Separate and Unequal

Through an ethnographic examination of legal processes in Family Court, this article maps some of the circumstances which Indian Muslim women confront in the area of Family Law. It provides a portrait of the politically interested spaces which govern their lives, indicating the osmosis between ‘religious,’ cultural and legal realms, rather than essentialisms about the nature of Islam. It provides a reminder that we can no more separate religious practices fundamentally from patriarchal logic than we can separate jurisprudence and the workings of law, indeed the State, from its constitution in multiple embedded sites of patriarchal logic and race and imperial regimes. Optimal strategies for Indian Muslim women to be socioeconomically and legally empowered are also interrogated in this context, as the paper explores the ways in which gender equality and cultural difference and community support can, or not, protect women. It emphasizes the importance of problematizing both notions of ‘community’ and ‘gender equity’ in any attempt to address women's rights and needs.     

Jews in the News – Representations of Judaism and the Jewish Minority in the Norwegian Contemporary Press

This article provides an analysis of how Jewish rituals and Jews as a minority group are represented and debated in the Norwegian press: How is “news about the Jews” framed by the media? Which discourses dominate the debates? Are notions of what it “takes to be Norwegian” put forward in these cases? The article is also an analysis of Jewish voices in the press, and based on the fact that Jewish advocates refer to minority-based legal rights suggests that the Jewish minority benefits from the use of a broader international human rights discussion in the press. I claim that a multicultural discourse provides the Jewish minority with language that makes it possible to argue for cultural rights without referring to Jewishness; offering protection against a general fear of anti-Semitism.     

Caring for the Fetus to Protect the Born Child?

This article analyzes the circumstances under which physicians have sought court orders to force pregnant women to comply with unwanted obstetrical interventions. It argues that pregnant women have moral obligations to care for their fetuses, not because the fetus has rights, but because the fetus becomes the born child, and children are vulnerable and in need of care. While the overwhelming majority of women are willing to make significant personal sacrifices in the interest of having a healthy baby, sometimes it is difficult for pregnant women to comply with treatment recommendations due to intervening variables beyond their control. Utilization of the court system to coerce unwanted treatment raises serious ethical and legal problems.     

The ethnophysiology and folk dietetics of pregnancy: a case study from South India

The contingency between notions of ethnophysiology and the folk dietetics of pregnancy are examined in a region of South India. Attention is focused on lay perceptions of essential body processes and health concerns during pregnancy. Preventive and promotive health strategies employed during pregnancy by the rural poor which involve diet are considered. The tendency for rural South Indian women to prefer smaller babies and the relationship of this preference to dietary behavior are considered in relation to both concepts of the appropriate quality and quantity of food to eat during pregnancy and the concepts of baby space and baby strength. Nutritional ramifications of alternative food consumption patterns are considered. The importance of understanding indigenous health concerns and notions of ethnophysiology when introducing public health programs is highlighted by a discussion of why many pregnant women are reluctant to comply with iron sulfate, tetanus toxoid, and vitamin therapy as currently presented by primary health care staff.     

Chinese Femininity and Social Control: Gender-Role Socialization and the State

Abstract This paper employs four classics of women's instructive literature and legal cases from late imperial China to analyze (1) the formation and development of Chinese femininity, and (2) the connection between gender-role socialization and the social control of women. I conclude that neither Chinese culture nor Confucianism is sufficient to explain Chinese women's subordination. The Chinese patrimonial state, with its centralized propaganda and coercive legal control, also played an active part in forming Chinese notions of femininity and enforcing women's subordinate status.     

Asking for a Child: The Refashioning of Reproductive Space in Post-War Northern Vietnam

In the mid-1980s, population movement, wartime male mortality, and changing notions of marriageability converged to create a radically different marital terrain than that previously encountered by Vietnamese women. Finding themselves without suitable marriage prospects a small number of single women asked men they would not marry to get them pregnant. This paper focuses on three elements that contributed to this refashioning of reproductive space: the women's post-war experiences that prompted them to ‘ask for a child’, state policies that provided a different dynamic for bearing children out of wedlock, and the manner in which the Women's Union sought to provide social acceptance for women who ‘asked for a child’. As a result of the women's agency and the state's decision to incorporate single mothers into society a new reproductive space was forged in which ideologies of motherhood, family, and reproduction took on new meaning in post-war northern Vietnam.     

The Victim Advocacy and Research Group: Serving a Growing Need to Provide Rape Victims with Personal Legal Representation to Protect Privacy Rights and to Fight Gender Bias in the Criminal Justice System

The Constitutional guarantee of procedural “due process,” arguably the most essential principle of the American justice system, provides that no person should be deprived of their rights without, at a minimum, notice and an opportunity for a meaningful hearing. Yet the personal rights of crime victims and other third parties are often violated in criminal proceedings in the absence of even minimal respect for due process. The problem persists, in part, because the system does not provide victims with personal legal advocacy and prosecutors are neither obligated nor empowered to serve as the victim’s lawyer. This lack of systematic zealous advocacy for victimsproduces harmful common law principles that depend on andperpetuate false and prejudicial notions about the credibility of rape victims, and women as a class. This article calls for the creation of public and privately supported lawyers for victims at both the trial and appellate levels of the criminaljustice system in an effort to ensure respect for fundamental constitutional principles, and to identify and eradicate gender bias in the criminal common law.     

