.

We look forward to your submissions. If you have further questions, please contact Prof. Margaret Johnson at majohnson@ubalt.edu. For additional information about the conference, please visit law.ubalt.edu/caf.

Special Issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society: Feminist Legal Theory

Clare Huntington, Fordham University School of Law, and Maxine Eichner, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Law, have published an introduction to Studies in Law, Politics, and Society in volume 69 of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Special issue: Feminist Legal Theory (2016). Here is the abstract.

Half a century after the beginning of the second wave, feminist legal theorists are still writing about many of the subjects they addressed early on: money, sex, reproduction, and jobs. What has changed is the way that they talk about these subjects. Specifically, these theorists now posit a more complex and nuanced conception of power. Recent scholarship recognizes the complexities of power in contemporary society, the ways in which these complexities entrench sex inequality, and the role that law can play in reducing inequality and increasing agency. The feminist legal theorists in this volume – Susan Appleton, Katharine Baker, Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, Maxine Eichner, Angela Harris, Jennifer Hendricks, Michelle Oberman, and Susan Stiritz – are emblematic of this effort. They carefully examine the relationship between gender, equality, and power across an array of realms: sex, reproduction, pleasure, work, money. In doing so they identify social, political, economic, developmental, and psychological and somatic forces, operating both internally and externally, that complicate the expression and constraint of power. Finally, they give sophisticated thought to the possibilities for legal interventions in light of these more complex notions of power.

The full text is not available from SSRN. Link to publisher's website.

Stanchi, Berger, and Crawford on Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court

Kathryn Stanchi, Temple University School of Law, Linda L. Berger, UNLV School of Law, and Bridget J. Crawford, Pace University School of Law, are publishing Introduction: U.S. Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the United States Supreme Court in U.S. Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the United States Supreme Court (Kathryn M. Stanchi, Linda L. Berger & Bridget J. Crawford eds.), Cambridge University Press, 2016). Here is the abstract.

What would United States Supreme Court opinions look like if key decisions on gender issues were written with a feminist perspective? To begin to answer this question, we brought together a group of scholars and lawyers to rewrite, using feminist reasoning, the most significant U.S. Supreme Court cases on gender from the 1800s to the present day. While feminist legal theory has developed and even thrived within universities, and feminist activists and lawyers are responsible for major changes in the law, feminist reasoning has had a less clear impact on judicial decision-making. Doctrines of stare decisis and judicial language of neutrality can operate to obscure structural bias in the law, making it difficult to see what feminism could bring to judicial reasoning. The twenty-five opinions in this volume demonstrate that judges with feminist viewpoints could have changed the course of the law. The rewritten decisions show that previously accepted judicial outcomes were not necessary or inevitable and demonstrate that feminist reasoning increases the judicial capacity for justice, not only for women but for many other oppressed groups. The remarkable differences evident in the rewritten opinions also open a path for a long overdue discussion of the real impact that judicial diversity has on law and of the influence that perspective has in judging. Included here are the table of contents for the book, and the introductory chapter to the book.

Download the Introduction from SSRN at the link.

Jurisprudence, Law, and Gender

Leslie Green, University of Oxford Faculty of Law, and Queen's University Faculty of Law, has published Gender and the Analytical Jurisprudential Mind as Oxford Legal Studies Research Paper No. 46/2015. Here is the abstract.

Why does contemporary jurisprudence have so little to say about law and gender? I think that is because gender is not relevant to theories of the nature of law. Joanne Conaghan disagrees. She says the methods of analytic philosophy screen out gender by abstracting concepts from social contexts, smuggling in hidden values, and ignoring empirical evidence. My own work on the law of marriage is said to exemplify this. But Conaghan is comprehensively mistaken in her diagnosis. She misunderstands analytic jurisprudence, misunderstands the relation between sex and gender, and misunderstands the role of social facts in legal philosophy. Feminist legal theory is made poorer if it accepts the caricature she offers. Legal scholars should be more open to the contributions of analytic philosophy to feminist inquiry.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Assessing Feminist Legal Studies: Also Available As a Free Download From Springer Website

Ruth Fletcher's Responding to Submissions and Introducing Issue 23(1), in volume 23 of Feminist Legal Studies (2015), previously blogged here, is also available here as a free download. 

