Seeking Relations: Law and Feminism Roundtables

Currently the rhetoric of difference and diversity among women dominates discussions in legal feminism about where women stand in relation to each other. The words difference and diversity organize the relationship among women in ways that can eclipse the differential impact of ableism, economic exploitation, heterosexism, racism, and sexism in women\u27s lives. Differences among women are taken into account, for example, in the recognition that some women are doubly and triply disadvantaged. Ultimately, however, the multiple ways in which we as women actually are implicated in maintaining structures of domination in each other\u27s lives can remain uninterrogated. Consequently, while women often seek solidarity, we frequently find it difficult to sustain collective action, given our respective differences

Liberal warriors and the violent colonial logics of “partnering and advising"

Building on the feminist literature that traces the (re)production of militarized masculinities in and through military interventions, this article details some of the ways British soldiering subjects are being shaped in today's counterinsurgency context. Required now to be both nation builders and war fighters, contemporary soldiers are a “softer,” less masculinized subjectivity, and what Alison Howell has termed “liberal warriors.” British troops with their long history of colonialism and frequent overseas military campaigns are understood to be particularly suited to this role. Taking the British military's involvement in the “partnering and advising” of the Afghan National Army (ANA), this article pays attention to the interlocking gendered, raced, and sexualized discourses through which the British/Afghan encounter is experienced. Exploring first British troops' preoccupation with the perceived femininity and homosexuality of their Afghan counterparts, and second, Afghan hypermasculinity as demonstrated by the characterizations of their violent and chaotic fighting tactics, colonial logics are revealed. While British liberal warriors come to know “who they are” through these logics, (mis)represented Afghan soldiers are rendered increasingly vulnerable to the very “real,” very material violences of war

Smoke, curtains and mirrors: the production of race through time and title registration

This article analyses the temporal effects of title registration and their relationship to race. It traces the move away from the retrospection of pre-registry common law conveyancing and toward the dynamic, future-oriented Torrens title registration system. The Torrens system, developed in early colonial Australia, enabled the production of ‘clean’, fresh titles that were independent of their predecessors. Through a process praised by legal commentators for ‘curing’ titles of their pasts, this system produces indefeasible titles behind its distinctive ‘curtain’ and ‘mirror’, which function similarly to magicians’ smoke and mirrors by blocking particular realities from view. In the case of title registries, those realities are particular histories of and relationships with land, which will not be protected by property law and are thus made precarious. Building on interdisciplinary work which theorises time as a social tool, I argue that Torrens title registration produces a temporal order which enables land market coordination by rendering some relationships with land temporary and making others indefeasible. This ordering of relationships with land in turn has consequences for the human subjects who have those relationships, cutting futures short for some and guaranteeing permanence to others. Engaging with Renisa Mawani and other critical race theorists, I argue that the categories produced by Torrens title registration systems materialise as race

Writing settlement after Idle No More: non-indigenous responses in Anglo-Canadian poetry

This article examines the representation of settlement in Canada in the wake of Idle No More in recent Anglo-Canadian literature. It argues that Idle No More engendered a new vocabulary for settler-invader citizens to position themselves in relation to this Indigenous movement, with non-Indigenous Canadians self-identifying as “settlers” and “allies” as a means of both orienting themselves with respect to Indigenous resistance to the settler-invader nation-state and signalling an attempted solidarity with Idle No More that would not lapse into appropriation. Four very different poetic texts by non-Indigenous authors demonstrate this reconsideration of settlement in the wake of Idle No More: Arleen Paré’s Lake of Two Mountains (2014); Rachel Zolf’s Janey’s Arcadia (2014); Rita Wong’s undercurrent (2015); and Shane Rhodes’s X (2013). Although only the latter two of these collections make explicit reference to Idle No More, all four of these texts engage with historical and current colonialisms, relationships to land and water, and relationships between Indigenous peoples and settler-invaders, providing examples of new understandings and representations of (neo)colonial settlement in post-Idle No More Canada