The Race and Class Privilege of Motherhood: TheNew York Times Presentations of Pregnant Drug‐Using Women1

Prior research has examined race and class bias embedded in media presentations of pregnant drug users; however, this past research is limited in identifying biases because it focuses on single substances—primarily crack cocaine. I build on this work by conducting a comparative analysis of more than 15 years worth of New York Times articles on three drugs (crack cocaine, alcohol, and tobacco) used during pregnancy. These three drugs have varying levels of deleterious effects on fetal development and infant health, as well as varying levels of use by poor and minority women. Because of this variation, I am able to assess whether media coverage of pregnant drug‐using women is proportional to the documented adverse consequences of specific drugs or, rather, whether media coverage is higher and more negative for poor and minority pregnant women regardless of the degree of adverse health consequences associated with the specific drug used. Through this analysis, I demonstrate that the prevalence and framing of news stories about pregnant drug‐using women has little to do with protecting the health of children. Rather, concern for children is a rhetorical tool used to define poor and minority women as bad mothers and blame them for contemporary changes in families.     

Sovereign Force and Crime-focused Law at the Cape Colony

This paper shows how law enables right-based versions of the sovereign to take root by studying how British sovereignty was fashioned over the Cape of Good Hope since its occupation in 1795. Challenging notions that sovereignty is predicated on an ability to except itself from law, the analysis shows how the emerging Cape sovereign was authored into being through its active insertion into crime-focused legal practices.     

Paretos hermeneutischer Positivismus

An analysis of Pareto’s action theory making use of practical syllogism has as a result the differentiation of an externalist and an internalist part of his model of action. The externalist part is positivist in character and therefore unacceptable. It contains two classical positivist positions: a strict demarcation between metaphysics and science and the conspiracy-theory of error. Both were rightly criticised by Karl Popper. The internalist part contains the principle “reasons as causes”, which was later made famous by Donald Davidson. In comparison with Max Weber it will be shown that this is the rationality principle of interpretative sociology. Bringing internalist and externalist perspective together Pareto’s position can be called hermeneutical positivism. The article describes an hitherto neglected effect of positivist epistemology on sociology, and specifies action-theoretical fundaments of interpretative and explanative sociology.     

Making Sense of Muscle: The Body Experiences of Collegiate Women Athletes*

Using ethnographic research, this paper explores the experiences of elite women athletes on a Division‐I college soccer team. I draw on existing literature in the sociology of sport, sociology of the body, and interactionism to inform my analysis. With this approach, I illustrate the complicated relationship women athletes have with their bodies in relation to physical competition and dominant notions of femininity today. Key reference groups influenced the players’ self‐perceptions and encouraged the women to closely monitor their own appearances and actions. While undoubtedly affected by these inter‐actions as well as their place in the gender hierarchy, many women athletes subtly resisted notions of idealized bodies and constructed their own meanings about their bodies and experiences. Investigating the day‐to‐day body awareness and negotiations of women athletes reveals the gendered nuances of sport and the complicated relationship between cultural ideals and female embodiment.     

Interrogating medical tourism: Ireland, abortion, and mobility rights

Medical tourism in Ireland, like in many Western states, is built around assumptions about individual agency, choice, possibility, and mobility. One specific form of medical tourism—the flow of women from Ireland traveling in order to secure an abortion—disrupts and contradicts these assumptions. One legacy of the bitter, contentious political and legal battles surrounding abortion in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s has been securing the right of mobility for all pregnant Irish citizens to cross international borders to secure an abortion. However, these mobility rights are contingent upon nationality, social class, and race, and they have enabled successive Irish governments to avoid any responsibility for providing safe, legal, and affordable abortion services in Ireland. Nearly twenty years after the X case discussed here, the pregnant female body moving over international borders—entering and leaving the state—is still interpreted as problematic and threatening to the Irish state.     

Foodwork as re-articulation of women's in/visible work: A study of food allergy blogs

This paper advances our understanding of foodwork as the organization of women's work and racialized, gendered, and classed inequalities in the provisioning, preparation, and consumption of food. Drawing on notions of the in/visibility of women's work, I conceptualize foodwork as the articulation of visible and invisible women's work in the social organization of everyday food practices. The analysis of three blogs, written by women with, or mothers of children with, food allergies, provides a glimpse into the everyday living with food allergy. The investigation of the actual practices of allergy foodwork shows that they are interactive and intersectional patterns of work and make everyday life possible. The paper maps directions for research to explore how foodwork could be organized differently starting from the transformative potential of everyday food practices, blogs, and food allergy.     

