After the commercialisation of induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSCs) in 2007, the pressure to commercialise women's eggs for stem cell research could have been expected to lessen. However, the pressure to harvest human eggs in large quantities for research has not diminished; rather, it has taken different directions, for example, in germline mitochondrial research. Yet there has been little acknowledgement of these technologies' need for human eggs, the possible risks to women and the ethical issues concerning potential exploitation. Rather, there (...) has been a renewed campaign to legalise payment for eggs in research, although the actual scientific advances are at best modest. This article shows why a market in women's eggs is ethically problematic in terms of the doctor's duty to do no harm and the limitations of informed consent. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between neoconservative values and neoliberalism in American jurisprudence through a critique of the US Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision. The article uncovers how the Court imposes market-oriented logic on religious expression and in the process spiritualizes economic activity. In this way neoliberal rationality is intertwined with neoconservative values. For example, exercising religion through corporatization can be understood as a neoconservative moderation of the corrupting influence of excessive neoliberal individualism. Finally, while the decision furthers employer control (...) of workers’ reproduction, the Court’s proposed workaround—a direct government contraceptives program—would undermine that control and points to another, more emancipatory response to the problems of neoliberalism. (shrink)

Political legitimacy is a virtue of political institutions and of the decisions—about laws, policies, and candidates for political office—made within them. This entry will survey the main answers that have been given to the following questions. First, how should legitimacy be defined? Is it primarily a descriptive or a normative concept? If legitimacy is understood normatively, what does it entail? Some associate legitimacy with the justification of coercive power and with the creation of political authority. Others associate it with the (...) justification, or at least the sanctioning, of existing political authority. Authority stands for a right to rule—a right to issue commands and, possibly, to enforce these commands using coercive power. An additional question is whether legitimate political authority is understood to entail political obligations or not. Most people probably think it does. But some think that the moral obligation to obey political authority can be separated from an account of legitimate authority, or at least that such obligations arise only if further conditions hold. (shrink)

Many disabled people face some form of exclusion or discrimination. One of the most damaging, yet pervasive, types of exclusion is sexual exclusion. Various factors hinder sexual opportunities for disabled persons, such as social attitudes around body image, gender, and sexuality. In this paper, I engage with Sheila Jeffreys's paper, “ Disability and the Male Sex Right,” wherein she argues that discourse around sexual rights for disabled people is a veiled way of promoting male dominance over women. Though Jeffreys raises (...) many pertinent issues, she assumes that when a disabled man seeks commercial sex, he does so as an act of domination or violence. I argue that when a disabled man seeks commercial sex, he is seeking the goods of sex, such as connection, intimacy, and pleasure. (shrink)

: This essay critically explores contemporary Euro-American feminist debate on prostitution. It argues that to develop analyses relevant to the experience of more than just a small minority of "First World" women, those who are concerned with prostitution as a form of work need to look beyond liberal discourse on property and contractual consent for ways of conceptualizing the rights and wrongs of "sex work.".

This essay critically explores contemporary Euro-American feminist debate on prostitution. It argues that to develop analyses relevant to the experience of more than just a small minority of “First World” women, those who are concerned with prostitution as a form of work need to look beyond liberal discourse on property and contractual consent for ways of conceptualizing the rights and wrongs of “sex work.”.

Kant distinguishes between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizens and holds that only the former are civilly self-sufficient and possess rights of political participation. Such rights are important, since for Kant state institutions are a necessary condition for individual freedom. Thus, only active citizens are entitled to contribute to a necessary condition for the freedom of each. I argue that Kant attributes civil self-sufficiency to those who are not under the authority of any private individual for their survival. This reading is more (...) textually grounded than the dominant reading, which understands civil self-sufficiency in terms of economic relations alone. I further argue that Kant was interested in relations of authority because he was concerned to eliminate certain forms of corruption. This indicates that Kant’s contested distinction between active and passive citizens was a response to a key problem of any account of public lawgiving. (shrink)

This article reflects on some ethical dilemmas presented by an ethnographic study of prostitution that I conducted in the 1990s. The study drew one research subject into a long and very close relationship with me, and though she was an active and fully consenting participant in the research, she was also objectified within both the field relationship and the textual products it generated. This kind of contradiction has been recognized and discussed as a more general problem for ethnography by feminist (...) and critical ethnographers. In this article it is considered specifically in relation to informed consent as an ethical issue. If an ethnographer secures the free and informed consent of a research subject, does this necessarily make the intimacy of their subsequent relationship ethical? Is it possible for anyone to genuinely consent to being objectified through the research process? (shrink)

