The Collateral Consequences of Masculinizing Violence

Before an enraged gunman fired thirty-six deadly shots into an exercise class filled with women, on August 4, 2009, in Pennsylvania, he blogged that his killing spree was the result of his failure to meet society’s expectations of him as a man. This violent act tragically affirms that hegemonic masculinity — a dominant form of masculinity whereby some types of men have power over women and over some other men — can directly cause violence against women and reveals both an underlying connection between masculinities scholarship and feminist scholarship and the value in exploring that linkage further in both theory and praxis. This article examines the victories and collateral consequences of feminist law reforms challenging hegemonic masculinity as codified and perpetuated in the law. This article focuses on expressions of hegemonic masculinity in the family and the military — two institutions that occupy the theoretical feminist “front lines.” It concludes that feminist law reforms launched a foundational challenge to hegemonic masculinity through its domestic violence reforms. Yet these reforms also entrenched hegemonic masculinity in other ways by perpetuating gender stereotypes positioning all men as prone to violence and all women as vulnerable to victimization and displacing the men and women that function outside these binary constructs. These reforms also masculinized the state by positioning it as the surrogate masculine defender of women and of traditional families. While the domestic violence movement may have contemplated and mitigated these collateral consequences in context, this article examines a previously unexplored angle: how the further entrenchment of hegemonic masculinity migrated to impact women’s military integration. The momentum of feminist law reform successes criminalizing domestic violence in the family also advanced military integration advocacy, reforming military codes and policies to penalize violence against women. More notable, however, the domestic violence movement successfully contributed to women’s expanded access to combat positions, signaling the partial extraction of hegemonic expressions of male violence from the law more broadly — not just to protect women from violence, but to expand professional opportunities for women. But as the victory migrated, so too did the collateral consequences entrenching hegemonic masculinity; indeed they were compounded. Positioning the state as the surrogate masculine protector of women and of traditional families compounded in the military because it reinforced protectionist arguments opposing integration. This article concludes by examining the implications of this analysis to feminist theory and praxis. It recommends that feminism re-engage its narrative grassroots methodology to absorb more holistically the experiences of women who would wield strength, aggression, and violence in all its forms. This article considers how and why masculinities scholarship reveals the synergistic benefits of generating more complex and interconnected responses to violence against women, women’s violence, male violence, and male vulnerability

Debunking the Myth of Universal Male Privilege

Existing legal responses to sexual assault and harassment in the military have stagnated or failed. Current approaches emphasize the prevalence of sexual assault and highlight the masculine nature of the military’s statistical composition and institutional culture. Current responses do not, however, incorporate masculinities theory to disentangle the experiences of men as a group from men as individuals. Rather, embedded within contestations of the masculine military culture is the unstated assumption that the culture universally privileges or benefits the individual men that operate within it. This myth is harmful because it tethers masculinities to military efficacy, suppresses the costs of male violence to men, and positions women as perpetual outsiders. Debunking the myth of universal male privilege in heavily masculinized institutions would advance gender equality and shift the law reform focus. It would bring sexual assault, domestic violence, and sexual harassment into the same frame as the military mental health crisis and even mass solidier-on-soldier shootings. This would reveal the gender equality implications of military mental health and disentangle masculinities and military efficacy. Debunking the myth of univeral male privilege would yield more vigilance to how law reforms can exacerbate hyper-masculine violence. It introduces new entry points to gendered violence in the military, expanding the focus from incident-based responses to recruiting and training

The #MeToo Movement: An Invitation for Feminist Critique of Rape Crisis Framing

This article invites feminists to leverage the #MeToo Movement as a critical analytical tool to explore the longevity of the enduring rape crisis framing of victim services. Long before the #MeToo Movement, victim services in communities nationwide were framed around a crisis model. For nearly half a century, victims have visited rape crisis centers, called rape crisis hotlines, and mobilized rape crisis response teams to provide services and support. This enduring political and social framing around rape as a crisis is opaque, has prompted a political backlash, and risks distorting hard-fought feminist legal, social, and political battles. It has yielded underreporting, underutilization, and recurring risks of budgetary cuts. Yet, this model and terminology have gone virtually unchanged for nearly half a century

