CentreLGS Conference: Theorising Intersectionality
Saturday 21 - Sunday 22 May 2005 @ Keele University
Abstracts:
To view participants abstracts, please click on the alphabetical
links below (abstracts are listed by surname), or download
the full list of abstracts in Microsoft Word format.
A - B
| C - D
| E - G
| H - J
| K | L
- P | Q
- R | S
| T - V
| W - Z
Toni Lester
Babson College, USA
Paper Title: Race and Sexual Orientation Employment
Discrimination - How Are They the Same and How Are They
Different?
Abstract: Currently in the US, there is no nationwide
federal law that prohibits employment discrimination against
gays, and countries like the UK are just now beginning
to implement EEC directives that mandate the adoption
of such laws. What would the first set of lawsuits brought
under laws like this tell us about the nature of sexual
orientation discrimination? How will suits brought under
these laws compare to suits brought under parallel laws
designed to prohibit race discrimination? What are the
similarities and what are the differences between the
experiences of people who sue for sexual orientation discrimination
vs. race discrimination? In order to answer these questions,
I conducted a case study of 30 claimants who sued under
the U.S. state of Massachusetts’ Fair Labor Act
("MFLA"), which prohibits sexual orientation
employment discrimination. Massachusetts is only one of
11 states in the US that has such a law. The study covers
claimants who sued their employers from the year of the
law’s inception in 1991 until 1998. It provides
a rich source and information and data about the nature
of sexual orientation discrimination law, and how it compares
to race discrimination.
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Titia Lonen
Utrecht University, Netherlands
Paper Title: Constructing the identity of Muslim
women in European Human Rights Law
Abstract: The paper will explore the
construction of the identity of Muslim women in the discussions
on the wearing of headscarves in public functions, which
are rocking many European countries. It will analyse how
this topic is dealt with so far in European human rights
law, and will argue that the way the European Court of
Human Rights approaches issues of gender and multiculturalism/religious
pluralism in its decisions regarding headscarves, ignores
the complexities of the intersections of gender and Islamic
identity.
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Monica Monkherjee
Keele University, UK
Paper Title: Toleration, Harm and the Ethics
of Global Feminism
Abstract: Liberal feminists wish to
tolerate diverse cultures’ practices, so long as
they do not harm historically-vulnerable people within
cultural groups. However, the problem is that, at the
contemporary time, many marginalized peoples are involved
in crucial struggles to have their different conceptions
of wellbeing and harm recognised institutionally. This
paper examines critically the conceptions of harm and
toleration embedded in Susan Okin’s liberal-democratic
feminism. After explaining the objections that ‘postcolonial’
feminist writers have raised against the stability of
liberal understandings of ‘harm to interests’,
I defend a Deleuzian ‘micropolitics’ that
replaces what I term the liberal ideal of ‘static
toleration’ with a more appropriate conception of
‘transformative toleration’. This concept
goes deeper than the standard liberal account, by seeking
to overcome sedimented social attitudes that cast certain
conceptions of wellbeing and harm as normal, right and
true, and which cast others as deviant, abnormal and false.
By addressing and overcoming these social prejudices,
one arrives at intersubjectively-shared standards through
which the need for static toleration is dissolved. The
paper concludes by examining the implications of this
account for a global feminism. Here I argue that interventions
by postcolonial feminists such as Uma Narayan have significantly
encouraged liberal feminists to be more ethically-responsible
in their engagements with the differences in conceptions
of harm and wellbeing which divide women cross-culturally.
*******************
Siobhan Mullally
University of Cork, Ireland
Paper Title: Theorising intersectionality: gender,
migration and reproduction in Ireland
Abstract: This paper examines the intersectionality
of debates on gender and reproduction in the context of
migration, law and policy in Ireland. The overlapping
axes of discrimination, gender, sexuality and ‘race’,
are reviewed in the context of the immigration law, and
the emergence of a politics of exclusion in official law
and policy in Ireland.
*******************
Lisa Philipps
Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada
Paper Title: Helping Out in the Family Firm:
Disrupting Binary Concepts of Paid and Unpaid Labour
Abstract: This paper is part of a 3-year
project investigating a form of labour that crosses the
boundaries between paid and unpaid work, and between market
and family: that is the work done by spouses, children
and other relatives who assist with a business or job
that belongs formally to another family member, most often
a man, who is constructed as the entrepreneur or employee.
It will explore the intersections of class, race, gender
and age that shape experiences of this work and that require
attention in theorizing its meaning and significance for
law. How does class inform the ways in which wives are
incorporated into the careers or business activities of
husbands? Is access to such assistance entirely gendered,
or do some women draw on relatives, including male relatives,
in performing their paid work? What does the incorporation
of spouses in paid work imply about the heteronormativity
of the business world? Is the participation of racialized
and immigrant women in family businesses a mark of oppression
or a form of agency? How do children support family income
earning activities in different social contexts? What
cultural, class and other biases are evident in the way
childrens’ labour is treated (or rendered invisible)
within social and legal research?
*******************
Konstanze Plett
University of Bremen, Germany
Paper Title: On the Intersection of Civil Status
and Family Laws with Respect to the Legal Construction
of Gender
Abstract: Gays, lesbians and transgender
people have challenged the law and legal doctrine in many
respects during the past decades. Based on the human rights
to gender identity and to marry and found a family, many
countries came to legally acknowledge gender reassignment
and same-sex partnerships (some even same-sex marriages).
Yet the laws regulating civil status on the one hand and
marriage and partnership on the other hand still construct
human beings along the fe/male gender line, and do not
respect gender identity for all human beings: intersexuals
are still excluded. An inclusive right to gender identity,
I shall argue, would take into account the characteristic
of gender identity as developing over time and open to
change. This, in turn, would affect the rights to gender
identity and to marry (or form a partnership) and found
a family, and the intersection of the respective laws,
in ways not yet much discussed.