Mientras Carole Pateman (1988) afirma que «para las feministas la democracia no ha existido jamás», Julieta Kirkwood (1986) sostiene que «no hay democracia sin feminismo». Ambas aluden a la deuda del ideal democrático con la emancipación de las mujeres, e incluso a la función estructural de la exclusión de las mujeres en la democracia liberal. A partir de los encuentros y desencuentros entre democracia y feminismo, el presente artículo pretende ofrecer una definición de la democracia feminista que vaya más allá (...) de la inclusión a través de la acción afirmativa, abordando las tensiones que esta genera en el debate feminista de las últimas décadas y los nuevos desafíos en torno a las políticas de redistribución y de reconocimiento. ¿Es posible superar la opresión y la dominación a partir de políticas centradas en el interés de grupo? ¿Cómo se define ese interés sin esencializar la diferencia? Responder a estas preguntas resulta clave para plantear un concepto eficaz de democracia feminista. (shrink)

In international law, ‘humanitarian intervention’ refers to the use of military force by one nation or group of nations to stop genocide or other gross human rights violations in another sovereign nation. If humanitarian intervention is conceived as military in nature, it makes sense that only the most horrible, massive, and violent violations of human rights can justify intervention. Yet, that leaves many serious evils beyond the scope of legal intervention. In particular, violations of women's rights and freedoms often go (...) unchecked. To address this problem, I begin from two basic questions: When are violations of human rights sufficiently serious to require an international response of some sort? What should that response be? By re-orienting the aim and justification of international law to focus on individual autonomy rather than on peace between nations, I argue that women's rights violations other than genocide and mass rape can warrant intervention. Military intervention is often counter-productive to the aim of achieving autonomy, however. I suggest a range of responses to human rights violations that includes military intervention as one end of the spectrum, and combine this with a greater understanding of the scope of human rights violations that require international response. (shrink)

This paper engages with debates around transformations in the production and circulation of images and the changes in modes of perception that these offer. Paul Virilio has argued that technological developments have produced a shift in the site of meaning‐production from the material reference space of the image to the time of visual contact by the viewer. I consider what significance these temporalities have in relation to social difference, and I develop debates around the performative to consider how the viewer (...) is constituted in visual performativity. This focus on time and performativity opens up questions of how vision may constitute the agency, intention and responsibility of the viewer. Drawing on an example of visual irony in advertising, I explore how the temporal suspension of meanings allows for a suspension of the terms of intent and responsibility. This visual performative accesses and reworks the terms of social difference and privilege in what I have called ‘retroactive intentionality’. (shrink)

An encyclopedia entry providing an overview of the philosophical issues entailed in the theory and practice of "identity politics." Open access and online. Regularly updated.

The provision of a marriage right is a distinctive aspect of Kant ’s political philosophy and seems, initially, difficult to reconcile with the general concern with ensuring external freedom of action apparent in the universal principle of Right and the sole innate right said to follow from this principle. I claim that this provision can be regarded as consistent with this general focus and that Kant ’s treatment of issue suggests an interesting secular argument for the institution of marriage.

This paper explores women's accounts of prostitution in terms of the lived experience of the body, drawing on life story narratives and arts images created by women in the sex industry. These narratives show that women's experiences of prostitution constitute a spectrum of (dis)embodiment that is inflected, not determined, by settings and contexts. Theoretical approaches to embodiment were sought that acknowledged tensions between violation and a sense of empowerment. Therefore, the ontology of selling sex, and associated experiences such as violence, (...) drug use and self-harm are explored using feminist applications of Merleau-Ponty's notion of the `habit body'. A key focus is how the body is constituted by embodied experiences of abuse (e.g. the work of Parkins and of Weiss), and how women negotiate ownership of the body within commercial sex transactions. This highlights the process of repositioning the body by selling sex, in accordance with the accumulated experiences of the habit body. Thus, to borrow from Wendy Parkins, women perceive that they are acting meaningfully through the body, even when reproducing dynamics of objectification and dissociation. (shrink)

