Meredith Render’s research while affiliated with University of Alabama and other places

What is this page?


This page lists works of an author who doesn't have a ResearchGate profile or hasn't added the works to their profile yet. It is automatically generated from public (personal) data to further our legitimate goal of comprehensive and accurate scientific recordkeeping. If you are this author and want this page removed, please let us know.

Publications (5)


The Law of the Body
  • Article

March 2012

·

179 Reads

Physis Revista de Saúde Coletiva

Meredith Render

This article posits that a “law of the body” is overdue. In the absence of clarity about the legal status of the human body, courts have constructed a collection of circumstantially-defined categories for resolving question of human body ownership and use. This patchwork approach is awkward, unwieldy, incoherent, and, by many lights, ultimately unjust. Many able minds have been applied to critiquing the distributive consequences of a regime in which we cannot – at any point in our lives – “own” our own bodies (or its constituent parts), but other people can and do. But what has been missing from these conversations is a conceptual foundation for understanding the living human body as property. This article supplies that piece of this byzantine puzzle. Specifically, the thesis presented here holds that by employing a property framework to understanding the legal status of the human body we can explain with coherence and consilience our existing legal commitments concerning the treatment of the human body. Moreover, the article addresses the standard objections to explicitly acknowledging the human body as an object of property and demonstrates that these objections are predicated on a series of misunderstandings. These misunderstandings generally fall into three categories: misunderstandings about the nature of “property;” conceptual misunderstandings about bodies and selves and the capacity to own oneself; and misunderstandings about the necessary consequences of adopting a property framework with respect to the human body. Once these misapprehensions are clarified, the intellectual path will be cleared for a “law of the body” to emerge, and legislators, courts, and scholars can begin the important work of shaping it into a doctrine that is consistent with our normative ends.


Power, Paradigms, and Legal Prescriptions: 'The Rule of Law' as a Necessary but Not Sufficient Condition for Transitional Justice

July 2011

·

8 Reads

This essay considers the various ways that law functions to sometimes perpetuate and sometimes prevent genocide and other mass catastrophes in transitional societies. In particular, the essay examines three conceptually distinct aspects of law within a given society - the concept of law, the “rule of law” and the role (or function) of law - and posits that only by considering the interplay of these three aspects of law within transitional societies can we fully appreciate the necessity of a robust commitment to the rule of law as a bulwark against mass atrocity within transitional societies. The essay offers a response and supplement to the insights contained in David Gray’s interesting essay, "Transitional Disclosures: What Transitional Justice Reveals about Law” in which Gray thoughtfully challenges the conventional view that a commitment to the rule of law is the sole and best hope for preventing mass atrocity given the role that “law” and legal officials often play in perpetuating mass violence, and contends that dynamic stability among competing and overlapping identities (i.e. religious, ethnic, class) and associations is necessary to stave off abusive regimes. While this essay accepts the latter insight, I argue that Gray’s multi-dimensional “law as paradigm” understanding of the relationship between legal institutions and abusive norms obscures important distinctions between the concept of law, the rule of law, and the role of law. By retracing these distinctions, the essay demonstrates that a robust commitment to the rule of law is indeed a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for preventing the rise of abusive regimes, even within Gray’s own prescription.


The Man, the State and You: The Role of the State in Regulating Gender Hierarchies

