DOCSLIB.ORG

What Is Family Law?: a Genealogy Part II

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
What Is Family Law?: a Genealogy Part II Articles What is Family Law?: A Genealogy Part II Janet Halley INTRODUCTION This Article offers a genealogy of domestic relations law (later renamed family law). It comes in two Parts. Part I is an account of how it emerged as a distinct field in American law in the latter half of the nineteenth century.' This Part, Part II, is an account of its successive transformations * Royall Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. Thanks to Amy J. Cohen, Glenn Cohen, Lisa Kelly, Duncan Kennedy, Frank Sander, Mark Tushnet, and Philomila Tsoukala for help with many aspects of the research. Thanks to David Worthington, Janet Katz, and the staff of Harvard Law Library Special Collections team for help with rare materials; and special thanks to FRIDA for making the research on all other fronts possible. Kristi Jobson was a wonderful research assistant. Thanks also to the Up Against Family Law Exceptionalism conference for the context of this work, to the Harvard Law School Faculty Workshop for excellent questions, to the HLS Family Law Lunch for help with the ideas, and to my Family Law students over the years for tolerating a lot of curricular experimentation as I tried to harvest the lessons of this investigation for them, and to distill the lessons I learned from them for this investigation. All errors of fact and judgment are mine alone. 1. Janet Halley, What is Family Law?: A Genealogy: Part 1, 23 YALE J.L. & HUMAN. 1 (2011) [hereinafter Halley, What is Family Law?: Part 1]. 189 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol. 23, Iss. 2 [2011], Art. 1 190 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities [Vol. 23:189 over the course of the twentieth century. I argue that domestic relations/family law did not always exist; rather, it was invented, and the ideological implications of that act of creation remain embedded in the field today. The central idea which, I argue, recurrently characterizes the field is that the family and its law are the opposites of the market and its law. Born in the middle of the nineteenth century as the notorious status/contract distinction, it has shown amazing powers of resilience, surviving three highly intentional and collectively organized attacks and gathering to itself new ideological and practical implications as the presuppositions about law that permeate legal consciousness have changed and changed again over time. The idea that the family and its law are the opposites of the market and its law is just one form of family law exceptionalism (FLE).2 But it is a crucial one: it travelled the globe in the middle of the nineteenth century, originating in the thought of the immensely influential jurist Friedrich Carl von Savigny and diffusing, along with capitalism and colonialism, all around the world. 3 It became a fit vessel for the ideologies of laissez faire and the separate spheres when they emerged. All of this was a product of classical legal thought (CLT), which, as Duncan Kennedy shows in an article from which this one draws its basic historical template,4 venerated contract as the legal space in which to maximize space for the will of the parties, and venerated family law as its opposite, the space for the untrammeled will of the state imposing ascriptive statuses saturated with duty. Savigny also taught that contract law was universal, while family law gave voice to the spirit of the people, which was inevitably local. This formulation became an apt explanation for the development of a transnational body of law governing commerce and a 2. For a fuller statement of the vast range of meanings that have accumulated around the idea that the family and its law are exceptional, see J. Halley & Kerry Rittich, Critical Directions in Comparative Family Law: Genealogies and Contemporary Studies ofFamily Law Exceptionalism, 58 AM. J. COMP. L. 753 (2010) [hereinafter Halley & Rittich, CriticalDirections]. 3. For an account of Savigny's family law/contract law distinction and his influence, see Duncan Kennedy, Savigny's Family/PatrimonyDistinction and Its Place in the Global Genealogy of Classical Legal Thought, 56 AM. J. COMP. L. 811 (2010) [hereinafter Kennedy, Savigny's Distinction]. Kennedy construes FRIEDRICH CARL VON SAVIGNY, SYSTEM OF THE MODERN ROMAN LAW (Hyperion Press 1979) (William Holloway trans., 1867). See also Halley & Rittich, CriticalDirections, supra note 2, at 757-58, 771-75. 4. Duncan Kennedy, Three GlobalizationsofLaw and Legal Thought: 1850-2000, in THE NEW LAW AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: A CRITICAL APPRAISAL (David Trubek & Alvaro Santos eds. 2006) [herinafter Kennedy, Three Globalizations]. The same basic periodization receives different explanations in Ugo Mattei, Why the Wind Changed IntellectualLeadership in Western Law, 42 AM. J. COMP. L. 195 (1994). https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol23/iss2/1 2 Halley: What is Family Law?: A Genealogy Part II 2011] Halley 191 complementary deference to national difference with respect to the family and was widely deployed in colonial as well as postcolonial nationalist projects.I Kennedy dates CLT as a global phenomenon to the period from 1850 to 1914. It has never entirely disappeared; instead, its ideas broke up from the systematic, conceptualist, abstract armature which CLT eventually built for imagining all of law, becoming