Call For Papers: U.S. Feminist Judgments Project

From Bridget Crawford, Pace Law School, comes this Call for Papers:

 

The U.S. Feminist Judgments Project seeks contributors of revised opinions and commentary for an edited collection entitled Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the United States Supreme Court. This edited volume is a collaborative project among feminist law professors and others to rewrite, from a feminist perspective, key Supreme Court decisions relevant to gender issues. Editors Kathy Stanchi, Linda Berger and Bridget Crawford seek prospective authors for 20 to 25 rewritten Supreme Court opinions covering a range of topics including reproductive rights, equal protection, the state’s use of criminal power, privacy, the family, women’s political participation, Title IX, employment discrimination and substantive due process. The editors also seek authors for commentaries of 1,500 to 2,500 words to put into context each of the rewritten cases.
The U.S. Feminist Judgments project was inspired by the successful collection and publication in Britain of Feminist Judgments: From Theory to Practice, edited by Rosemary Hunter, Clare McGlynn, and Erika Rackley. This volume, which included feminist versions of twenty-three key British decisions from the Court of Appeal and House of Lords, was published in 2010 and has been very well received. Like the sister project in Britain, the U.S. Feminist Judgments Project endeavors to pioneer “a new form of critical socio-legal scholarship” that illustrates how cases could have been decided differently had a feminist method been employed. We believe that U.S. Supreme Court law is ripe for this kind of scholarly treatment.
Those who are interested in rewriting an opinion or providing the commentary on one of the rewritten opinions should fill out an application here:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/feministjudgments
Applications are due by September 15, 2014 at 5:00 p.m. eastern. Editors will notify accepted authors and commentators by October 7, 2014. First drafts of rewritten opinions will be due on February 1, 2015. First drafts of comments on the rewritten opinions will be due on March 15, 2015. The editors are in the process of identifying a publisher; publication of the final volume is anticipated for late 2015.
A list of cases tentatively scheduled for rewriting is available here:
http://www.law.temple.edu/pdfs/faculty/FeministJudgmentsSurveyResults.pdf
Applicants may indicate their preferences among the list of cases. Applicants also may suggest other cases for rewriting. The tentative cases were chosen with the input and advice of an Advisory Panel of distinguished U.S. scholars including Kathryn Abrams, Katharine Bartlett, Devon Carbado, Mary Anne Case, Erwin Chemerinsky, April Cherry, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Martha Fineman, Margaret Johnson, Sonia Katyal, Nancy Leong, Catharine MacKinnon, Rachel Moran, Melissa Murray, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Nancy Polikoff, Dorothy Roberts, Dan Rodriguez, Susan Ross, Vicki Schultz, Dean Spade, Robin West, and Verna Williams.

---

Feminism Here and There

Yxta Maya Murray, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, has published 'Creating New Categories': Anglo-American Radical Feminism's Constitutionalism in the Streets, at 9 Hastings Race & Poverty Law Journal 454 (2012). Here is the abstract.

In 1968 and 1970, U.S. and British radical feminists organized provocative protests at the Miss America and Miss World beauty pageants. While the American New York Radical Women expressed their outrage at women’s objectification by picketing, engaging in street theater antics, and organizing a brief if peaceable outburst, British feminists raised a panic in London by throwing flour bombs and rotten produce at audience members and celebrity MC’s, scattering plastic mice, spraying ink-filled squirt guns, and even snubbing out a cigarette on a policeman.
Why were the U.S. radical feminists so much more decorous than their British sisters? In this article, I analyze how each of these radical feminist camps employed the strategies of outrage, law-breaking, and violence, noting that U.S. beauty pageant protesters were outrageous, but avoided the scandalous scofflawing and aggression of the London rebels. Investigating the historical and contemporary political worlds in which these two revolutionary groups worked, I show that U.S. and British attitudes toward law-breaking and violence were shaped by their native, early 20th century histories of feminism, as well as the American and European tumults and tragedies that characterized the age.
Drawing on the work of Reva Siegel, Jack M. Balkin, and Lynda G. Dodd, I will then consider how the U.S. and British protesters influenced their countries’ respective constitutional cultures and future feminist legal theories. Each camp’s approach to outrage, law-breaking, and violence in street protest would later be felt in successes and failures on the constitutional front, and also resound in a law-faithful U.S. feminism that differs significantly from its skeptical, anti-authoritarian British complement.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Women's Speech

Eileen Hunt Botting, University of Notre Dame, is publishing Ascending the Rostrum: Hannah Mather Crocker and Women's Political Oratory in the Journal of Politics. Here is the abstract.