The Victim Advocacy and Research Group: Serving a Growing Need to Provide Rape Victims with Personal Legal Representation to Protect Privacy Rights and to Fight Gender Bias in the Criminal Justice System

The Constitutional guarantee of procedural due process, arguably the most essential principle of the American justice system, provides that no person should be deprived of their rights without, at a minimum, notice and an opportunity for a meaningful hearing. Yet the personal rights of crime victims and other third parties are often violated in criminal proceedings in the absence of even minimal respect for due process. The problem persists, in part, because the system does not provide victims with personal legal advocacy and prosecutors are neither obligated nor empowered to serve as the victim's lawyer. This lack of systematic zealous advocacy for victims produces harmful common law principles that depend on and perpetuate false and prejudicial notions about the credibility of rape victims, and women as a class. This article calls for the creation of public and privately supported lawyers for victims at both the trial and appellate levels of the criminal justice system in an effort to ensure respect for fundamental constitutional principles, and to identify and eradicate gender bias in the criminal common law.     

Good,Bad, and Captive Samaritans:

This paper adds-in pregnancy and consent to the abortion debate in the context of good samaritan arguments initiated by Judith Jarvis Thomson. Drawing upon legal and medical definitions, the abortion issue is reframed as the right of a woman to consent to what will be done to her body by the fetus rather than her right merely to choose what to do with her own body. This argument shifts abortion rights from the right to decisional autonomy established in Roe to the right to bodily integrity affirmed by samaritan case law. As a result, we see why women who are pregnant without their consent, in effect, are captive samaritans, a status unsubstantiated by either legislative statutes or legal precedents. Recasting abortion as a response to nonconsensual pregnancy opens new grounds guaranteeing women's reproductive rights.     

The Role of Blended Value Accounting in the Evaluation of Socio-Economic Impact of Social Enterprises

Social enterprise has become a key phenomenon in providing public services in many developed countries. The debate on the evaluation of the socio-economic impact generated by this kind of organization has gone hand in hand with the growth of social entrepreneurship. This study provides an exploratory analysis of the emerging practice of measuring the socio-economic impact of social enterprises using the theoretic construct called “Blended Value Accounting” (BVA). Among the models and tools proposed by BVA, we examine in particular the Social Return on Investment (SROI)—an instrument of causal contribution analysis—conducting a literature review on its application to the evaluation of socio-economic impact of social enterprises and on its implications for BVA. Finally, we reach a conclusion as to the role that these tools of mixed accounting and assessment might play—particularly the one examined—with respect to the positivist, critical, and interpretative theories of accounting, thus identifying the areas for further research.     

Refugee Women in Europe: Some Aspects of the Legal and Policy Dimensions

This article presents an overview of the legal and policy issues affecting refugee and asylum-seeking women in European host societies. First, it explores the unique types of persecution experienced by women and shows that the asylum determination process, along with the status of women relative to men, mitigates against the effective protection of women. The legal basis for asylum, the evidential requirements and the procedural norms all reduce the protection which is likely to be conferred upon asylum-seeking women. Second, the article provides an overview of responses to female refugees and asylum-seekers in European countries of asylum. Although there are differences between countries, there is also a large degree of uniformity. For example, there is a lack of recognition and understanding of the diversity and the range of experiences which refugees bring with them, including different social and cultural norms. Moreover, European policies do not provide special provisions to facilitate the settlement of refugee women and instead place barriers to their social and economic participation. Third, the article examines policies for family reunion in different countries and shows that such unfavourable and unsympathetic policies mitigate against the settlement of refugee women. Finally, the article argues that if refugee and asylum-seeking women are to have their cases recognized and to be successfully settled, then there needs to be a complete rethink of legislation and policy in Europe.     

Nothing to Declare: J. Hillis Miller and Zero's Paradox

In Australian law, the protection of cultural property or cultural rights is built upon generalisable notions of culture, cultural belongings and properties. These notions have tended to reflect non‐Indigenous preconceptions and, as a result, Aboriginal cultural rights have been inadequately recognised and legal protection offered has often failed to protect what is valuable and significant to Aboriginal peoples. In the context of these issues, this article considers the relationship between the representation of culture and notions of cultural identity and property.     

Growing Down Like a Banana: Solomon Islands Village Women Changing Gender Norms

This article presents Solomon Islands village women’s opinions about gender norms. It explores their perceptions of their ability to be involved in leadership roles and decision-making, and their analysis of how they conceive of their abilities changing. It attempts to unravel the ‘push-pull’ experience for Solomon Islands rural women—a push towards modernity equated with gender equity and development, and the pull of traditional gender roles for women embedded in notions of what it means to be a good Solomon Islander woman. It concludes that women’s empowerment must be viewed as a journey that encompasses women’s strategic and practical interests relating to agency in a variety of locations. This article contributes to understanding some aspects to women’s empowerment and how international NGOs and other development entities may have a role in creating space for women’s self-reflection, public commentary and visibility in secular social space.