fragments which survived into two large subsequent forms of legal consciousness which succeeded it. My argument in this Part of this Article is that FLE in its form as the status/contract, family/contract, family/market distinction is one such durable fragment. The two subsequent forms of legal consciousness which Kennedy identifies as spreading throughout the world in globalizations of legal thought spanning the twentieth century are, first, "the social," emerging by 1900 and losing its grip on legal minds by 19686; and second, the era of conflicting considerations, which I will dub concon, emerging after World War II and persisting today.7 Here is how Kennedy introduces these two successive but also overlapping brainwaves: Between 1900 and 1968, what globalized was The Social, . .. a way of thinking without an essence, but with, as an important trait, preoccupation with rethinking law as a purposive activity, as a regulatory mechanism that could and should facilitate the evolution of social life in accordance with ever greater perceived social interdependence at every level, from the family to the world of nations.... Between 1945 and 2000, one trend was to think about legal technique, in the aftermath of the critiques of CLT and the social, as the pragmatic balancing of conflicting considerations in administering the system created by the social jurists. At the same time, there was a seemingly contrary trend to envisage law as the guarantor of human and property rights and of intergovernmental order through the gradual extension of the rule of law, understood as judicial supremacy.' Whereas the social emanated originally from Europe, and was received eagerly by Americans still hungry to receive intellectual influence from 5. See Halley & Rittich, CriticalDirections, supra note 2, at 771-75. 6. Kennedy, Three Globalizations,supra note 4, at 21, 37-62. 7. Id. at 21, 63-71. 8. Id. at 22. Published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 2011 1 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol. 23, Iss. 2 [2011], Art. 1 192 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities [Vol. 23:189 abroad, Kennedy's concon consciousness is a largely American export, and indeed in this Part we will see American legal elites gaining confidence in their own powers to reconstruct all of law in the interwar period, during the rise of the social. Today, American legal influence is everywhere, carrying not only the pragmatic balancing impulse but also a neoformalist "identity/rights complex" putting faith in rights as enforced by judges. Both of these elements of concon will play an important part in our story here: Public law neoformalism strongly resembles the practices of late nineteenth-century U.S. courts, which took the CLT construction of private law and applied it to the U.S. Constitution. After WWII, liberal civil libertarians who had strongly criticized the conservative public law neoformalism of the earlier period took up the same practice through the Warren Court. Policy analysis and balancing were post-Realist U.S. developments, and the advocates of balancing were already debating public law neoformalists in the early 1950s. The identity/rights complex, as a template for thinking about a vast range of legal issues, seems foreshadowed in the United States by the post-WWII alliance of elite WASPS, Jews, and blacks in the construction of the category of ethnicity, linking the evils of the Holocaust to those of racism in the United States as illegal discrimination. U.S. second-wave feminism is responsible for the abstraction and generalization of the category by transforming it into "identity." And it is familiar since de Toqueville that Unitedstateseans tend toward juristocracy.9 At three points, twice during the social and once in the explosive birth of concon identity politics, vanguard groups took direct aim at FLE. The first attacks came from social jurists: Roscoe Pound and the Columbia Law School faculty pursuing radical reform of their curriculum in the 1920's. They sought to reconnect domestic relations/family law not only with the market but with the vast array of regulatory orders, inside and outside the state, that condition its lifeways. That effort failed, only to be taken up again in the waning days of the social era by a group I will call the professionalizers. They produced an important casebook that fully delivers upon the most innovative ideas of the Columbia reformers, with some distinctive mid-1960's changes. But this erasure of FLE was not to last for long. The third group was feminists attacking the private/public 9.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • An Unreconstructed Ode to Eve Sedgwick (And Others) Brenda Cossman
