L’homicide conjugal féminin, de Marie-Josephte Corriveau (1763) à Angélique Lyn Lavallée (1990) : meurtre ou légitime défense ?

In this article, the author examines the socio-legal relevance of the « battered woman syndrome » (BWS) in the cases of women who kill their violent partners in Canada. The legal recognition of domestic violence in these situations, in its historical context, is examined by focusing on the Supreme Court of Canada decision in the case of Angélique Lyn Lavallée in 1990. This landmark decison is used as pivotal in this discussion in order to shed light into the reasoning behind the subsequent legal decisions. The ideas proposed in this article are part of a more general exploration of the representations of femininity and their inscription in law. In discussing female conjugal homicide, the gendered nature of law and order, the pathologization of women, the « syndromisation» phenomenon and the médicalisation of violence, the author offers some insights in thinking legal strategies but more fundamentally in the social debate to continue

Femmes et héroïne : bilan des connaissances, limites et perspectives nouvelles

This article gives the results of the consultation of several bases of bibliographical data on Women and Heroin, using the Boolean type of research. Various subjects are discussed, the extent of its use, the characteristics and factors of involvement in drug dependency, treatment, Mother/children relationship, Aids and prostitution. In the light of this survey of the literature, it seemed necessary to question the actual pertinence of these studies. They pose a number of important problems. Our criticism of the quality of these studies are I) problems of method and sampling; 2) epistemological problems and 3) the “monodisciplinarity” of these studies. In these works, the norm or “normality” (of drug addiction) is proper to the male sex. Women are considered marginal to this norm. Other fundamental omissions are mentioned, especially the relativity of the norms, problems connected with the concepts and the terms used. With regard to these various criticisms, we propose two models of analysis. The first refers to the study of women heroin-users as a group rather than in regard to men. The second is to construct a more general plan of analysis ofmarginality, of deviance and the criminality of women using the theories of social reaction in criminology and of radical materialist feminism. These two models could be complementary

Femmes et emprisonnement : le marquage du corps et l’automutilation

À l'aide d'entrevues avec des femmes incarcérées dans un établissement cor- rectionnel provincial, l'auteure nous invite à réfléchir sur les effets de l'incarcération sur le corps des femmes et plus particulièrement sur la signification de l'automutilation. Cet article situe l'automutilation chez les femmes incarcérées dans une perspective plus globale du marquage du corps en prison et comme un cas de figure de la trajectoire iden- titaire trouble de ces femmes. Dans cette perspective, le « corps » est conçu comme un site central de la manifestation du pouvoir pénal. Cette discussion se divise en quatre parties. Une première partie présente un profil des femmes incarcérées au Canada. Une deuxième retrace l'itinéraire théorique, méthodologique et épistémologique, emprunté dans cette démarche de recherche. Une troisième présente les résultats de la recherche sur ce corps enfermé autour de deux axes conceptuels : le corps comme site de contrôle et le corps comme site de résistance. Une quatrième et dernière partie tente de proposer des pistes pour penser l'automutilation dans une perspective plus large d'analyse.In the light of interviews conducted with provincially-sentenced women, the author invites the readers to examine the effects of incarceration on women's bod- ies and most particularly, the significance of self-mutilation. This article locates self- mutilation within a wider social perspective of the marking of the body and as an exam- ple of the troubled identity trajectory of these women. Moreover, the body is taken as a site of the manifestation of power. This discussion comprises four parts. The first part is a presentation of the profile of incarcerated women in Canada. The second one traces the theoretical, methodological and epistemological journey taken in this research project. The third one presents the research results on the topic of the imprisoned fem- inine body which is conceptually organised as the body as a site of control and the body as a site of resistance. The fourth and final part proposes ways of understanding self- mutilation within a wider social perspective

Efficient Heuristic for Resource Allocation in Zero-forcing OFDMA-SDMA Systems with Minimum Rate Constraints

4G wireless access systems require high spectral efficiency to support the ever increasing number of users and data rates for real time applications. Multi-antenna OFDM-SDMA systems can provide the required high spectral efficiency and dynamic usage of the channel, but the resource allocation process becomes extremely complex because of the augmented degrees of freedom. In this paper, we propose two heuristics to solve the resource allocation problem that have very low computational complexity and give performances not far from the optimal. The proposed heuristics select a set of users for each subchannel, but contrary to the reported methods that solve the throughput maximization problem, our heuristics consider the set of real-time (RT) users to ensure that their minimum rate requirements are met. We compare the heuristics' performance against an upper bound and other methods proposed in the literature and find that they give a somewhat lower performance, but support a wider range of minimum rates while reducing the computational complexity. The gap between the objective achieved by the heuristics and the upper bound is not large. In our experiments this gap is 10.7% averaging over all performed numerical evaluations for all system configurations. The increase in the range of the supported minimum rates when compared with a method reported in the literature is 14.6% on average.Comment: 8 figure

Femmes au-delà des murs : le sens de la quête d’emploi chez les femmes judiciarisées et les intervenants au Québec

Sur la base d’une enquête de terrain menée auprès de femmes judiciarisées au Québec et d’intervenants travaillant avec elles, nous explorons dans cet article la question du travail des femmes judiciarisées après l’emprisonnement. Nous voulons plus spécifiquement préciser comment se pose la question de l’emploi pour ces femmes et le sens qu’elles lui accordent. Nous voulons aussi interroger les ressources existantes en matière d’aide à l’emploi. Sont-elles suffisantes et répondent-elles aux besoins des femmes ? Cette analyse nous conduira ainsi à identifier les ressources, projets et changements souhaités dans l’approche préconisée auprès des femmes judiciarisées pour enfin nous interroger plus globalement sur l’efficacité des formes d’intervention pénale auprès des femmes et la persistance d’une logique carcérale qui continue à s’imposer malgré les multiples échecs qu’on lui reconnaît. En ce sens, notre recherche souligne la nécessité de repenser les formes d’intervention auprès des femmes judiciarisées en matière d’emploi, en prêtant attention à la singularité de leurs expériences et de leurs besoins en matière d’emploi, en tenant compte du contexte structurel d’oppression qu’elles subissent, en essayant enfin d’atténuer, voire de supprimer l’idéologie répressive et les effets négatifs que celle-ci peut avoir sur leurs possibilités de réinsertion.In this article, based on a field research with criminalized women in Quebec and with front line workers, we address the question of criminalized women’s work. More specifically, we want to precise how those women define and give meaning to the concept of employment. We also want to review some of the existing resources created to help those women to find a job. Are they sufficient and do they really address the needs of the criminalized women? We also present the resources, projects and changes which would positively improve the employment policies toward criminalized women. Finally, we will question the efficiency of the penal policies toward criminalized women. Despite their obvious failures, those policies are still maintained. In that sense, our research emphasizes the need to re-think those policies by considering the women’s expectations and experiments in terms of employment, by taking into account the numerous forms of oppression they are still submitted to, by trying to diminish or suppress the structural repressive ideology that negatively impacts on their lives