Category Archives: Equality
Sep 3, 2014 Camille NelsonEquality
Timing is everything. I started reading Crime, Surveillance and Communities in the midst of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. The community north of St. Louis was the site of civil unrest in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager. I could say that Prof. Capers’ article, which explores the use of technological surveillance as a mechanism to police the police, is prescient. However, given the number of such shootings, especially those that have risen to national attention, I would instead describe the article as a thoughtful effort to assess how technology might be used to assist and address interactions between police and community members, especially interracial interactions. Let me explain.
Capers argues that because the Fourth Amendment does protect some actions in public from technological surveillance, reasonable privacy intrusions must be balanced with the public good. Thus, technological surveillance in public is legitimate only so long as the surveillance is reasonable. Capers begins by introducing the many ways in which surveillance technology is already being used to watch our public movement and activities, be it through video cameras, biometric technology, zoom and movement capabilities, license plate readers, car trackers, CCTV, facial recognition technology, or apps. All of these, he says, combine to amount to “warrantless mass surveillance.” Thus, the Big Brother possibility, and the Foucauldian panoptican, are already a part of our lives. (P. 964.) Continue reading "Crime, Surveillance, and Communities"
Jul 22, 2014 Ruthann RobsonEquality
Kelly A. Behre,
Digging Beneath the Equality Language: The Influence of the Fathers’ Rights Movement on Intimate Partner Violence Public Policy Debates and Family Law Reform, 21
Wm. & Mary J. Women & L. (forthcoming 2014), available at
SSRN.
The fathers’ rights movement relies on the rhetoric of equality. Men, it seems, are discriminated against because the law has come under the sway of feminists. Feminists have prevailed upon the law to intrude in areas where the government has no business, such as the home. Moreover, feminists have convinced policy makers that there is an epidemic of domestic violence perpetrated by men upon women and that adult intimate partner violence should be considered in issues of custody of children. The correct view according to the fathers’ rights movement, is that true equality means gender-neutrality.
While discussions, critiques, and analysis of the equality rhetoric of the international fathers’ rights movements are not novel, Kelly Behre’s article, Digging Beneath the Equality Language: The Influence of the Fathers’ Rights Movement on Intimate Partner Violence Public Policy Debates and Family Law Reform, does – – – as the title promises – – – “dig beneath.” The article’s first section is an excellent overview of the equality narratives of the fathers’ rights movement, including the appeal to civil rights movements and the use of both discrimination and gender-neutral tropes. But the real contribution of Behre’s article is her exploration of the relationship between empiricism and equality. Continue reading "Empiricism and Equality: Studying Fathers’ Rights"
Jun 27, 2014 Nicola BarkerEquality
There appears to be a certain irony in writing in the Equality Section about a book produced by a group called “Against Equality”. But while their name may initially create an image of a reactionary conservative group trying to stem the tide of progressive social change, their agenda is to highlight and critique the inherent conservatism of the apparently liberal “gay rights” claims of equal marriage, equal military service, and equal protection under the law in the form of hate crime statutes. There is a great deal of feminist and queer scholarship making similar points but it has been too easy for gay rights campaigning groups, such as the deeply conservative Human Rights Campaign in the US, to by-pass any real engagement with this scholarship, much of which is inaccessible to the general public due to expensive paywalls. With this anthology, which includes both activist and academic writers, the Against Equality collective seeks to “be sure that our voices of resistance are not erased and written out of history“.
The anthology brings together three books, previously self-published: Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage (2010); Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars (2011); and Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You (2012). In each volume Conrad brings together a diverse collection of essays drawn from a variety of sources from zines, to blogs, to Facebook posts, and journal articles. Some of these contributions would already be familiar to an academic audience, others may not be, but all are interesting and impassioned refutations of a liberal reformist agenda that fails to properly challenge the underlying economic as well as gender, race, and class power structures. Continue reading "Against Equality"
May 30, 2014 Elaine CraigEquality
“Why should women live in anticipatory dread and hypervigilence?” Elizabeth Sheehy writes in the concluding chapter of her important new book Defending Battered Women on Trial: Lessons from the Transcripts. Instead, she argues, the legal system should “shift the risk of death to those men whose aggressions have created such dehumanizing fear in their female partners”.
In Defending Battered Women on Trial: Lessons from the Transcripts, Sheehy offers a compelling and startling account of the criminal justice system’s failure to protect women from the men who batter them. She begins the book by situating the issue in its historical legal context. Making the work accessible to an audience much broader than just those well-versed in criminal law, Sheehy provides the reader with ample background to understand the legal context in Canada both prior to and in the years following the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1990 recognition of battered women syndrome in R. v Lavallee. Continue reading "It is Not Open Season on Men"
Apr 29, 2014 Ann TweedyEquality
Robert Alan Hersey, Jennifer McCormack, & Gillian E. Newell,
Mapping Intergenerational Memories (Part I): Proving the Contemporary Truth of the Indigenous Past, Ariz. Legal Stud. Discussion Paper 14-01 (2014), available at
SSRN.
I strongly recommend this paper not only for its immediate subject—the struggles that indigenous peoples face in proving land claims due to colonial governments’ distrust of evidence on oral history—but also because it helped me understand the limitations of my own perspective.