A Synergistic Pedagogical Approach to First-Year Teaching

The First “Colonial Frontier” Legal Writing Conference, held at Duquesne University School of Law, focused on Engendering Hope in the Legal Writing Classroom: Pedagogy, Curriculum, and Attitude. This conference built on the foundational work of Allison Martin and Kevin Rand in which these scholars call for educators to engender hope in law students to prepare them for practice. Martin and Rand conclude that hope is a predictor of students’ academic performance and psychological health during the first semester of law school and recommend that law professors “maintain and creat[e] hope in law students” by embracing five core principles. Martin and Rand’s core principles recommend that law faculty “(A) help law students formulate appropriate goals, (B) increase law student’s autonomy, (C) model the learning process, (D) help law students understand grading as feedback rather than as pure evaluation, and (E) model and encourage agentic thinking.” Martin and Rand’s work provides concrete recommendation on how to “engender hope” in the legal writing classroom in particular. Martin and Rand’s frame for approaching legal education is both timely and responsive considering the rapidly evolving legal market and the ongoing calls for reform in legal education. As the Carnegie Report highlighted: “Critics of the legal profession, both from within and without, have pointed to a great profession suffering from varying degrees of confusion and demoralization. A reawakening of professional élan must include, in an important way, revitalizing legal preparation.” Martin and Rand’s work and the Colonial Frontier conference responsively and proactively bring together educators to consider pedagogical approaches centered on engendering hope in our students to prepare them for successful and satisfying legal careers. “Engendering hope” as a pedagogical frame for curricular innovation offers a holistic and success-oriented approach that is a workable and adaptable starting point to strengthening the legal education model. This article uses Martin and Rand’s core principles as a lens to examine a synergistic integrated pedagogical approach adopted at the American University Washington College of Law (WCL). In this pedagogical approach, a section of first-year WCL faculty coordinated to lead students through a client simulation woven through all first-year courses in the first semester. This article examines how this simulation engendered hope in law students using Martin and Rand’s five principles as a rubric for initial assessment. This article reveals the methodology for this curricular innovation, the desired objectives, and both our initial successes and our preliminary critiques. WCL’s approach reveals how synergistic pedagogy can engender hope in today’s law students without unduly straining existing models, resources, or personnel. This approach suggests a proactive, not reactive, pedagogical technique capable of replication in institutions of varying curricular specialization, size, composition, and resources. This approach in its early assessment seems to rekindle hope in students and faculty alike, an outcome that is itself a catalyst to change

Experiential Learning and Assessment in the Era of Donald Trump

Law teaching is turning a critical corner with the implementation of new ABA accreditation standards requiring greater skills development, experiential learning, and student assessment. Years of debate and discourse preceded the adoption of these ABA Standards, followed by a surge in programming, conferencing, and listserv activity to prepare to implement these standards effectively. Missing from the dialogue about effective implementation of standards has been thoughtful consideration of how implementing these requirements will intersect with the challenges, realities, opportunities, and complexities of political divisiveness and polarization so prevalent in society and university campuses today. Law schools are notably implementing these pedagogical reforms in a time of great political division. From the divisive presidential election, to police-community relations, to a worldwide refugee crisis, political discourse is contentious, polarized, and fraught with both risk and opportunity. University campuses have particularly been the sites of difficult discussions about race, politics, gender, and the very role of academic communities in these conversations. Students and faculty alike seem less capable than ever to manage these complex dynamics, yet true experiential learning and assessment requires us to move into the eye of the storm for courses with politically grounded content like legislation, among many others in the law school curriculum. The stakes are high. Faculty must engage students in more active learning with real-time feedback designed around realistic and timely simulations. Yet, they must do this in a time of great divisiveness in law, society, and politics. In this modern reality, both faculty and students alike may not be comfortable, prepared, or equipped to navigate these challenges without savvy techniques and methods. This article discusses how law faculty might successfully implement experiential learning and assessment techniques with these modern dynamics in mind. It highlights a critical opportunity to transform our students into thoughtful problem-solvers and savvy lawyers. It identifies three critical components to a modern experiential learning course addressing topics of political relevance: (1) student-driven content, instead of faculty-driven content; (2) consistent and holistic student engagement, instead of sporadic or sequential engagement; and (3) vertically and horizontally structured feedback

The Illusion of Autonomy in Women\u27s Medical Decision-Making

This Article considers why there is not more conflict between women and their doctors in obstetric decision-making. While patients in every other medical context have complete autonomy to refuse treatment against medical advice, elect high-risk courses of action, and prioritize their own interests above any other decision-making metric, childbirth is viewed anomalously because of the duty to the fetus that the state and the doctor owe at birth. Many feminist scholars have analyzed the complex resolution of these conflicts when they arise, particularly when the state threatens to intervene to override the birthing woman’s autonomy. This Article instead considers the far more common scenario when women and their doctors align in the face of great decision-making complexity and uncertainty. What decision-making framework normalizes this doctor-patient alignment, and how does this decision-making framework complicate the actualization of autonomy for the women who do not elect this framework? This Article concludes that many, if not most, of the four million women who birth in hospital settings attended by physicians align with their doctors by applying a shared decision-making framework that presumptively elects the outcome that minimizes any, even minor, risks to the fetus. While individual patients can certainly elect this approach autonomously, when understood in the context of tort law—in which the actions of “most women” and “most doctors” can become the standard of care itself—this framework is deeply concerning. This fetal-focused decision-making framework perpetuates an illusion of autonomy because doctors can apply the framework independently and universally. This decision-making model problematically resurrects the ghost of Roe v. Wade‘s medical model in which doctors effectuate decision-making autonomy for women. Understood through a tort law lens, while this illusion of autonomy might not seem problematic to the individual women who elect this framework, it risks imputing a distorted standard of care to all obstetric cases by creating a primacy that always prioritizes fetal risks over maternal risks, a primacy that explicitly contravenes existing tort standards. Tort law ordinarily governs ―unreasonable risks,‖ whereas this framework elevates any fetal risk to an unreasonable risk and reduces any maternal risk short of death to reasonable. It risks imputing to all women a standard requiring the complete acceptance of medical guidance. This Article concludes that tort law standards should explicitly govern not just the―what‖ of childbirth outcomes, but the ―how‖ of childbirth decision-making by using decision-making aids to ensure that women‘s autonomy is actual and not illusory. Incorporating decision-making aids in the standard of care would remedy the illusion of autonomy by ensuring that ―most women‘s‖ decision-making frameworks are not presumptively applied to all women so as to distort tort law and undermine patient autonomy