Law, Feminism and Sexuality: From Essence to Ethics?

1994 ◽  
Vol 9 (01) ◽  
pp. 15-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Smart
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Specific Area ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Feminist Ethics ◽  
Current Thinking ◽  
Sex And Sexuality ◽  
Sexual Conservatism

AbstractThis paper explores current thinking on the meanings of sex, gender and sexuality and on the relationship between each of these concepts. It suggests that whilst feminist theory has adopted a social constructionist view of gender and, to a lesser extent, sexuality, it has left sex to the conceptual domain of biology. It has also prioritised gender over sexuality conceptually. These issues are explored in the specific area of sexuality and law where it is argued that recent theoretical developments on sex and sexuality within poststructuralist thought have, as yet, failed to influence the dominant understanding of heterosexual relations. Arguably in the field of law and sexuality, feminism has remained wedded to a notion of binary sex and identity politics. The paper then works through two specific instances, namely rape and S/M sexual practice, to identify some of the problems associated with the latter approach. Ultimately it raises questions about whether a poststructuralist politics imbued with feminist ethics might provide us with less essentialist models of masculine/male and feminine/female sexuality without either abandoning feminist political action or falling into a new sexual conservatism.

Organizing for Economic Justice in The Late 1960s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Penny Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Christian Leadership ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Poor People's Campaign ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
Martin Luther King

Shortly before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched the Poor People’s Campaign that aimed to highlight the links between economic and racial injustice. Although t 1960s are usually characterized as a period in which race, gender and sexuality were the key identity issues for American protest, this chapter brings to the fore issues of class and poverty. From SCLC to labor unions to coalitions of African American single mothers, a range of activist organizations waged their own wars on poverty, putting into action the poverty tours that Robert Kennedy conducted in the mid-1960s and accounts such as socialist Michael Harrington’s influential 1962 book The Other America. These organizations worked at the intersections between economic and identity politics. Their successes and failures account for the new, often regressive contours of political action, discourse and policy around class and poverty in the following decades, and the re-emergence of a progressive vision in contemporary protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street.

A Queer Strategy of Equivocation: The destabilisation of normative heterosexuality and the rigid binary gender order

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antke Engel
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Minority Politics ◽  
Sexual Ambiguity ◽  
Queer Politics ◽  
Binary Gender

The critique of identity politics has opened up a sceptical attitude towards normative categories and demands for the coherence and stability of sex, gender and sexuality. At the same time reflections on mechanisms of exclusion within emancipatory movements and politics have also gained attention. Thus, not only (hetero-)sexism and homophobia, but also discriminations pertaining to the rigid binary gender order as well as racist discrimination are issues of importance to queer politics. Considering the critique of identity or minority politics, I have come to the conclusion that rather than to proliferate or to dissolve categories of sex, gender and sexuality, it is more promising to render them ambiguous: that is what I call a queer strategy of equivocation. Nevertheless sexual ambiguity is not progressive or liberating in itself. Instead, we have to realize that queer/feminist struggles against normative identities, a destabilization of binary, heterosexual norms or new forms of gendered or sexual existence are quite compatible with the quest for individualization put forth by neo-liberal forms of domination. Therefore, a strategy of equivocation should include the fight against social hierarchies, inequalities, and normalizations. The task is to consider simultaneously the working of and the intervention into different mechanisms of power; normalizations and hierarchizations, inclusions and exclusions work together, but not always in the same direction or without contradictions.

scholarly journals Archaeology and identity politics. A cross-disciplinary perspective

2004 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Vermeersch
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Units Of Analysis ◽  
Identity Group ◽  
Disciplinary Perspective ◽  
Stable Categories ◽  
The Relationship

What scholars are committed to in principle is not always what they are likely to uphold in practice. Adam T. Smith examines – and deplores – the striking discrepancy between the centrality of the constructivist idiom in a variety of disciplines and the tendency of archaeologists to continue to treat archaeological subjects (be they ethnic groups, classes, nations, races, cultures or any other kind of identity group) as given entities and stable units of analysis. Smith's concern is not merely about the consistency of the discipline's theoretical underpinnings. In fact, his greatest worry turns out to be political: an archaeology that reconstitutes, rather than deconstructs, the essential subject may be wrongly used as a foundation for contemporary political action (such as nationalism). Thus he invites archaeologists to revise the relationship between scholarly analysis and political practice. Smith not only suggests taking into full account the malleability of identity groups in relation to changing sociopolitical contexts, but he also incites scholars to bend their minds to the sociopolitical circumstances within which seemingly stable categories of identity are produced. Archaeologists should be careful not to ‘essentialize’ identities, he concludes, but instead shift their attention to exposing the strategic practices deployed by those who do ‘essentialize’ identities.

Masculinity Left to Be Desired

Contracultura ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Political ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Repression ◽  
Brazilian Society ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Sexual Repression

Chapter Five explores social and cultural practices that challenged traditional conventions of gender and sexuality in Brazilian society. In the late 1970s, emergent feminist and gay movements succeeded in expanding the range of leftist political debates to include discussions around gender roles, sexual desire, corporal pleasure, and other issues previously regarded as personal or private and therefore outside the realm of the political. These activists sought to link political repression to diverse forms of sexual repression such as the maintenance of male dominated gender relations, the policing of female sexuality, or the violent suppression of homosexuality. Here the author draws on the alternative press, especially the largest gay journal Lampião da Esquina. He examines here the influential work by performers who subverted gender norms, like former tropicalists Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, the gender-bending troupe Dzi Croquettes, and gay icon Ney Matogrosso. The author also discusses left-wing intellectuals, including former guerillas such as Fernando Gabeira, who sought to redefine notions of masculinity during the final phase of military rule.