    Queering Queer Legal Studies: An Unreconstructed Ode to Eve Sedgwick (and Others) Brenda Cossman Abstract The essay explores the extant field queer legal studies and maps the multiple meanings of “queer” deployed within it. I distinguish queer from LGBT, but resist any further disciplining of the term. I propose instead an understanding of queer legal studies as a sensibility. Neither a prescription nor a pronouncement, the article is written as an ode to Eve Sedgewick, her axioms and her reparative readings. I offer the essay as a celebration of queer legal studies to date and of its hopeful potentialities into an unknown future. I. Axiom 1: Queer legal theory exists. There is a body of queer legal studies. It is not part of a fantastical yet to be realized future. It is found in the oft-cited works of Francisco Valdes,1 Carl Stychin,2 Kendall Thomas,3 and Janet Halley.4 But, there is so much more. And it exists independently of what might be called LGBT legal studies. I begin with the assertion that queer legal theory exists because many who write queer legal theory begin with a counter-assertion—that there is little or no queer legal scholarship.5 The claim is puzzling. My discomfort with the claim is perhaps based in unrequited love, as I would locate my own work for the last two decades within the tradition of queer legal studies. Professor of Law, University of Toronto. I am indebted to Joseph Fischel for his generous and razor sharp engagement with this essay. 1 Francisco Valdes, Queers, Sissies, Dykes, and Tomboys: Deconstructing the Conflation of “Sex,” “Gender,” and “Sexual Orientation” in Euro-American Law and Society, 83 Cal.
    [Show full text]
  • The Socratic Method in the Age of Trauma
    THE SOCRATIC METHOD IN THE AGE OF TRAUMA Jeannie Suk Gersen When I was a young girl, the careers I dreamed of — as a prima ballerina or piano virtuoso — involved performing before an audience. But even in my childhood ambitions of life on stage, no desire of mine involved speaking. My Korean immigrant family prized reading and the arts, but not oral expression or verbal assertiveness — perhaps even less so for girls. Education was the highest familial value, but a posture of learning anything worthwhile seemed to go together with not speak- ing. My incipient tendency to raise questions and arguments was treated as disrespect or hubris, to be stamped out, sometimes through punish- ment. As a result, and surely also due to natural shyness, I had an almost mute relation to the world. It was 1L year at Harvard Law School that changed my default mode from “silent” to “speak.” Having always been a student who said nothing and preferred a library to a classroom, I was terrified and scandalized as professors called on classmates daily to engage in back-and-forth dia- logues of reasons and arguments in response to questions, on subjects of which we knew little and on which we had no business expounding. What happened as I repeatedly faced my unwelcome turn, heard my voice, and got through with many stumbles was a revelation that changed my life. A light switched on. Soon, I was even volunteering to engage in this dialogue, and I was thinking more intensely, independently, and enjoyably than I ever had before.
    [Show full text]
  • Janet Halley and Andrew Parker Introduction
    Janet Halley and Andrew Parker Introduction To be honest, we didn’t know what to expect when we asked potential contributors to this issue of SAQ to assess the current state of queer think- ing by reflecting on, among other things, what in their work isn’t queer. Though we couldn’t pre- dict what our authors would make of this ques- tion, we had a variety of reasons for posing it in these terms. In the first place, we’d been hearing from some quarters that queer theory, if not already passé, was rapidly approaching its expiration date, and we wanted to learn from others whether or how this rumor might be true.1 We knew, of course, that the activist energies that helped to fuel queer academic work in the United States have declined sharply since the early 1990s, when the books that would become foundational for queer theory first began to appear.2 With Gender Trouble and Epistemology of the Closet now close to reaching their age of majority, it didn’t entirely surprise us that a recent issue of a journal could ask, “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?”—with now an obviously pointed way of announcing a depar- ture from earlier habits of thought.3 But the authors around whom queer theory crystallized seem to have spent the past decade distancing South Atlantic Quarterly 106:3, Summer 2007 DOI 10.1215/00382876-2007-001 © 2007 Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/106/3/421/469893/SAQ106-03-01HalleyFpp.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 422 Janet Halley and Andrew Parker themselves
    [Show full text]
  • Trading the Megaphone for the Gavel in Title IX Enforcement
    Trading the Megaphone for the Gavel in Title IX Enforcement The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Janet Halley, Trading the Megaphone for the Gavel in Title IX Enforcement, 128 Harv. L. Rev. F. 103 (2015). Published Version http://cdn.harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ vol128_Halley_REVISED_2.17.pdf Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:16073958 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA TRADING THE MEGAPHONE FOR THE GAVEL IN TITLE IX ENFORCEMENT Janet Halley∗ When feminist advocates on campus sexual assault “speak truth to power,” they speak for (and often as) victims and survivors. In that position, it’s perfectly fair for them to pick and choose the constituen- cies to which they give voice. They can and should specialize. But as feminists issue a series of commands from within the federal gov- ernment about what the problem of campus sexual violence is and how it must be handled, and as they build new institutions that give life to those commands, they become part of governmental power. Now that they have the power to adjudicate cases and determine sanc- tions, they are facing the full range of cases. For those feminists — and I would argue they should include, by now, the advocacy branch — the days of specialization should be over.
