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Reaction and Resistance: Feminism, Law, and Social Change
Abstract
The image of “backlash” is pervasive in contemporary debates about the impact of second-wave feminism on law and policy. But does it really explain the resistance to feminist initiatives for social change in contemporary culture? In this timely volume, contributors from various disciplines analyze reaction and resistance to feminism in several areas of law and policy – child custody, child poverty, sexual harassment, and sexual assault – and in a number of institutional sites, such as courts, legislatures, families, the mainstream media, and the academy. Collectively, their studies paint a more complicated, often contradictory, picture of feminism, law, and social change than the popular image of backlash suggests. Reaction and Resistance offers feminists and other activists empirically grounded knowledge that can be used to develop legal and political strategies for change.
... These are but two examples of antifeminist backlash and the very real impacts this backlash is having on policies relevant to female victimization and offending in jurisdictions across the globe. From America to Australia, Britain, Columbia, Italy, Jamaica, Mexico, Nepal, Nigeria, Palestine, Pakistan, Portugal, South Africa, Canada, Hong Kong, and beyond, criminal justice sanctions increasingly target, without adequately protecting, women caught up in poverty, crime, and domestic violence, while responsibility for preventing crime and victimization is (re)priviatized (Chunn, Boyd, & Lessard, 2007;Joe Laidler, Petersen, & Emerton, 2007;Mann, 2008;Sudbury, 2005). The papers that follow demonstrate the complexities of the two key concepts that inspired the call for papers for this special issue, backlash and globalization. ...
... In particular , they demonstrate the ways antifeminist actions and feminists' counteractions interact with other factors and discourses in jurisdictionally discrete but globally linked policy contexts. Indeed, as others have pointed out, globalization and backlash are diverse and contradictory rather than unitary or unilateral processes (Chunn et al., 2007). Thus, the " global lockdown " (Sudbury, 2005) on marginalized women and men is indeed an aspect of global capitalism, but it also reflects realities at play that are far more complex. ...
... Finally, my data contribute to a deeper understanding of the concept of legal consciousness and how theorized types of legal consciousness may shift and be linked, possibly, with deterrence-in this case, deterrence from purchasing sex. The shift in legal consciousness on the forums in response to the passage and especially the perceived implementation of new laws hopefully will contribute to literature on law and social change (e.g., Chunn et al., 2011;Gessner, 2001). Based on my findings, it seems that social reform may be achieved even in the absence of a "before the law" legal consciousness (described by Ewick and Silbey (1998) as characterizing the attitude of law-abiding citizens who view the law as authoritative and do not challenge it), and when the players (the sex buyers) articulate a mind-set rooted in a "with the law"/"against the law" legal consciousness. ...
Introduction
Discussions about commercial sex have historically overlooked sex purchasers. Previous research often focused on sex workers, limiting our understanding of the social relationships and forms of masculinity that characterize and reproduce the industry. This research adds to growing research on sex purchasers in the “manosphere” by examining which policies purchasers themselves may consider effective or ineffective at deterring the buying of sex, a question that elucidates how law matters to this and other stigmatized populations.
Methods
This study focuses on the exchange of information among men who post on online “johns’ boards” that contain discussion forums for every type of commercial sex venue in Illinois (both indoor and outdoor, initiated in-person and online). I conducted a content analysis of 1,684 posts made in 2010, before, during, and after the passage of legislation in Illinois designed to curtail the demand for commercial sex.
Results
Forum posts indicate that many posters, who band together as what they call a “brotherhood” under the banner of persecuted masculinity, pay close attention to changes in statewide legislation and local law enforcement policies regarding prostitution.
Conclusions
I argue that when purchasers perceive policies as tangible, ongoing threats, their legal consciousness shifts, and law enforcement is no longer seen as a manageable risk within the manosphere brotherhood.
Policy Implications
This reaffirms the importance of the internet in shaping commercial sex industries and has wider implications for our understanding of how men who share perceptions of masculinity threat react to new deterrence policies for sex purchasing.
... Este artículo tiene por finalidad analizar e identificar las prácticas discursivas que sostienen la emergencia de un nuevo discurso antifeminista en las redes sociales. Si bien, el estudio del antifeminismo ha generado una notable literatura en el área anglosajona (Anderson, 2015;Chunn et al., 2007;Tarrant & Howard, 2000) y francófona (Bard, 1999;Blais & Dupuis-Déri, 2012;Lamoureux, 2015), su desarrollo en el área iberoamericana es todavía incipiente. La mayoría de investigaciones publicadas se circunscriben o bien a estudios históricos y literarios (Aguado & Ortega, 2011), o bien al análisis de actores en los procesos de producción de políticas públicas (Alonso & Paleo, 2017), obviando su configuración discursiva. ...
