The Vulnerability of Women in Dealing with Covid-19 Pandemic: Feminist Legal Theory Approach

Women are one of the community groups most affected by Covid-19 because most are workers with lower incomes and unprotected financial security. Moreover, most women occupy the informal sector, which is more vulnerable in accessing social security guarantees. In addition, domestic violence against women increases in several countries during the pandemic. This article aims to analyze the causes of the negative impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on Women and formulate the legal solution using the Feminist Legal Theory approach. The results show that there are broadly two causes of negative impacts for women dealing with Pandemic Covid-19. Firstly, due to the inequality in economic structure. Secondly is the gender stigmatized social structure. In this case, the feminist legal theory approach can be used to reconstruct and reform the negative impacts, as well as reanalysis the solutions in realizing women's legal justice due to the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic. This study offers three solution methods. Firstly, analyzing the legal methods in giving gender implications and perpetuating women's subordination. Secondly, making gender the main category in conducting legal analysis. Thirdly, considering gender specificity in achieving legal equality for women.

The Myth of Madness: Murderous Mothers and Maternal Infanticide

The sex-specific doctrine of infanticide provides a merciful method of dealing with women who kill their newborn children in circumstances of psychological distress. This article examines the contentious medical rationale which underpins infanticide legislation with the purpose of providing a substantiated argument for the abolition of this antiquated doctrine. Specifically, a two-pronged approach is taken. First, by utilising the views of contemporary medical science, the scientific credibility of the medical rationale is scrutinised. Second, by drawing upon feminist legal theory, a myriad of concerns associated with the medicalisation of female offenders are critically discussed. Ultimately, it is suggested that the offence/defence of infanticide should be abolished and that crimes of this nature should be readily subsumed under the current partial defence of diminished responsibility.

The Long History of Feminist Legal Theory

The conventional idea is that feminist legal theory began in the 1970s, in the second-wave feminist movement. However, the foundations of feminist legal theory were first conceptualized much earlier, in 1848, and developed over the next century and a half through distinct periods of thought. That development began with the establishment of the core theoretical precepts of gender and equality grounded in the comprehensive philosophy of the nineteenth-century’s first women’s rights movement ignited at Seneca Falls. Feminist legal theory was popularized and advanced by the political activism of the women’s suffrage movement, even as suffragists limited the feminist consensus to one based on women’s maternalism. Progressive feminism then expanded the theoretical framework of feminist theory in the early twentieth century, encapsulating ideas of global peace, market work, and sex rights of birth control. In the modern era, legal feminists gravitated back to pragmatic and concrete ideas of formal equality and the associated legalisms of equal rights and equal protection. Yet through each of these periods, the two common imperatives were to place women at the center of analysis and to recognize law as a fundamental agent of change.

KEBIJAKAN PENANGGULANGAN HIV/AIDS YANG BERKEADILAN: SEBUAH TELAAH FEMINIST LEGAL THEORY

Pengakuan bahwa ketidaksetaraan mungkin menjadi pendorong kerentanan seseorang atau sekelompok orang atas HIV/AIDS, misalnya ketidaksetaraan gender dalam bidang pendidikan dan pembatasan otonomi sosial di kalangan perempuan secara langsung terkait dengan akses yang lebih rendah ke layanan kesehatan seksual, termasuk tes dan pengobatan HIV. Ketidaksetaraan tersebut menimbulkan serangkaian tanggapan Feminist Legal Theory di sebuah upaya untuk mengatasi HIV. Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk untuk menganalisis mengenai kebijakan penanggulangan HIV/AIDS yang berkeadilan dalam telaah Feminist Legal theory. Metode penelitian yang digunakan adalah metode kualitatif dengan jenis penelitian doktrinal/normatif serta pendekatan filosofi. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa etika feminis mungkin sangat relevan dengan etika kesehatan masyarakat. Berangkat dari cara pandang feminist legal theory, maka pembuatan kebijakan penenanggulangan HIV/AIDS harus dilakukan berbasis pada people with HIV-centered social policies, yang menekankan bahwa dalam proses pembuatan suatu kebijakan haruslah berorientasi pada kesejahteraan ODHA.

Rights Adrift: Sexual Violence Against Rohingya Women on the Andaman Sea

Women fleeing Myanmar in 2015 were trapped on the Andaman Sea for months when States in the region closed off places of disembarkation. Among the horrors of starvation and unsanitary conditions experienced on the boats, they faced additional risks of sexual violence. These women fled from a situation in Myanmar that severely curtailed their rights, including gender violence, which is being tried as genocide at the International Court of Justice, and were exposed to further violations while fleeing. Through interviews with survivors of the journey and those who assisted them, this article describes the experiences of these women at sea. It outlines the failure of States to apply customary principles of international law and related regional standards to protect these women. From a feminist legal theory perspective, it explores the reasons for these failures and recommends reforms to guarantee better protection at sea for women in the future.

Precarity and Resistance: A Critique of Martha Fineman's Vulnerability Theory

Contemporary feminist theory by and large agrees on criticizing the traditional, autonomous subject and instead maintains a relational, dependent self, but the vocabulary used to describe the latter remains contested. These contestations are seen in comparing the approach of some feminist legal theory, as demonstrated by Martha Fineman, to the approach of some feminist theory that draws on continental philosophy, as demonstrated by Judith Butler. Fineman's concept of vulnerability emphasizes the universality of vulnerability in the human condition, arguing that a “responsive state” is most conducive to producing subjects who are “resilient” in the face of neoliberal pressures. We argue that vulnerability, as an existential as opposed to a political description, is a limited rubric under which to organize against neoliberal forces. Further, we contend that Fineman's rhetoric of resilience risks reiterating a neoliberal logic of individualized self-management. In response, we look to Butler's concept of precarity, which underscores particular social conditions, as opposed to universal ontological vulnerabilities, that debilitate certain subjects. At stake is how we respond to neoliberal forces today: a vocabulary of precarity poses a more effective challenge than one of vulnerability, for it opens onto not merely individual or institutional resilience but grounded, communal resistance.

Transnational Law and Feminist Legal Theory

This chapter examines the relationship between transnational law (TL) and feminist legal theory (FLT), focusing on the specific historical and political trajectories advanced by FLT in the transnational context and how they influence understandings of gender, sex, and sexuality in law. It demonstrates how these concepts have come to be understood in women’s human rights campaigns against violence against women (VAW) in both the domestic and global contexts. The chapter sets out how these concepts have been taken up in FLT, which in this overview, includes the poststructural, queer, and postcolonial feminist critiques of these concepts. The chapter then illustrates how in the context of VAW, “solutions” have mainly taken the form of carceral measures and a general tightening of the sexual security regime. The chapter provides a fuller understanding of the transnational effects of FLT and its limitations as a progressive project.