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
Elvia Arriola
Northern Illinois University
Paper Title: Unpacking An zaldua’s Mestiza
Consciousness for a Latina Lesbian Legal Theory: Or Latinizing
Robson’s Lesbian Legal Theory?
Abstract: This paper will extend ideas
I have begun to develop for the Latina experience in response
to Ruthann Robson’s lesbian legal theory. In earlier
criticisms of Robson’s work I expressed concern
for the absence of race, class or cultural specificity.
Robson, however, if examined more carefully does offer
avenues for cultural specificity of the lesbian identity
and experience. (Incendiary Categories in Sappho Goes
to Law School). The recently deceased Latina lesbian cultural
theorist Gloria Anzaldua also offered an avenue for locating
a culturally specific latina lesbian experience through
her framework of "hybridit," or what she labelled
"mestiza consciousness." Hybridity is analogous
to the frameworks of a number of other queer/race/fem
crit scholars (Valdes, Hutchinson, Hernandex-Truyol, Kwan,
Crenshaw, Harris). I first hope to present the possibilities
for a latina lesbian legal theory by mining the works
of latina lesbians who broke ground for the voices of
women of color in the eighties with such landmark studies
as This Bridge Called My Back. After grounding the place
for a lesbian experience that is specifically shaped by
hybridity (or the intersectional experiences of race,
class, citizenship, etc.), I plan to examine a few legal
cases to show how Latina/o cultural attitudes about gender
and sexuality impact on the Latina lesbian caught in a
legal conflict or how Anglo attitudes about Latina/os
and lesbians highlight the costs of visibility for lesbians
of color. Because antilesbianism or homophobia is grounded
in attitudes of gender and sexuality in every cultural/racial/social
group, it is significant to this project to illustrate
the tensions presented by a lesbian legal theory that
isolates gender and sexuality attitudes from the context
of one’s class and social location (e.g., Latin
country versus Anglo-dominant cultures like the U.S.).
The legal contexts I intend to draw upon for working out
these thoughts involve a) the election of an out lesbian
to the Mexican legislature; b) the use of homophobia in
the prosecution of Bernina Mata, a poor, Mexican-American
latina lesbian for the murder of her female lover; and
c) two cases of domestic violence in which the battering
enacts antilesbian/homophobic rage which is then oddly
used to celebrate "traditional Latino values."
*******************
Lakshmi Arya
Paper Title: 'The Uniform Civil Code in India:
Transcendence and Difference in the Politics of Identity'
Abstract: The 'postcolonial feminist
intellectual' who has critiqued the universalisms of Western
feminism for ignoring the intersections of race and class
in the construction of gender, finds herself similarly
embattled in her local contexts. This is evident in the
debates surrounding the proposed enactment of a Uniform
Civil Code (UCC) in India. In some feminist arguments
that support the UCC, a uniform civil law is seen as providing
a sphere of rights to Indian women of different religions,
castes and communities, that is alternative to the rights—or
wrongs—given to them by religious laws. The latter
are encoded in the form of the “personal laws”
of the various religious denominations in contemporary
India. Critics of this vision of gender justice have pointed
to the plurality of religions, castes, regions, languages
and communities in India and the unequal power relations
that mark these sites, making the prioritization of gender
over other identifications both a reversal to a primordial
essentialism and a liberal ruse that excludes other axes
of power and their politics, thereby hegemonizing already
existing sites of dominance. In articulating this opposition,
these critics themselves seem to identify religion and
caste as primary identifications, which subsume gendered
identities as subsets within them.
Identifications, of course, can be multiple and cross-
cutting—or intersecting. However, the very logic
of repudiation or exclusion by which identifications emerge
as neat, plural categories that can intersect, or be related,
is contested by certain post-structuralist theorists,
such as Judith Butler, who see the constitution of “positions”
or “categories” as an effect of the exclusionary
operations of the liberal state that attribute a false
uniformity to them. What results from Butler’s argument
is a universal matrix of gender relations, which subsumes
all other identifications within it and wherein sexed
positions are also unstable. What effects do such theoretical
positions that collapse distinctions and boundaries, as
also those that posit separation, have for the identity
politics of gender, caste and religion? I would like to
explore this negotiation between transcendence and difference
in the context of the politics of caste and religious
identities, as “intersectable”, relatable
entities, in relation to the notion of the transcendental
‘universal’, within the debate of the Uniform
Civil Code in India. I would utilize insights drawn from
histories of similar debates engendered in the colonial
encounter of India and Britain.
*******************
Doris Buss
Carleton University, Canada
Paper Title: 'War crimes and the gender of community'
Abstract: In 1993 and 1994, the conflicts in Yugoslavia
took a horrifying turn in the eyes of the Western world
as reports emerged of the commission of mass atrocities
including concentration camps and, what became known as
‘rape camps’, places where (primarily) Muslim
women were held for periods of time and subjected to rape
and other abuses. Feminist scholars and activists mobilised
to secure greater international action on, and recognition
of the violence against women, both in war and peacetime.
The feminist legal literature from this time reflects
a concern with strengthening international law relating
to wartime sexual offences, but also with uncertainty
about how to understand, and hence legally respond to
wartime rape in the context of Yugoslavia. For some feminists,
such as Catherine MacKinnon, the mass rape of Bosnian
women needed to be seen as continuous with, and the most
logical extension of, ‘everyday’ violence
against women. Ethnic or community identity of the women
constituted ‘layers’ of oppression, at the
base of which was gender. For others, MacKinnon’s
rhetorical and vituperative writings failed to adequately
recognise the racialised dimension of the incidences of
mass rape in Yugoslavia. Women were targeted not just
because of their gender, but also because of their imputed
ethnic identity. Greater attention to race was needed.
Ten years later and the ad hoc tribunals for Yugoslavia
and Rwanda are often proclaimed a feminist success story,
yielding a number of important decisions recognising rape
of women as a crime against humanity and genocide. Gone
from the legal literature are the debates about the intersectional
character of the mass rapes in these conflicts, and the
troubling questions about the relationship between war
and peacetime nature of violence against women. In this
paper, I look at the jurisprudence of the war crimes tribunals
to consider the courts’ characterisation of the
intersection of race and gender. My interest here is in
exploring how the court constructs and calls into being
particular communities – Bosnian Muslim or Rwandan
Tutsi – in order to classify acts of atrocity as
international crimes. How does gender, and gender inequality
in particular, articulate with race in the courts’
findings on the collective character of the war crimes
committed? What images of race and gender emerge from
these rulings? And to what extent does the courts’
willingness to consider the alignment of gender and race
address some of the initial feminist debates about wartime
violence against women in Yugoslavia?
