Abstract

This contribution analyses feminist scholarship on women’s suffrage – women’s fight for the right to vote in the United States. The 100-year anniversary of the passing of the 19th Amendment – the suffrage amendment – serves as exigence for considering how feminist scholarship dedicated to suffrage addresses our contemporary contexts and concerns. To that end, we bring together scholarship that troubles dominant white suffrage narratives in order to amplify the rhetorics of suffragists of colour, that engages the racism that inflected the suffrage movement, that explores possibilities for coalitions and alliances, and that continues to consider how suffrage rhetorics, at the turn of the twentieth century, might connect to and inform restrictions on voting rights for people living various intersectional realities in the twenty-first century.

Abstract

This essay is a detailed study of an event that took place in January 2019 in Washington DC on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It was a confrontation between Catholic schoolboys returning from a March for Life and mainly Native Americans led by an Omaha elder. The ‘faceoff’ between the two central protagonists, Nicholas Sandmann and Nathan Phillips, went viral as the embodiment and enactment of white racism. It occasioned massive lawsuits for defamation against major media corporations. By applying critical rhetoric, this essay intends to show that repressed forms and norms of rites, sacrifice and religious artefacts were re-activated and performed anew during this encounter.

Abstract

Demonstrating the inherent indiscernibility of political power, particularly in our post-tellurian, celestial epoch (Schmitt) of ‘postdemocracy’ (Ranciere), a focus on spaces and sites of power – in its dual characteristic of dominating, controlling as well as enabling force – illuminates historic changes that produced today’s technologically and pecuniary propelled ‘governance’ (Morozov). Dispensed by idola of the ‘marketplace and the theatre’ (Bacon) coursing through cyberspace, the muted demos is coaxed into accepting Silicon Valley’s promise of utopia unless forensic rhetoric pierces the broken connection between having power and exercising it deliberatively. That depends on the extent to which concealed places of power can be made comprehensible for the demos to withstand celestial seduction and regain her politically informed voice.

Abstract

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language that they may not understand one another’s language. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11, 1–9).

Abstract

This article is the framing chapter of this collection of articles. It discusses violence against women through the lens of the three main themes that also run through the collection. The first theme focuses on sexual violence as a particular manifestation of violence against women. The second theme includes a discussion of legal and policy discourses of violence in international and regional law, as well as the challenges faced by women at the margins of society. The final theme addresses the difficulties for women who work against violence against women, whether as scholars or practitioners, and considers the toll and costs associated with doing this work. The discussion of these themes is used to both acknowledge the systematic nature of these challenges and to problematise the challenges, by reflecting on the repeated violences, acknowledging new(er) manifestations, and asking probing questions about how trends in public outrage can impact on legal, policy and practice developments.

Abstract

Sexual harassment is rooted in structures and patterns of patriarchy, power and discrimination. The law requires employers to address the root causes of sexual harassment to prevent and protect all employees. When the law intervenes to remedy sexual harassment, the disciplinary rules and procedures set out in the law of sexual harassment can victimise or vindicate both complainants and perpetrators. The law can also legitimise toxic workplace cultures when it directs all its focus on individual perpetrators and complainants, as opposed to interrogating broader organisational cultures that may create a toxic environment in which sexual harassment can thrive. This article explores the limitations of the individualised, adversarial approach to discipline and offers guidance for reimagining what justice and accountability could look like in cases of sexual harassment, through an analysis of the Equal Education sexual harassment inquiry process and outcome.

Tribunal justice may be meaning ful to lawyers drafting legal documents … amid the smoldering embers of destroyed communities. But little satisfaction will come to survivors … the voices of survivors will remain largely unheard and unaddressed.