This article explores areas of law loosely within English equity and trusts law that have not conventionally been subject to feminist debate, and within the context of a discussion about feminist method. The particular areas examined are whistleblowing and trustees’ powers of investment, each of which calls for consideration of decision-making processes which have an ethical content. These sites are chosen because they take debate outside the all too familiar locations of woman or ‘the body of woman’, including the family (...) home, where feminist analysis in relation to equity and trusts tends to stray. In exploring these chosen fields, Hobby’s (Feminist Perspectives on Equity and Trusts, Cavendish Publishing, 2001, pp. 219–255) critique of gender dimensions in relation to whistleblowing and Dunn’s (Feminist Perspectives on Equity and Trusts, Cavendish Publishing, 2001, pp. 179–196) account of women trustees’ investment decisions are evaluated and developed. The debate within feminist legal criticism of the possibility of integrating an ‘ethics of care’ and an ‘ethics of rights’ is acknowledged. Whilst acknowledging of the difficulty of adopting an approach that recognises ‘mixed logics’, it is concluded that women (and men) do integrate the ethics of care and the ethics of rights in their decision-making. It is argued that the effort should be made to trace the specific weave in particular circumstances, thereby paying suspicious attention to the values that underlie courts’ analyses of ethical choices. (shrink)

This article examines the precepts of natural law feminism, and in exploring the writings of two Canadian feminists, Maureen McTeer and Louise Vandelac, examines how natural law feminism is deployed in debates about how to theorize reproduction. I contend that the natural law perspective obscures many issues worthy of feminist inquiry, and, perhaps more critically, eschews a discourse that emphasizes reproductive freedom in favour of one which has at its centre a largely unproblematized view of reproduction that follows a biologically (...) driven script of conception, gestation, childbirth and mothering as inherently and necessarily connected. I argue that this stance is particularly evident in natural law feminist analyses of ecology and the regulation of new reproductive and genetic technologies. In both these areas, natural law feminism poses the central problem as one in which feminists must zealously protect the natural association between women and reproduction; in so doing, natural law feminists gloss over the nature of this association. I suggest a reframing of the focus of debates on reproduction from what is natural and what is socially constructed to how we demarcate the two. (shrink)

Starting in late 2011, public discourse increased around several similar pieces of proposed and enacted legislation that began to appear in the United States. These instruments, currently at different stages in their respective legislatures, impose or intend to impose restrictions on the conditions under which an abortion can be provided to a woman seeking to terminate her pregnancy.1 Among this set of instruments is state-level legislation, modeled after the Woman’s Ultrasound Right to Know Act, a law and policy guide developed (...) by the pro-life/anti-choice group, Americans United for Life (AUL). This guide and the legislation that is modeled on it state that a woman seeking an abortion cannot give “informed .. (shrink)

We examine pregnant women's experiences with routinised obstetric ultrasound as entailed in their antenatal care during planned pregnancies. This paper highlights the ambiguity of ultrasound technology in the constitution of maternal–foetal connections. Our analysis focusses on Australian women's experiences of the ontological, aesthetic and epistemological ambiguities afforded by ultrasound. We argue that these ambiguities offer possibilities for connecting to the foetus in ways that maintain a kind of unknowability; they afford an openness and ethical responsiveness irrespective of the future of (...) the foetus. This suggests that elucidating women's experience has implications for theorising ethics across maternal–foetal relations and, more specifically, for the ‘moral pioneering’ (Rapp, 2000) that reproductive technologies can demand of women. Moral pioneering cannot be reduced to moments or processes of decision-making; it must allow for greater recognition of the affective commitments entailed in and incited by ultrasound. Furthermore, focussing on experiences of the ambiguity of ultrasound allows for understanding the ways in which affectivity circulates across domains commonly understood as medical or social, public or private. In doing so, it contributes to undermining a series of tensions that currently shape feminist analysis of obstetric ultrasound, often at the expense of the experience of women. (shrink)

Social scientists have shown that scientific characterizations of the egg and the sperm are shaped by gender stereotypes and cultural values. How have such characterizations been transformed by a recent embrace of -omics, when studies of reproduction increasingly go beyond genomics to incorporate proteomics, transcriptomics, exposomics, and other -omics perspectives? Scientists studying reproduction and analyzing eggs, sperm, and embryos are in some ways reimagining the roles, identities, and functions of gametes as fundamentally shaped by other molecular entities and environments. Such (...) relational understandings of substances and processes, however, continue to operate through a teleology that often conscripts more nuanced -omics reflection into familiar genomic visions of sex and reproduction. While ideas of the gene as an alienable object may be unraveling, -omics efforts to go beyond the egg and the sperm are frequently constricted by an understanding of reproduction that remains tied to individualized bodies and by a genomically infused interpretation of the gamete as life itself. (shrink)

This paper appraises the role of critical-feminist figurations within the environmental humanities, focusing on the capacity of figures to produce situated environmental knowledges and pose site-specific ethical obligations. We turn to four environments—the home, the skies, the seas and the microscopic—to examine the work that various figures do in these contexts. We elucidate how diverse figures—ranging from companion animals to birds, undersea creatures and bugs—reflect productive traffic between longstanding concerns in feminist theory and the environmental humanities, and generate new insights (...) related to situated knowledges, feminist care-ethics and the politics of everyday sensory encounters. We also argue, however, that certain figures have tested the limits of theoretical approaches which have emerged as the product of dialogue between feminist theory and environmental studies. In particular, we explore how particular figures have complicated ethical questions of how to intervene in broad environmental threats borne of anthropogenic activities, and of who or what to include in relational ethical frameworks. (shrink)

In debates over abortion, the foetus and the woman have been continually positioned as antagonists. Given the stakes involved in such debates about personal integrity, individual responsibility, life and death, it is no wonder that many radical feminist authors have concentrated on refocusing the attention on women and away from the disembodied foetus. Such writers have worked hard to decode and deconstruct the public foetus in our midst and have mobilized interpretative tools such as cultural criticism to contextualize the production (...) and consumption of foetal images. Barbara Duden's book, The Public Foetus, is an important and interesting contribution to this effort, which is still taken up by authors writing in this field. Duden's strategy is to seek to remind us (and in particular those who are involved in reproductive medicine) that pregnancy is concentrated in the embedded pregnant woman rather than the disembodied ‘public foetus’ and she attempts to retrieve the embodied woman as the site of pregnancy through what Michaels has termed a ‘fetal disappearing act’. While this may create as many problems for women as it resolves, I would argue that, while the ‘public foetus’ continues to loom large in the politics of abortion and women's positions in relation to the new reproductive technologies remain contested, Duden's work remains important in the continuing debate about how women's reproductive freedom can be continually re-negotiated and re-established. (shrink)

In recent social theory, there has been an emphasis on the emergence of non-market, non-cash nexus or what are sometimes referred to as `traditional' forms of organization in the economic sphere. These are sometimes represented as vital to innovation and as constituting the cutting edge of socioeconomic change. In this article, my concern is to interrogate these new modes of organization. Its main argument is that such traditional forms may go hand in hand with a retraditionalization of gender in terms (...) of employment. The innovation and creativity associated with such new economic formations is therefore called into question. (shrink)