Although Hannah Mather Crocker (1752-1829) apparently presented a prescription against women's political oratory in her Observations on the Real Rights of Women (1818), she provided philosophical and historical challenges to this conventional rule of early nineteenth-century feminine propriety elsewhere in the first American treatise on women's rights. By analyzing new archival findings of two of her oratorical works from the early 1810s — her 1813 "Fast Sermon" against the War of 1812 and her 1814 "Address" to the advisory board of the School of Industry for poor girls in Boston's North End — I argue that Crocker also provided a personal challenge to this conventional rule. In philosophically, historically, and personally redefining women's political oratory as compatible with feminine propriety — during the post-revolutionary backlash against women's rights — Crocker helped pave the way for the strategic use of the constitutional rights of speech and association in the nineteenth-century American women's rights movement and beyond.

The full text is not available from SSRN. 

A New Book on Nineteenth Century Women, Law, and Literature

Now available:

In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, Law, and Literature

by Kristin Kalsem

Available from Ohio State University Press http://www.ohiostatepress.org/books/book%20pages/kalsem%20in.html

In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, Law, and Literature explores the legal advocacy performed by nineteenth-century women writers in publications of nonfiction and fiction, as well as in real-life courtrooms and in the legal forum provided by the novel form.

The nineteenth century was a period of unprecedented reform in laws affecting women’s property, child support and custody, lunacy, divorce, birth control, domestic violence, and women in the legal profession. Women’s contributions to these changes in the law, however, have been largely ignored because their work, stories, and perspectives are not recorded in authoritative legal texts; rather, evidence of their arguments and views are recorded in writings of a different kind. This book examines lesser-known works of nonfiction and fiction by legal reformers such as Annie Besant and Georgina Weldon and novelists such as Frances Trollope, Jane Hume Clapperton, George Paston, and Florence Dixie.

In Contempt brings to light new connections between Victorian law and literature, not only with its analysis of many “lost” novels but also with its new legal readings of old ones such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Rider Haggard’s She (1887), and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). This study reexamines the cultural and political roles of the novel in light of “new evidence” that many nineteenth-century novels were “lawless”—showing contempt for, rather than policing, the law.

“Kristin Kalsem’s In Contempt makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the history of feminist jurisprudence. She covers thorny legal issues including married women’s property, infanticide, and lunacy law, as well as birth control, imperialism, and women’s admission to the bar. In her afterword she urges scholars to engage the ‘new evidence’ she has brought to light—and I have no doubt that this evidence will be welcomed enthusiastically.”

Christine L. Krueger, professor of English, Marquette University

Kristin Kalsem received her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School and her Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. She is professor of law and co-director of the Center for Race, Gender, and Social Justice at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.

Pedro Almodovar's "High Heels"

Monica Lopez Lerma, University of Helsinki Faculty of Law, has published Law in High Heels: Performativity, Alterity, and Aesthetics, at 20 Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 2 (2011). Here is the abstract.

Pedro Almodovar's High Heels (the original Spanish title, Tacones Lejanos, literally means 'distant heels') is a 1991 postmodern film that celebrates performance, fluidity, and fragmentation as ways of being in and understanding the world. In a generic combination of melodrama, comedy, musical, and film noir, High Heels tells the story of a turbulent mother daughter relationship, and a judge's criminal investigation following the murder of the daughter's husband (who also happens to be the mother's former lover). In recent years, Almodovar's film has received the attention of Orit Kamir, a law-and-film feminist scholar who opens up a refreshing line of inquiry. Kamir uses the film as a powerful site and as a means to explore alternative feminist images of law, judgment, and justice. In this Article, I provide new insights into Kamir's feminist jurisprudential reading of the film by placing it within the framework of postmodern jurisprudence, performativity, and queer aesthetics. My aim is to reconceptualize law through an ethics of alterity, and to further theoretical developments in postmodern accounts of judgment, ethics, and justice.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Legal Intellectuals and Their Impact On Society

James R. Hackney, Jr., Northeastern University School of Law, has published Legal Intellectuals in Conversation: Reflections on the Construction of Contemporary American Legal Theory (New York University Press, 2012). Here is the abstract.