Anti-feminism has become a discourse increasingly present on social networks, however there is still little research that addresses its development in the Ibero-American region. This article aims to give an account of the discursive practices used by anti-feminism to associate the feminist mobilizations of the 8th of March with the expansion of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain. The article is based on a critical discourse analysis of the publications on Twitter during the months of March and April 2020, in order to visualize and identify the strategies used to establish such association. From the analysis carried out, the similarities and differences between the traditional religiously based anti-feminist discourse and the new forms of anti-feminism linked to the options of the populist right are evident, and it is inferred that this new anti-feminism is articulated as a countermovement that makes a strategic use of the intransigence rhetoric and the mechanisms of propagation of rumor in order to support de-democratizing practices.
... There is growing body of scholarly work on antifeminist backlash (Chafetz and Dworkin 1987;Chesney-Lind 2006;Chunn et al 2007;DeKeseredy 1999;Dragiewicz 2011;Faludi 1991;Laidler and Mann 2008). This literature describes backlash tactics, attempts to assess its impact, and counters inaccurate claims. ...
... Young girls are regularly taught that physical aggression is -un-lady like,‖ thus, they are not encouraged to amass physical strength (Doerner & Lab, 2005). Further, before the late-1960's womens' movement, female victims of sexual assault and rape were repeatedly judged based on how well their lifestyle measured up against social expectations of women (Chunn, Boyd, & Lessard, 2007). Stereotypes associated with female sexual assault victims frequently stem from the sexual double standard often applied to boys and girls: sex ruins girls' lives and enhances boys' lives (Chesney-Lind & Pasko, 2003). ...
... Research into falling rape conviction rates may need to investigate the possibility of attitudes strengthening in favour of defendants in rape cases as a result of backlash against what are perceived as feminist-inspired law reforms. Resentment and resistance on this basis are occasionally expressed by commentators and legal professionals (particularly criminal defence lawyers), and the general phenomenon of 'backlash' against perceived feminist advances and the re-assertion of 'men's rights' is well known (see Chunn et al. 2007). While in published literature it is often acknowledged that some reform of 1970s rape laws was needed to remove outdated provisions that effectively denied women's autonomy and equality, there is also an expressed view that things have now 'gone too far'-too far in favour of protecting the victim/survivor at the expense of the accused's fair trial rights: the ''pendulum [has] swung so far as to create a system of policies and laws that are fundamentally unfair'' (Klein 2008(Klein , p. 1052; see also Hughan 2006). ...
Rape conviction rates have fallen to all-time lows in recent years, prompting governments to explore a range of strategies
to improve them. This paper argues that, while the current legal impunity for rape cannot be condoned, increasing conviction
rates is not in itself a valid objective of law reform. The paper problematises the measure of rape law that conviction rates
provide by developing an account of (some) feminist aims for rape law reform. Three feminist aims and associated measures
are explained—all of which look beyond conviction rates to qualitative and victim-centred outcomes of criminal justice processes.
Applying these measures, I argue that strategies designed solely to increase conviction rates are more likely to work against,
rather than in support of, feminist aims. The paper thus underscores the need for continued feminist engagement with rape
law reform, broadly conceived, notwithstanding its acute limitations for feminist anti-violence politics.
KeywordsConviction rates–Feminist aims–Law reform–Measures–Rape–Sexual assault
Qualitative researchers of ‘unsavory’ populations experience a complex range of emotions as they sustain close contact with people and communities that are deemed reprehensible, dangerous, or toxic. Empathy, in particular, raises ethical and methodological challenges for scholars who must build rapport with people who may perpetuate racism, sexism, xenophobia, and so on. Drawing on existing qualitative literature and ethnographic fieldwork, I propose critical empathy as a methodological framework to account for the difficult and sometimes problematic emotional dimensions of research on ‘unsavory’ populations. Instead of trying to resolve the tensions between empathy and critique, critical empathy compels us to grapple with these tensions and make them apparent in our work.
Drawing on findings of an original 12-month ethnographic study, this article presents the challenges that Bolivian women face in accessing a new law that has been designed to protect them, Law 348 to “Guarantee Women a Life Free from Violence.” Data reveal that while the law creates opportunities for the (re)conceptualization of violence, mobilizing the law is fraught with difficulties and a culture of impunity prevails. The challenges of implementation are both nationally and internationally significant as other countries seek to enact similar legal strategies. In Bolivia, this article suggests, civil society organizations and women’s voices are central to the full realization of the law.
This essay extends Susan Carter’s (2004) models of women’s access to broadcasting to include racial and ethnic minorities. It investigates the different historical contexts of female and minority access to commercial broadcasting, and argues that women and minorities have rooted their media access in different models. The intersection of race and gender, combined with an evolving cultural, political, and regulatory environment, has had a powerful influence on which of the three access models were used by women and people of color.