The identification and valorization of unacknowledged, feminized forms of economic productivity has been an important task for feminist theory. In this article, we expand and rethink existing definitions of labour, in order to recognize the essential economic role women play in the stem cell and regenerative medicine industries, new fields of biomedical research that are rapidly expanding throughout the world. Women constitute the primary tissue donors in the new stem cell industries, which require high volumes of human embryos, oöcytes, foetal (...) tissue and umbilical cord blood. Such material is generally given for free in the advanced industrial democracies, constituted as a surplus (‘spare’ embryos) or waste (umbilical cord ‘afterbirth’, cadaveric foetuses, poor quality oöcytes) whose generative powers should not be withheld from others. At the same time, among impoverished female populations in developing nations, such biological material is now often procured through frankly transactional relations, where women undertake risky procedures for small fees. In each case, female bodily productivity is mobilized to support bioeconomic research, yet the economic value involved in these relations is largely unacknowledged. In this article, we consider both the gift economy and the transactional economy for reproductive tissues as a form of labour. In order to fully conceptualize the specificities of feminized productivity in the bioeconomy, we distinguish between earlier feminist theories of reproductive labour and the emerging practices generated by stem cell research, which we term regenerative labour. We consider how historical transformations in the regulation of feminized labour and the technical repertoires of stem cell research renegotiate the productivity limits of female reproductive biology, opening it out to novel and profitable forms of surplus value and enrolling women in complex negotiations over their role in bioeconomic activity. (shrink)

This brief article introduces a special issue of Feminist Legal Studies addressing gender, sexuality and human rights, and comprising papers drawn from an E.S.R.C.-funded workshop held at the University of Kent in June 2004 on the theme of “Gender-Auditing the Human Rights Act”. The article begins by situating the themes of the special issue within the broader context of feminist engagement with rights discourse. It goes on to consider the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998 into the U.K. with (...) a view to assessing its implications in terms of engendering a positive legal and political culture for equality-seeking initiatives. The article concludes with a survey of the contributions to the special issue, highlighting the possibilities for feminist theory and strategy posed by a wider intersectional engagement with rights issues. (shrink)

This article introduces the idea of ‘dependence subtexts’ to explain how the stories that we encounter in property theory and public rhetoric function to make some actors appear ‘independent’, and thus capable of acquiring property in their own right, while making other actors appear ‘dependent’ and thus incapable of acquiring property. The argument develops the idea of ‘dependence subtexts’ out of the work of legal scholar Carol Rose and political theorist Carole Pateman, before using it as a tool for contrasting (...) the canonical property stories of John Locke and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. We argue that the link between property and dependence provides a useful starting point for understanding issues of economic justice that share a common political problem: how do we choose to govern the relation between dependence and independence through the institution of property? (shrink)

This article examines a peculiarity dating from Classical times, namely, that democracy may be achieved, in practice, independently of and prior to its articulation as theory. This peculiarity has implications for the way in which the history of democratic theory is understood, and also for the place of the democratic theorist in society. Paul Feyerabend, Richard Rorty, Chantal Mouffe and John Keane are theorists of democracy, but they all depart, first, from the commitment to the universal truth‐claims that underpin other (...) schools of democratic thought, and, second, from the concomitant belief in the priority of theory over practice. In doing so, they make it difficult to theorise how democracy might be brought about, except, circularly, where it already exists. On the one side, Feyerabend, Rorty and, to a lesser extent, Keane, assume that ‘democracy’ already exists, so that its realisation requires no theory. On the other, Mouffe argues that ‘democracy’ does not yet exist in practice, but her attempts to theorise its realisation are not convincing. (shrink)

This article investigates related contexts and connections that both hide and display the coercion and sexual violence manifest in Western cultural and aesthetic artefacts during ancient Greek and Roman eras and the French imperialist epoch. Exploring ‘Pan and Syrinx’ from Ovid’s ‘Book I’ of the Metamorphoses and Claude Debussy’s Syrinx for solo flute, I historicise the meanings of rape and sexual assault that informed Ovid’s epic and then revisit the genesis of Debussy’s Syrinx because of the uneasy elements surrounding its (...) creation. I show how its cultural production is complicit with the imperial in several ways. I consider how sexual violence impacts voice, subjectivity and the body, and finally, I draw on Luce Irigaray’s work to sketch an embodied Syrinx in relation with others and her environment. I suggest the desiring potential of sexual difference, with limitations, as a generative conception of figuring the feminine-maternal body beyond masculine appropriation. In this way I open the myth up to watery material-social relations. (shrink)

