Equality Claims and Population Control

Critical Race Theory generally and intersectionality theory in particular have provided scholars and activists with clear accounts of how the legal approaches to oppression that have been taken up through the anti-discrimination principle have failed to sufficiently change conditions for those facing the most violent manifestations of settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and xenophobia. These interventions have exposed how the discrimination principle's reliance on individual harm, intentionality, and universalized categories of identity has made it ineffective at eradicating these forms of harm and violence and has obscured the actual operations of systems of meaning and control that produce maldistribution and targeted violence. This paper follows this line of thinking an additional step to focus on the racialized-gendered distribution schemes that operate at the population level through programs that declare themselves race and gender neutral but are founded in the production and maintenance of race and gender categories as vectors for distributing life chances. In the context of intensifying criminal and immigration enforcement and wealth disparity, it is essential to turn our attention to what Foucault called "state racism"--the operation of population-level programs that target some for increased security and life chances while marking others for insecurity and premature death. This paper looks at how social movements resisting intersectional state violence are formulating demands (like prison abolition and an end to immigration enforcement) that exceed the narrow confines of the discrimination principle and take administrative systems as adversaries in ways that pull the nation-state form itself into crisis

Welcome to feminists@law

feminists@law is a new, peer-reviewed, open access journal published online and hosted by the University of Kent. The journal is aimed at promoting critical, interdisciplinary and theoretically engaged scholarship that extends feminist debates and analyses relating to law and justice (broadly conceived). It has a particular interest in critical and theoretical approaches and perspectives that draw upon postcolonial, transnational and poststructuralist work. The journal publishes material in a range of print and multimedia formats and in English and other languages. The journal is committed to an international perspective, to the promotion of feminist work in all areas of law and justice, and to making that work widely available through open access publishing.Publishing the journal online allows us to provide open access to its contents to feminist researchers anywhere in the world where access to the internet is possible. It enables us to move beyond subscription barriers, as well as to reduce the time interval from submission to publication by adopting a rolling content format. This means that, within our two annual issues, articles will be posted as soon as they are ready for publication. It also enables us to interact with, and encourage interaction between, our readers. In addition, our peer-review process ensures the journal will produce high quality publications. Via the medium of open access, we aim to promote a culture of greater access to research output while simultaneously participating in current debates about alternative forms of academic publishing.In the first issue of the journal, Carys J. Craig, Joseph F. Turcotte and Rosemary J. Coombe make a feminist contribution to this debate with their article ‘What’s Feminist About Open Access? A Relational Approach to Copyright in the Academy.  In addition, we mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of Drucilla Cornell’s landmark postmodern feminist legal text, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law with a reflection on the book by Cornell herself, together with comments by two feminist legal scholars who have been notably influenced by Cornell’s work, Karin van Marle and Toni Johnson. We also invited a group of feminist legal scholars from across the globe to provide their perspectives on current issues and future directions for feminist legal studies. The resulting short pieces provide a richly diverse collection of reflections, ideas, arguments and manifestos. On a similar theme, in our ‘Multimedia’ section, we reproduce four presentations from a roundtable on the ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ of feminist legal scholarship, recorded at a 2010 conference in London, UK.We hope you will find much that is stimulating and thought-provoking in our first issue. Please post comments on the articles, tell your colleagues about the journal, and send us your work for consideration for future issues.     The journal has an online submission system. To submit a manuscript please visit the About page to see our guidelines for authors.Rosemary HunterStacy DouglasYvonne RigbyMadhu MukherjeeGauri NanayakkaraDonatella [email protected] 8 May 201

Judging in the Presence of Women as Legal Persons – Feminist alternative to the Indian Supreme Court Judgment in Sakshi v. Union of India

In this paper I will present a feminist alternative to the Supreme Court of India’s judgment in the case of Sakshi v. Union of India AIR 2004 SC 3566. The purpose of this exercise inspired by the Feminist Judgments Project in the UK and elsewhere, is to implement feminist theory in judicial practice and to provide an alternative to the supposedly ‘universal’ voice of judicial authority. In 1997 Sakshi, a sexual violence intervention and victim support organisation, through a writ petition asked the Supreme Court of India to broaden the definition of rape by judicial re-interpretation to include all kinds of penetrative sexual violence against women. The petition argued that the narrow definition of rape as only vaginal-penile violates the fundamental rights of women who endure ‘other’ kinds of non-consensual sexual penetration. After a long deliberation, in 2004 the petition was dismissed by the Court. I have chosen to write an alternative to this particular judgment because its inadequacies affect women’s lives profoundly in relation to sexual violence and rape.

What's Feminist About Open Access? A Relational Approach to Copyright in the Academy

In a context of great technological and social change, existing intellectual property regimes such as copyright must contend with parallel forms of ownership and distribution. Proponents of open access, for example, question and undermine the paradigm of exclusivity central to traditional copyright law, thereby fundamentally challenging its ownership structures and the publishing practices these support. In this essay, we attempt to show what it is about the open access endeavour that resonates with a feminist theory of law and society—in other words, we consider what is “feminist” about open access.  First, we provide an overview of a relational feminist critique of traditional copyright law and the assumptions of possessive individualism that pervade it.  We then offer a brief description of the open access movement and the way in which it reflects or responds to this criticism. In doing so, we discover vital synergies between this branch of feminist legal theory and the open access movement. Ultimately, we hope to underscore the importance of an open access policy for legal journals such as this one, whose mission is to support, advance and disseminate a feminist perspective that challenges the prevailing hegemony within traditional legal scholarship. We conclude by offering ways in which this journal can help draw out the synergies between feminist criticism and the open access movement