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Legal Reform and Social Construction: Violence, Gender, and the Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Extract

As scholars and activists have addressed the problem of violence against women in the past 25 years, their efforts have increasingly attuned us to the multiple dimensions of the issue. Early activists hoped to change the structure of power relations in our society, as well as the political ideology that tolerated violence against women, through legislation, education, direct action, and direct services. This activism resulted in a plethora of changes to the legal codes and protocols relating to rape and battering. Today, social scientists and legal scholars are evaluating the effects of these reforms, questioning anew the ability of law by itself to redress societal inequalities. As they uncover the limitations of legal reforms enacted in the past two decades, scholars are turning—or returning—to ask about the social and cultural contexts within which laws are formulated, enforced, and interpreted.

Type
Symposium: Women, Law, and Violence
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1994 

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References

1 See Nancy Matthews, Confronting Rape: The Feminist Anti-Rape Movement and the State (London: Routledge, 1994) (“Matthews, Confronting Rape”), and R. Emerson Dobash & Russell P. Dobash, Women, Violence, and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1992), for discussions of activism in the antirape and antibattering movements.Google Scholar

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53 There are, of course, still other areas of violence that have been addressed in legal forums–-violent attempts to prevent women from obtaining abortions, for example (see Ruth Colker, Abortion and Dialogue: Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, and American Law (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Rebecca Eisenberg, “Beyond Bray: Obtaining Federal Jurisdiction to Stop Anti-Abortion Violence, 6 Yale J. L. & Feminism 156 (1994)). And there are areas that involve violence not of individual men against women, but of male-dominated institutions–- for example, the violence involved in criminalizing aspects of women's reproductive process or in enforced temporary or permanent sterilization through use of reproductive technologies. Again, we are limited here to a brief overview of a very complicated field.Google Scholar

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62 Henrietta Moore, Feminism and Anthropology 11 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1988).Google Scholar

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65 Carol Mukhopadhyay & Patricia Higgins, “Anthropological Studies of Women's Status Revisited, 1977–1987,” 17 Ann. Rev. Anthropoio© 461, 472 (1988). See also an interesting critique by feminist anthropologists who are suspicious of the postmodern trend in anthropology that deconstructs the subject just as women and non-Western peoples generally have begun to find their voices: “To the extent that [die] dominant group has in recent years experienced a decentering as world politics and economic realities shift global power relations, postmodern theorizing can be understood as socially constructed itself, as a metaphor for the sense of the dominant that the ground has begun to shift under their feet.” Frances Mascia-Lees, Patricia Sharpe, & Colleen Ballerino Cohen, “The Postmodern Turn in Anthropology: Cautions from a Feminist Perspective,” 15 Signs 7, 15–16 (1989).Google Scholar

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If truths about what constitutes the core of human personhood are partly contingent, disputes over them can be resolved only through struggles over social reality like those that go in highly localized legal disputes. The common law is a social dialogue that accommodates pressures for preservation as well as for change, creating cultural space for the emergence of shared values as well as for criticism and transformation of past commitments … by the accretion of regularities in human experience over time, it gains moral and political authority, and thus provides the society with a basis for judging right from wrong.Google Scholar

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73 Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); id., Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Smart, Feminism (cited in note 54).Google Scholar

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