    [Show full text]
  • Rethinking International Women's Human Rights Through Eve Sedgwick
    Pace University DigitalCommons@Pace Pace Law Faculty Publications School of Law 2010 Rethinking International Women's Human Rights Through Eve Sedgwick Darren Rosenblum Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/lawfaculty Part of the Human Rights Law Commons, International Law Commons, and the Law and Gender Commons Recommended Citation Darren Rosenblum, Rethinking International Women's Human Rights Through Eve Sedgwick, 33 Harv. J. L. & Gender 349 (2010), http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/lawfaculty/737/. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Law at DigitalCommons@Pace. It has been accepted for inclusion in Pace Law Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Pace. For more information, please contact [email protected]. RETHINKING INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS THROUGH EVE SEDGWICK DARREN ROSENBLUM* Thanks to Janet Halley and Jeannie Suk for organizing this amazing workshop. Since the death of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I have wanted to honor her memory, and this panel is the perfect venue. Sedgwick's founda-founda­ tional understandings of sexuality, gender, and identity set the stage for much of my work and that of those I admire. My own work looks at how the state regulates gender in the "public" sphere.'sphere. I I attempt to challenge the tensions and intersections among interna-interna­ tional and comparative notions of equality and identity.2identity. 2 Group identity con­con- structions vary across cultural lines and conflict with liberal notions of universalist constitutionalism and equality.'equality.3 My current work, Unsex CEDAW: What's Wrong with Women's Rights,4Rights,4 continues the exploration of identity in focusing on an interrogation of the term "women" as deployed by international law in the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Dis-Dis­ crimination Against Women ("CEDAW").
    [Show full text]
  • Fairness for All Students Under Title IX
    Fairness For All Students Under Title IX The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Elizabeth Bartholet, Nancy Gertner, Janet Halley & Jeannie Suk Gersen, Fairness For All Students Under Title IX (Aug. 21, 2017). Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33789434 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Fairness for All Students FAIRNESS FOR ALL STUDENTS UNDER TITLE IX Elizabeth Bartholet, Nancy Gertner, Janet Halley and Jeannie Suk Gersen August 21, 2017 We are professors at Harvard Law School who have researched, taught, and written on Title IX, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and feminist legal reform. We were four of the signatories to the statement of twenty eight Harvard Law School professors, published in the Boston Globe on October 15, 2014, that criticized Harvard University’s newly adopted sexual harassment policy as “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused” and “in no way required by Title IX law or regulation.” We welcome the current opportunity to assess the response to campus sexual harassment, including sexual assault. In the past six years, under pressure from the previous Administration, many colleges and universities all over the country have put in place new rules defining sexual misconduct and new procedures for enforcing them. While the Administration’s goals were to provide better protections for women, and address the neglect that prevailed before this shift, the new policies and procedures have created problems of their own, many of them attributable to directives coming from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
    [Show full text]
  • Does Law Have an Outside? Janet E
    Osgoode Hall Law School of York University Osgoode Digital Commons Research Papers, Working Papers, Conference Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy Papers Research Report No. 2/2011 Does Law Have an Outside? Janet E. Halley Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/clpe Recommended Citation Halley, Janet E., "Does Law Have an Outside?" (2011). Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy. Research Paper No. 2/2011. http://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/clpe/42 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Research Papers, Working Papers, Conference Papers at Osgoode Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy by an authorized administrator of Osgoode Digital Commons. OSGOODE HALL LAW SCHOOL Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy RESEARCH PAPER SERIES Research Paper No. 2/2011 Does Law Have an Outside? Janet Halley Editors: Peer Zumbansen (Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto, Director, Comparative Research in Law and Political Economy) John W. Cioffi (University of California at Riverside) Lisa Philipps (Osgoode Hall Law School, Associate Dean Research) Nassim Nasser (Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto, Production Editor) 2 OSGOODE CLPE RESEARCH PAPER SERIES [VOL. 07 NO. 01 Osgoode CLPE Research Paper 44/2010 Vol. 06 No. 10 (2010) Janet Halley* Does Law Have an Outside? Abstract: I’ve been pondering this problem as I participated in this sparking conference titled “Beyond the Law”: What, if anything, is “beyond the law”? The better parent’s risk aversion; the propertyless man’s hunger: should we insist that these are non‐legal attributes about these characters which interact with legal rules to condition legally important decisions? Are they inside or outside of the law? We can think of it either way.
    [Show full text]
  • Rape at Rome: Feminist Interventions in the Criminalization of Sex-Related Violence in Positive International Criminal Law
    Michigan Journal of International Law Volume 30 Issue 1 2008 Rape at Rome: Feminist Interventions in the Criminalization of Sex-Related Violence in Positive International Criminal Law Janet Halley Harvard Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjil Part of the Human Rights Law Commons, Law and Gender Commons, Military, War, and Peace Commons, and the Organizations Law Commons Recommended Citation Janet Halley, Rape at Rome: Feminist Interventions in the Criminalization of Sex-Related Violence in Positive International Criminal Law, 30 MICH. J. INT'L L. 1 (2008). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjil/vol30/iss1/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Michigan Journal of International Law at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Michigan Journal of International Law by an authorized editor of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. RAPE AT ROME: FEMINIST INTERVENTIONS IN THE CRIMINALIZATION OF SEX-RELATED VIOLENCE IN POSITIVE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL LAWt Janet Halley* INTRODUCTION TO "GOVERNANCE FEMINISM" ...................................... 3 I. THE ICTY AND ICTR STATUTES AND THE ROME STATUTE SEEN SYNOPTICALLY ................................................. 8 A. The ICTY and ICTR Statutes and the Rome Statute as Events in Tim e ............................................................... 8 B. Feminist OrganizationalCapacity and Rhetorical Strategy .......................................................... 12 1. The Emergence of GFeminism as an Important NG Force ................................................. 12 2. The Emerging Genres of GFeminist Rhetoric .......... 26 II. FEMINIST GOALS, SUCCESSES, AND DEFEATS IN THE STATUTORY PROCESSES .................................................... 49 A. The Legal Backdrop ........................................................ 51 B.
    [Show full text]
  • A Rising Tide: Learning About Fair Disciplinary Process from Title IX
    822 A Rising Tide: Learning About Fair Disciplinary Process from Title IX Alexandra Brodsky Introduction In the fall of 2016, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced that Wesley College had violated Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments when it mistreated a student accused of sexual assault.1 According to the OCR, four male students at the Delaware college were accused of livestreaming a fellow student having sex, without her consent. One of those students never received information from the school about the accusation or the available evidence. He was invited to attend an informal educational meeting only to discover the “chat” was in fact a disciplinary hearing. Casual observers may have been surprised to hear the Education Department stood up for an alleged assailant. A popular public narrative suggests that advocates for victims’ rights and for accused students are locked in an intractable conflict, with the Obama presidency favoring the former and the Trump presidency sure to switch teams. The story is wrong—and that matters for all students. The decades-old movement to end campus gender violence achieved unprecedented attention and power during the course of Barack Obama’s presidency. Student organizers, many of whom publicly identify as survivors, used a combination of legal complaints, public protest, and powerful narratives to pressure their schools—often successfully—to change their approach to Alexandra Brodsky is a civil rights attorney representing students. My thanks go to Mike Wishnie for his guidance, thoughtful editing, and encouragement, to Nancy Chi Cantalupo and Kelly Moore for their generous feedback on early drafts, and to Alec Schierenbeck for his careful eye and sharp instincts.