Robert Alan Hershey, Jennifer McCormack, and Gillian E. Newell describe the disconnect between Western notions of cartography and spatial theory and those of indigenous peoples, particularly indigenous peoples located in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. They then explain that some of these groups, such as the Ngurrara in Australia have had success in getting their rights recognized by creating maps that incorporate oral history, thus adopting a hybrid form of evidence that is both documentary and respectful of indigenous ways of knowing such as through oral history. Continue reading "Oral History and Perceptions of Subjectivity"
Mar 25, 2014 Margaret DaviesEquality
Over the past several years, Davina Cooper has been writing about “everyday utopias,” intentionally created practices and spaces, which represent an effort to enact social change in everyday life. In Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces, Cooper brings together much of this work in a revised form and underpins it with an extensive theoretical discussion of how such practices can be understood as socially transformative.
The individual pieces previously published were always intriguing and highly stimulating—engaging as they did in great detail with a variety of otherwise marginal, and sometimes unstudied, cases. These include Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, the Toronto Women’s bath house, Local Exchange Trading Schemes, public nudism, an alternative school, and a state-run equality program. The synthesis of these case studies into one collection adds enormous value to her previous publications, as does the very significant theoretical work Cooper undertakes in framing, connecting, and conceptualizing these spaces. More than this, the book itself is “hopeful and inspired”—as Sara Ahmed says on the back cover—because it offers multiple instances of social transformation in action and an analysis of how shaping the present may influence the future, both in the cases discussed but also in general. Continue reading "Practicing the Future"
Feb 21, 2014 Kim BrooksEquality
One of the most heated series of conversations I had with my colleagues in law school was about hair: color, style, length, and accoutrements. All of these choices apparently meant something. It was unclear to me what, precisely, my haircut at the time signalled—or didn’t—but it was clear to me that Hair Matters.
Thankfully, Ruthann Robson has authored Dressing Constitutionally: Hierarchy, Sexuality, and Democracy from our Hairstyles to Our Shoes. The book is something of a relief for me. It clarifies how my hair (and clothes, and shoe) choices are constrained by the regulatory framework of the American Constitution. I feel less responsible for my Hair and Clothing Mistakes, since it is clear that my choices are subject to constitutional limits. And it has advanced my understanding of what Dressing Means. Continue reading "Dressed Up and Ready to Read"
Jan 22, 2014 Davina CooperEquality
In their engaging, highly readable article, Jon Binnie and Christian Klesse explore the effects of intergenerationality within Polish transnational sexual solidarity movements. Specifically, the authors examine how chronological age and people’s histories and trajectories of political activism shape the interactions taking place between lesbian and gay activists from Poland and those from Western Europe.
The authors locate their discussion within queer conversations about time and futurity. According to Lee Edelman, whose blistering critique of heterosexual reproductive futurity proved very popular within certain quarters of queer studies, “The image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought”; there is only one position to take when it comes to the Child and that is to be “for” it. Edelman argues instead for an “unthinkable” politics that refuses to be oriented to the future and its beneficiaries. But this is not the position Binnie and Klesse adopt. Rejecting Edelman’s account of queer, the authors draw instead on José Esteban Muñoz’s argument of queer time, where “Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond . . . the present.” Thus, the authors indicate the possibility of a “queer child” as one who stands in for, and gestures to, a different future—where sexual diversity is a regular and accepted dimension of social life. Continue reading "Generations of Activism and Queer Time"
Dec 11, 2013 Nick J. SciulloEquality
Nancy Leong provides the legal academy with a riveting account of the ways in which the logic of capital influences racial politics. Leong weaves together several topics of interest to legal scholars in her new article: criticisms of capital, diversity politics, and race as property. Her analysis revives the Marxian analysis conducted by early scholars of the critical legal studies movement at a time when questions of capital and race are as relevant as ever. I like it lots.
Leong’s work takes on the momentous task of breathing new life into Marxian legal theory. It also contributes to our substantive knowledge of the ideology of diversity and to our understanding of Marxian ideas and their relationship to law. Leong’s contribution is timely given the recent Supreme Court decisions in Fisher v. University of Texas and Shelby County v. Holder, both of which arise from historical legacies of race and racism. Her article does much to question the rhetoric of diversity, the linkages of capitalism and law, and the complexities of racial politics in a racialized world. Continue reading "The Sublime Object of Race"
Nov 11, 2013 Robert LeckeyEquality
Alexander Kondakov’s paper on the claims framed by gay and lesbian activists in Russia and the effects of official silence is brave and thought-provoking.
It is a fine example of socio-legal research, combining discourse analysis of sources gathered from empirical research with theoretical insights. Amongst other sources, Kondakov draws on Wendy Brown’s work on tolerance and Brenda Cossman’s study of how refusing legal recognition to same-sex marriage nevertheless inaugurates it into “speakability.” Methodologically, his discussion of the “sub-discourse under the articulated one” as part of the normative order, “shaping things that are supposed to be left unsaid,” might appropriately inspire other legal researchers, as much scholarship confines itself to that which is said. Continue reading "Scholarship in a Violent Time"