Practical political relations according to Luce Irigaray ground the possibilities for emerging to a new political epoch. She articulates that in order to move toward a more peaceful and emancipated politics, philosophers must focus more on subject-subject relations as opposed to subject-object relations. This in turn promotes the possibility of relating to a naturally and culturally different other. She also elaborates how an emancipated politics demands initially and primarily grounding subjectivity in the two, rather than in individuality or collectivity. This (...) is in contrast to classical liberalism which conceives of a social contract between individual agents who relate through mediations of property. Her philosophy conceives of refounding politics not only in the sphere of public government, but also in the traditionally private domestic sphere, which must become politically awakened. She articulates ways of refounding the family and the couple mediated first by relations between two, and liberating the family from its primary role as the material ground of society. Irigaray suggests that political relations at all levels must be rooted in difference rather than sameness, starting with recognizing sexual difference. Establishing such conditions involves creating civil protections and rights, especially for women, and establishing contexts nurturing to desire, including cultivating sensitivity and attending to sensible differences. Liberating contemporary politics from competitiveness and violence, and providing favorable conditions for peace, demands first attending to cultivating difference and fostering relations between two. (shrink)

In this article I will revisit the question of what I term the continuum of heteronormative sexual interactions, that is, the idea that purportedly ethically acceptable heterosexual interactions are conceptually, ethically, and politically associated with instances of sexual violence. Spurred by recent work by psychologist Nicola , I conclude that some of my earlier critiques of Catharine MacKinnon's theoretical linkages between sexual violence and normative heterosex are wanting. In addition, neither MacKinnon's theory nor my critique of it seem up to (...) the task of providing an ethical account of the examples of “unjust sex” that Gavey has described. I come to the conclusion that an ethical analysis of sexual interactions requires a focus on sexual desire, but that desire cannot take on the by now heavily criticized role of consent. Rather than looking for the presence or absence of sexual desire prior to sexual encounters as a kind of ethical certification of them, we ought instead to focus on the efficacy of that sexual desire, that is, its ability (or lack thereof) to shape an encounter in substantial and meaningful ways. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates how Mary Astell's version of Cartesian dualism supports her disavowal of female subordination and traditional gender roles, her rejection of Locke's notion of "thinking matter" as a major premise for rejecting his political philosophy of "social contracts" between men and women, and, finally, her claim that there is no intrinsic difference between genders in terms of ratiocination, the primary assertion that grants her the title of the first female English feminist.

This paper demonstrates how Mary Astell's version of Cartesian dualism supports her disavowal of female subordination and traditional gender roles, her rejection of Locke's notion of “thinking matter” as a major premise for rejecting his political philosophy of “social contracts” between men and women, and, finally, her claim that there is no intrinsic difference between genders in terms of ratiocination, the primary assertion that grants her the title of the first female English feminist.

This article argues that although marriage has been a historically productive and important site of feminist inquiry, feminist theorizations of the institution of marriage have reached something of a stalemate. Moreover, contemporary debates on the merits of same-sex marriage risk disarming feminist marriage critiques while simultaneously replicating their limitations. This does not mean, however, that marriage should be evacuated as an arena of feminist concern; rather, new ways of thinking about politics, subjectivities, sexualities and gender should be brought to bear (...) against our understandings of what contemporary marriage is and does. (shrink)

All duties are either duties of right (officia iuris), that is, duties for which external lawgiving is possible, or duties of virtue (officia virtutis s. ethica), for which external lawgiving is not possible. – Duties of virtue cannot be subject to external lawgiving simply because they have to do with an end which (or the having of which) is also a duty. No external lawgiving can bring about someone's setting an end for himself (because this is an internal act of (...) the mind), although it may prescribe external actions that lead to an end without the subject making it his end. (shrink)

The pursuit of equal citizenship has been complicated by two recent developments: the emergence of multi‐level governance (and with it the growing importance of local, regional and global levels of citizenship practices) and the emergence of group recognition claims (which signal the growing importance of particularised experiences and multiple inequality agendas). These developments shape the way citizenship is both practiced and analysed. Mapping neat citizenship models onto distinct nation‐states and evaluating these in relation to formal equality is no longer an (...) adequate approach. Comparative citizenship analyses need to be considered in relation to multiple inequalities and their intersections, and to multi‐level governance and trans‐national organising. This, in turn, suggests that comparative citizenship analysis needs to consider new spaces in which struggles for equal citizenship occur and new dynamics interactions between them. (shrink)