Framing Sympathy-Worthiness: Informal Support and the Use of Disclosure Myths

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 172-183
Author(s):  
Wayne C. Rivera-Cuadrado
Keyword(s):  
Social Support ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Informal Support ◽  
Negative Outcomes ◽  
Social Proximity ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
Construct Meaning

Research on sexual violence has shown that social support sources can have both positive and negative outcomes for victims’ health. Yet few studies examine how informal supporters construct meaning from initial disclosure experiences to produce these outcomes. Using a social constructionist framework, I analyze 30 in-depth interviews with friends, family members, and partners who received disclosures of sexual violence. I examine how confidants construct meaning from initial disclosures to negotiate and construct victims’ “sympathy-worthiness”. Disclosure recipients express several facilitators and obstacles to constructing victims as sympathetic that draw on notions about their social proximity to victims, expectations of assault based on gender and sexuality, disclosure temporality, trauma visibility, and victims’ post-disclosure “recovery-work.” I argue these positionings contribute to, and draw upon, “disclosure myths” that frame confidants’ differential interpretations of victims’ narratives, resulting in both the provision and denial of support.

(Un)troubling identity politics: A cultural materialist intervention

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Moran
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Politics Of Recognition ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
In Virtue Of

This article draws on the cultural materialist paradigm articulated by Raymond Williams to offer a radical historicization of the idea of identity, with a view to clarifying and resolving some of the issues animating the ‘identity politics’ debates currently dividing left academia and activism. First, it offers clarity on the concept ‘identity politics’, demonstrating that we should reserve the term to refer only to politics that mobilize specifically and meaningfully around the concept of identity. Second, and in virtue of this, it provides new insights into five central questions that have driven the identity politics debates: Do identity politics always tend towards essentialism?; Do identity politics inevitably promote a politics of recognition over redistribution?; Do identity politics inevitably create political cleavages rather than solidaristic forms of political action?; What is the relationship between ‘identity politics’ and ‘call-out culture’?; And, are the problems of identity politics resolved by reference to intersectionality?

Moving from Feminist Identity Politics To Coalition Politics Through a Feminist Materialist Standpoint of Intersubjectivity in Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Hypatia ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane L. Fowlkes
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Coalition Building ◽  
Feminist Identity ◽  
Coalition Politics ◽  
The Subject

Identity politics deployed by lesbian feminists of color challenges the philosophy of the subject and white feminisms based on sisterhood, and in so doing opens a space where feminist coalition building is possible. I articulate connections between Gloria Anzaldúa's epistemological-political action tools of complex identity narration and mestiza form of intersubject, Nancy Hartsock's feminist materialist standpoint, and Seyla Benhabib's standpoint of intersubjectivity in relation to using feminist identity politics for feminist coalition politics.

Gender in Merovingian Gaul

2020 ◽  
pp. 163-185
Author(s):  
Guy Halsall
Keyword(s):  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
Secular Changes ◽  
Gendered Identities ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Sex And Sexuality ◽  
Feminine Ideals

The relationships between gender, sex, and sexuality are far more complex than is often acknowledged, whether in modern politics or in publications about medieval history. In a Merovingian context, this can be shown from various stories from the works of Gregory of Tours and from the archaeology of cemeteries. The spaces within which what we might term non-normative gendered identities could be enacted in Merovingian Gaul is examined via a discussion of the development of gendered norms from the classical Roman period to the seventh century. It is argued that a Roman concept of gender that focused on a single civic masculine ideal gradually evolved, not least through the emergence of more politically effective rival forms of masculinity, into a more binary sixth-century construction with separate masculine and feminine ideals. It is proposed that widespread changes around 600 led to a reversion to a more “monopolar” construction of gender but that the masculine ideal that was its focus was now overwhelmingly martial. Developments in the ecclesiastical ideas of gender and sexuality are explored in parallel to these secular changes, and it is suggested that they frequently led in interestingly different directions.

Functional Foods of the Indian Subcontinent

2018 ◽  
pp. 452-480
Author(s):  
Jiwan S. Sidhu ◽  
Tasleem A. Zafar
Keyword(s):  
Functional Foods ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Specific Area ◽  
Fermented Milk ◽  
Immune Functions ◽  
Omega 3 ◽  
Traditional Foods ◽  
Gastrointestinal Health ◽  
Current Thinking ◽  
History Of

The medicinal effects of food have been recognized on the Indian subcontinent since many centuries. The current thinking on functional foods can easily be applied to many traditional Indian subcontinent foods as these are based on whole grains, legumes, oilseeds, nuts, vegetables, fruits, spices, condiments, and many fermented milk products. Consumption of such foods on a regular basis not only provides most of nutrients in adequate quantities but also improve gastrointestinal health, boost immune functions, improve bone health, lower cholesterol, oxidative stress, reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases, various types of cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, ill-effects of obesity, and metabolic syndrome. Various chemical and biological components present in Indian subcontinent traditional foods, such as phytochemicals, dietary fiber, oligosaccharides, lignins, omega-3 fatty acids, phenolics, flavonoids, carotenoids, and probiotic bacteria play an important role in improving the health of consumers of these foods. The history of Indian traditional foods has been adequately reviewed by Srinivasan (2011). The traditional food habits of each specific area of the Indian subcontinent have been influenced by the culture and the availability of locally grown food materials. Some of the important functional foods of India subcontinent will be briefly discussed in this chapter.

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