In this book the author examines the trajectory of American legal theory in the late 20th century by way of interviewing ten leading theorists. The interviews conducted with Bruce Ackerman, Jules Coleman, Drucilla Cornell, Charles Fried, Morton Horwitz, Duncan Kennedy, Catharine MacKinnon, Richard Posner, Austin Sarat, and Patricia Williams cover a wide breadth of contemporary legal theory — including law and economics, critical legal studies, rights theory, law and philosophy, critical race theory, critical legal history, feminist theory, postmodern theory, and law and society. The topics raised in the conversations include the early lives of interviewees as thinkers and scholars, their contributions to American legal theory, and their thoughts regarding some fundamental questions in legal academe.

Feminism and the Museum

Yxta Maya Murray, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, has published Feminist Engagement and the Museum in volume 1 of the British Journal of American Legal Studies (2012). Here is the abstract.

One day in the summer of 2011, Los Angeles law professor Yxta Maya Murray visited the Tate Britain and was shocked to see there Cathy Wilkes' installation (We are) pro-choice, a phantasmagoria involving a "weeping" naked mannequin sitting on a toilet, as well as a ladder and some banged up kitchenware. Murray gleaned that something feminist was in the offing, but couldn't tell quite what that might be. It seemed evident that Wilkes was making a case that women are miserable in today's brutalist western-capitalist society. However (she wondered), were there any other, more hopeful, conclusions to draw from the work? Pro-choice sent her off on a six-months long adventure of trying to understand this amazing art – intellectual travels that drew her to the lands of French/Bulgarian feminist Julia Kristeva, U.S. legal theorist Drucilla Cornell, and to the strange ways of Irish Wilkes herself. In the resulting essay, Murray asks the following questions: What is this suffering that Wilkes' describes in (We are) pro-choice? How does art help us understand subordination that might be reversed through legal reform? And what kinds of radical changes have to be made to museum law and policy that would allow art institutions to help us liberate the oppressed?

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Rape, Law, and Art

Yxta Maya Murray, Loyola Law School Los Angeles, has published Rape Trauma, the State, and the Art of Tracey Emin in volume 100 of the California Law Review (2012). Here is the abstract.

Prosecutors use “rape trauma syndrome” evidence at rape trials to explain victims’ “counterintuitive” behaviors and demeanors, such as their late reporting, rape denials, returning to the scenes of their attacks, and lack of emotional affect. Courts and experts, in instructions and testimony, usually describe victim reticence as a product of “shame” or “trauma.” Feminist critics of R.T.S. evidence posit that the syndrome’s profile is based on incomplete evidence, because most rapes are unreported. Furthermore, they object to its condescending, sexist, and colonial construction of rape victims and their emotions.

In this Article, I respond to feminist critics by studying the work of Tracey Emin. Emin is a British-Turkish artist who suffered an unreported rape at the age of 13, and who has been commenting on that rape through her art ever since. Expanding and innovating upon the work of law and humanities scholars, I apply the insights found in art – or, what I describe as “artifacts,” with a deliberate play on the word – to rape law. Through my study of the facts limned in art, I show how the complexities of Emin’s reactions to rape challenge the too-streamlined and often confusing stories of victims told by prosecutors, experts, and courts. Emin’s art demonstrates that she harbors suspicions of the state, a skepticism based in part on her failure to correspond to “real rape” victim stereotypes. Her critique adds much needed insight into problems of the R.T.S. model. Based on the lessons learned, I make suggestions for rape law reform, and for changes to be made to the administration of rape prosecutions in the U.S. and U.K.

Download the Article from SSRN at the link.