July 2011

·

7 Reads

·

3 Citations

This paper begins with the thesis that an andocentric-assimilation model of women’s liberation both has affected workplace outcomes for women and has desensitized us to those outcomes. The paper then applies that thesis to understandings of “equality” within a hierarchical framework, arguing that the equality-liberty dichotomy is false in the context of gender discrimination in the workplace. Instead the paper argues that disparate treatment is a liberty concern. In seeking to have our professional fates married to the fates of our male colleagues – which is what workplace equality doctrines aim to do – women are seeking to be only as free as our male colleagues are to find work and to find meaning in our work, to procreate or not, to coast along or to stand out, and, if we choose, to stand alone. Further, this paper offers the perspective that as feminist advocates we should resist the inclination to make our peace with the ordering of the gendered paradigms as they stand and to negotiate compromises from these vantage points. Within this theoretical framework, this paper explores the implications of the “regulation” versus “governance” debate in the context of gender discrimination. The article suggests that renaming and reframing aside, the approach embodied by the governance paradigm as it is applied to gender discriminatory contexts is neither new nor a deal for those already occupying a subordinate bargaining position, but it is instead a framework by which to privilege existing power structures and efficiency-based values over other values and interests. Moreover, this paper defends the civil rights model of rules-base state-enforced mandatory anti-discrimination measures, such as Title VII, as an admittedly non-panacean yet nonetheless indispensable means by which private gender hierarchies are inhibited. Finally, this paper contends that in looking to the law to inhibit this particular privately-enforced tyranny, women are correctly interpreting the obligation of the state within our constitutional scheme to disrupt private tyrannies when those tyrannies reach the point of functioning as class-based power monopolies, limiting the fundamental freedoms of those outside the monopolist class.


Gender Rules

February 2010

·

31 Reads

Sex-stereotypes are of perennial concern within antidiscrimination law and theory, yet there is widespread disagreement about what constitutes a “sex-stereotype.” This article enters the debate surrounding the correct understanding of “stereotype” and posits that the concept is too thin to serve as a criterion for distinguishing “discriminatory” gender generalizations from non-discriminatory probabilistic descriptions of behavior. Instead, “stereotype” is a heuristic that has been used by courts and commentators to crudely capture judgments about the justness of applying sex-respecting rules. In this light, the article argues for abandoning the stereotype heuristic in favor of a rule-centered analysis of sex-respecting generalizations. Arguing that courts and commentators have not objected to gender generalizations because they are descriptively inaccurate (as the stereotype heuristic suggests) but because they also exert unique prescriptive force, the article provides a new understanding of the theoretical basis for subjecting gender generalizations to antidiscrimination scrutiny.


Misogyny, Androgyny and Sexual Harassment: Sex Discrimination in a Gender-Deconstructed World

76 Reads

·

6 Citations

Understanding sexual harassment as a form of discrimination “because of sex” has grown increasingly difficult as our understandings of both gender and sex have grown richer and more complex. This piece offers a new descriptive model for understanding gender bias in the context of sexual harassment law. The piece argues that two separate sets of ideas about gender have intersected to produce a new picture of gender “equality”: one that is separated from a binary model of men and women, but that nonetheless continues to disadvantage women as compared to men. The paper refers to this idea as the androcentric-assimilation model of female liberation and argues that the adoption of this particular model of female liberation has presented an assimilation option to women who wish to “succeed” while obfuscating the fact that our ideas about gender remain hierarchically arranged. The paper suggests that this phenomenon may underlie some of the mystery surrounding gendered workplace outcomes, and specifically that this descriptive framing provides a foundation for understanding sexual harassment -- an ostensibly gender-neutral behavior when one considers that women can harass men as well as one another -- as a tool of discrimination that continues to disproportionately disadvantage women. The piece concludes, therefore, that sexual harassment law is properly conceptualized within an antidiscrimination framework.

Citations (1)


... Böyle yapılarak günlük hayatta erkek egemenliği desteklenmekte ve kadınların neyi giymesi gerektiğinden nasıl yürümesi gerektiğine kadar tüm sosyal hayat aktiviteleri erkekler tarafından kısıtlanmakta ve onların hakimiyetine bırakılmaktadır. Dahası popüler kültürde var olan mizojinik söylem, sokak ortasında erkeklerin kadınlara laf atmaları veya ıslık çalmaları gibi taciz niteliği taĢıyan davranıĢlara ve bu davranıĢların normalleĢmesine neden olmaktadır (Jacobsen, 1995;Render, 2005;Etyang, 2012). ...

Reference:

Popüler Kültürde Mizojini
Misogyny, Androgyny and Sexual Harassment: Sex Discrimination in a Gender-Deconstructed World
  • Citing Article