Domestic violence has been actively responded to as a crime in Canada since the robust “second-wave” activism of feminists, women’s advocates, and grassroots service providers recognized the problem as a political one in the late twentieth century. Over 40 years of activism, research, and public policy have led to aggressive criminal justice interventions, including mandatory arrest and pro-prosecution policies, specialized domestic violence courts, and batterer intervention programs, becoming embedded as the criminal justice response to domestic violence in Canada without adequate attention to the structural, cultural, and gendered underpinnings of this violence. In this chapter, evolutions of naming, understanding, and responding to domestic violence as a crime in Canada are situated within the broader context of critical decolonial feminist praxis addressing systemic violence against women and girls.
In the last decades, women have moved across many boundaries: in labour participation and professional work, in political commitment and elected office, in scientific research and education, in cross-border flows, and in daring to question why theologies and churches exclude them from hierarchy and power. The discourse and narratives of women’s hopes have been greatly enriched by a myriad experiences in different arenas and by soaring demands not only to be heard but to have authority and influence in decision-making. The diversity and richness of this movement has intertwined with neoliberalism with very mixed results. While neoliberal policies have opened up economic opportunities that diverse groups of women, both rich and poor, have benefited from, such policies have failed to inspire the profound changes needed to balance men’s and women’s roles in paid and unpaid work, in gaining freedom and entrepreneurship, in providing care and sociability, and in receiving respect and recognition.
As midwifery moved from lay practice to a regulated health-care profession in Ontario toward the end of the twentieth century, it brought with it many of its social movement goals and aspirations.Among these was the desire to attend to diversity and equity in the provision of birthing care.Drawing on interviews with currently practicing Ontario midwives, this paper focuses on midwives' conceptualizations of diversity and explores their everyday work to support and strengthen diversity among those using and those providing midwifery care.We argue that midwifery's recent relocation within state structured health care means neither that the social change projects of midwifery are complete nor that midwifery has abandoned its movement-based commitment to social change. Responses to social diversity in health care range from efforts to simply improve access to care to analyses of the role of social justice in recognizing the needs of diverse populations.The social justice aspiration to create a better world continues to animate the work of midwives postregulation.This paper explores the legacy of midwifery as a social movement, addressing the connections between diversity, social justice and midwifery care.
International laws such as The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) promise a universal system of rights to varied people in varied places. In many Pacific states this has been translated to mean that women should have the same privileges as men to control, possess and use land. This could not be further from the truth as evidenced by women’s experiences in Vanuatu, which bring home the visible and invisible spaces of international law. The insights of legal geographers into the spatialised dimensions of social, political and economic activities, together with those of feminist legal scholars into the gendered nature of law, are invaluable in understanding how some spaces are prioritized while others are devalued. We rely on these insights to uncover the prioritized legal spaces of Vanuatu and to locate them against the lived-in spaces of Vanuatu’s women. Becoming aware of the multispatiality of law is the first step in contemplating a landscape where justice can play a part.
North American scholarship has charted resonances between 1990s legislative and feminist discourse concerning violence against women. Feminist critique of official discourse surrounding the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 suggests that 1990s resonances did not reach the UK: however, an examination of the Hansard debates suggests this under-estimates the influence of feminist discourse. Halley’s discussion of “bad faith” helps to explain both the tendency of feminists to under-estimate their influence and why this matters. A commitment to an understanding of themselves as powerless may encourage feminists to underplay similarities between feminist and official discourse, leading feminists to find only what they expect. Such an understanding gives feminism the capacity to change social life without acknowledging, let alone agonising over, the full range of its distributive effects. This is most troubling in relation to “carceral” feminism, since under-assessment of feminist impact encourages amplification and intensification of the carceral message.
Over the last three decades, ‘blaming feminism’ has been a strong thread in two popular debates concerning the women’s movement. The first is the generation debate, between second-wave baby-boomer feminists and the third wave or generation × feminists. Third-wave feminists blame second-wave feminists for sabotaging women’s potential by taking on the mantle of ‘victim’ feminism; second-wave feminists retort that third wavers embrace an individualistic and consumerist approach. In the second debate, the mother wars (mommy wars in the United States), second-wave feminists are blamed for denigrating full-time mothers and telling young women they can ‘have it all’: they can readily combine career and motherhood. This article reviews the debates, with attention to the media’s role and the larger social context in Australia, Great Britain and the United States.
A British lesbian couple’s petition to have their Canadian marriage recognised as a marriage in England has prompted interesting discussions about the current status and meaning of marriage, but reinforces conservative ideas about the primacy of marriage over all other relationships and may lead to renewed disadvantage for other family forms.
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