    [Show full text]
  • Summer 1999 ~Tanfor~ Law ~C~Ool [Xecutive [~Ucation Programs
    Summer 1999 ~tanfor~ law ~c~ool [xecutive [~ucation Programs Since 1993 the Executive Education Programs at Stanford Law School have provided a national forum for leaders in the business and legal communities to share their expertise. Our law and business faculty will challenge and inspire you. We invite you to Jam us. ': .. This was the most beneficial course I've attended in my career. " Directors' College '99 Parricipant Mark Segura, CLECO Corporation 'Informal discussion and associating with other participants is very valuable-just bringing this group together is worthwhile. " General Counsel '98 Parricipant Contact us: Executive Education Phone: (650) 723-5905 Fax: (650) 72P861 Visit us at our website: http://lawschool.stanford.edu/execed ISSUE55 / SUMMER 1999 FEATURLS 18 PAUL BREST'S FOOTSTEPS A confluence of events 12 years ago fated Paul Brest's deanship to a troubled infancy. But Brest's relentless quest for improvement-his own and the Law School's-ensured that those baby steps would become historic strides. 26 THE STORY OF A SENTENCE 12 Does this guy deserve three years in jail? Yes, says an DAUGHTER OF A SOLDIER assistant U.s. attorney, who does his best to string With the poise of a veteran together a sentence that makes sense. and the confidence of her convictions, 33-year-old Cheryl Mills defended the Presidency, woke up the Senate, and wowed 3 Washington. Sullivan's appointment as Dean makes a splash Gunther, Babcock add to their honors Two faculty earn tenure Antitrust legend William Baxter dies A new book on "don't ask,
    [Show full text]
  • Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: the Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns
    Elizabeth Bernstein Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns uring a blustery New York City winter in the final weeks of 2008, two very different cinematic events focused on the politics of gender, D sexuality, and human rights stood out for their symmetry. The first event, a benefit screening of Call and Response (2008), a just-released “rockumentary” about human trafficking made by the Christian rock- musician-cum-filmmaker Justin Dillon, showed at a hip downtown cinema to a packed and enthusiastic mixed-gender audience of young, predom- inantly white and Korean evangelical Christians. The second event, a pub- lic screening of the film Very Young Girls (2008), a sober documentary about feminist activist Rachel Lloyd and her Harlem-based nonprofit or- ganization for teenaged girls in street prostitution, was populated primarily by secular, middle-aged professional women with a long-standing com- mitment to the abolition of the sex trade. Despite the obvious demo- graphic contrasts between the participants and the different constellations of secular and religious values that they harbor, more striking still was the common political foundation that the two groups have come to share. Over the past decade, mounting public and political attention has been directed toward the “traffic in women” as a dangerous manifestation of global gender inequalities. Media accounts have similarly rehearsed stories I would like to thank Jennifer Nina, Meryl Lodge, and Suzanna Dennison for their research assistance on this project, as well as the three anonymous reviewers of this piece who shared their insightful commentary.
    [Show full text]
  • The Unintended Consequences of the International Women's Movement: Medicalizing Rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo
    Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2016 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2016 The Unintended Consequences of the International Women's Movement: Medicalizing Rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo Faye N. Forman Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2016 Part of the Criminal Law Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Human Rights Law Commons, International Humanitarian Law Commons, Law and Gender Commons, Legal Theory Commons, Political History Commons, Sexuality and the Law Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, and the Women's History Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Forman, Faye N., "The Unintended Consequences of the International Women's Movement: Medicalizing Rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo" (2016). Senior Projects Spring 2016. 257. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2016/257 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Unintended Consequences of the International Women's Movement: Medicalizing Rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College by Faye Forman Annandale-on-Hudson, New York May 2016 Acknowledgements This project is dedicated to Bethany Nohlgren, for believing in my capability when I didn't believe in it myself.
    [Show full text]