Bionic bodies, posthuman violence and the disembodied criminal subject

This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form through the law of homicide and assault. By analysing how the body is materialised through the criminal law’s enactment of death and injury, this article suggests that the biological positioning of these harms of violence as uncontroversial, natural, and universal conditions of being ‘human’ cannot fully appreciate what makes violence wrongful for us, as embodied entities. Absent a theory of the body, and a consideration of corporeality, the criminal law risks marginalising, or altogether eliding, experiences of violence that do not align with its paradigmatic vision of what bodies can and must do when suffering its effects. Here I consider how the bionic body disrupts the criminal law’s understanding of human violence by being a body that is both organic and inorganic, and capable of experiencing and performing violence in unexpected ways. I propose that a criminal law that is more receptive to the changing, technologically mediated conditions of human existence would be one that takes the corporeal dimensions of violence more seriously and, as an extension of this, adopts an embodied, embedded, and relational understanding of human vulnerability to violence

Assimilation—On (Not) Turning White: Memory and the Narration of the Postwar History of Japanese Canadians in Southern Alberta

This essay explores understandings of “race” – specifically, what it means to be Japanese – of nisei (“second generation”) individuals who acknowledge their near complete assimilation structurally and normatively into the Canadian mainstream. In historically-contextualized analyses of memory fragments from oral-history interviews conducted between 2011-2017, it focusses on voices and experiences of southern Alberta, an area whose significance to local, national, continental, and trans-Pacific histories of people of Japanese descent is belied by a lack of dedicated scholarly attention. In this light, this essay reveals how the fact of being Japanese in the latter half of the twentieth century was strategically central to nisei lives as individuals and in their communities. In imagining a racial hierarchy whose apex they knew they could never share with the hakujin (whites), the racial heritage they nevertheless inherited and would bequeath could be so potent as to reverse the direction of the colonial gaze with empowering effects in individual engagements then and as remembered now. We see how the narration and validation of one’s life is the navigation of wider historical contexts, the shaping of the post-colonial legacy of Imperial cultures, as Britain and Japan withdrew from their erstwhile colonial projects in Canada

Application of Ligninolytic Enzymes in the Production of Biofuels from Cotton Wastes

The application of ligninolytic fungi and enzymes is an option to overcome the issues related with the production of biofuels using cotton wastes. In this dissertation, the ligninolytic fungus and enzymes were evaluated as pretreatment for the biochemical conversion of Cotton Gin Trash (CGT) in ethanol and as a treatment for the transformation of cotton wastes biochar in other substances. In biochemical conversion, seven combinations of three pretreatments (ultrasonication, liquid hot water and ligninolytic enzymes) were evaluated on CGT. The best results were achieved by the sequential combination of ultrasonication, hot water, and ligninolytic enzymes with an improvement of 10% in ethanol yield. To improve these results, alkaline-ultrasonication was evaluated. Additionally, Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) and principal component analysis (PCA) were employed as fast methodology to identify structural differences in the biomass. The combination of ultrasonication-alkali hydrolysis, hot liquid water, and ligninolytic enzymes using 15% of NaOH improved 35% ethanol yield compared with the original treatment. Additionally, FT-IR and PCA identified modifications in the biomass structure after different types of pretreatments and conditions. In thermal conversion, this study evaluated the biodepolymerization of cotton wastes biochar using chemical and biological treatments. The chemical depolymerization evaluated three chemical agents (KMnO4, H2SO4, and NaOH), with three concentrations and two environmental conditions. The sulfuric acid treatments performed the largest transformations of the biochar solid phase; whereas, the KMnO4 treatments achieved the largest depolymerizations. The compounds released into the liquid phase were correlated with fulvic and humic acids and silicon compounds. The biological depolymerization utilized four ligninolytic fungi Phanerochaete chrysosporium, Ceriporiopsis subvermispora, Postia placenta, and Bjerkandera adusta. The greatest depolymerization was obtained by C. subvermispora. The depolymerization kinetics of C. subvermispora evidenced the production of laccase and manganese peroxidase and a correlation between depolymerization and production of ligninolytic enzymes. The modifications obtained in the liquid and solid phases showed the production of humic and fulvic acids from the cultures with C. subvermispora. The results of this research are the initial steps for the development of new processes using the ligninolytic fungus and their enzymes for the production of biofuels from cotton wastes