This article explores how sexualities and space are constitutive of each other in that sexualities are enacted and encoded in and across different scales and sites. In particular, this article aims to investigate how space and heteronormativity interact to complicate once more distinctions between spatial categories such as public/private and, more importantly, urban/rural through the gateways of the train station around the turn of the 20th century. Against the background of urbanization, changes in transport and the particular dangers that were (...) associated with cities and towns from the late 19th century onwards, this article is interested in looking at how train stations as locations of displacement function as sexualized spaces while at the same time providing opportunities to police and govern non-conformist female sexuality. The transformation from rural ‘good’ sexuality to ‘dangerous’ urban sexuality took place precisely at the arrival points in the cities so that train stations became hugely symbolic in collective and individual constructions of sexuality. We argue that a distinctive spatial perspective generates innovative interpretations of social interactions within a given historical context. (shrink)

This paper advances a framework to conceptualize societal care-giving arrangements abstractly. It is abstract in that it brackets the meaning of our particular relationships. This framework, which I call “the arrow of care map”, is a descriptive tracking model that is a necessary component of a theory of justice, but it is not a normative prescription in itself. The basic idea of the map is then multiply specifiable to track various ascriptive identity categories as well as different categories of care (...) labor. In this way, the idea of the arrow of care map serves as a conceptual frame within which to begin to understand every human society’s care-giving arrangement. I characterize it as a component of “ideal theory” insofar as it seeks to clarify our values, without the immediate aim of formulating principles to govern a just society. The resultant partial theory of justice is one that responds to non-ideal theory’s critiques of the ideological nature of liberal contractarianism’s idealizations and abstractions while moving towards new visions of a just society. (shrink)

: This paper may be read as a reclamation project. It argues, with Simone de Beauvoir, that patriarchal marriage is both a perversion of the meaning of the couple and an institution in transition. Parting from those who have given up on marriage, I identify marriage as existing at the intersection of the ethical and the political and argue that whether or not one chooses marriage, feminists ought not abandon marriage as an institution.

Exposing food violences – hunger,malnutrition, and poisoning from environmentalmismanagement – requires policy action thatconfronts the structured invisibility of theseviolences. Along with the hidden deprivation offood is the physical and political isolation ofcritical knowledge on food violences and needs,and for policy strategies to address them. Iargue that efforts dedicated on behalf of ahuman right to food can benefit from thetheoretical analysis and activist work of theinternational Women's Rights are Human Rights(WRHR) movement. WRHR focuses on women andgirls; the food rights movement operates (...) onbehalf of all people, with an emphasis on thepoor. Both attend to the protection of bodilyintegrity against physical and psychicviolences. Both cope with bodily violences thatare socially privatized and spatiallysegregated from public institutions of relief,that is, they are tacitly omitted from publicdiscourse and purview. Most typically, but notexclusively, these violences unfold in privatehousehold space. Both rights movements mustmobilize political rights to demand economicand social rights and security. I introduce theUnited Nations' early Declaration (1948) andCovenant (1966) language on the human right tofood and review problems of household accessand grassroots engagement that are ``writteninto'' this early documentation. An abbreviatedoverview of the WRHR movement describes how thepublic/private and economic/political rightsdichotomies have been critiqued andre-formulated. A case study set in Polandacross the transition from (more) communist to(more) capitalist political economies attemptsto illuminate the discussion through agrounded example. (shrink)

Because it is often argued that surrogacy should not be treated as contractual, the question arises in which terms this practice might then be couched. In this article, I argue that a phenomenology of surrogacy centering on the notion of trust provides a description that is illuminating from the moral point of view. My thesis is that surrogacy establishes a complex and extended reproductive unit––the “surrogacy triad” consisting of the surrogate mother, the child, and the intending parents––whose constituents are bound (...) together by mutual trustful commitments. Even though a trust-based approach does not provide an ultimate answer to whether surrogacy should be sanctioned or prohibited, it allows for at least some practical suggestions. In particular, I will argue that, under certain conditions, surrogacy is tenable within familial or other significant relationships, and I will stress the necessity of acknowledging the new relationships and moral commitments that result from this practice. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to elaborate two concerns: those of maternal ethics, and notions of making things public. I attempt to bring these two concerns together and think them alongside one another, in hopefully productive ways. I want, in other words, to think about the ethics of what mothers ‘make public’, whether this is understood in its most rudimentary form, of enabling a child to express something, to make public an affective state, for instance, even if it is only (...) the mother who is there to witness or receive it, through to more overt and material forms of ‘publication’ glimpsed when mothers parent in spaces we call ‘public’. This paper focuses on what happens to us all when we encounter ‘mothering’ – not in the enclosed, private, secluded spaces where we imagine mothering to take place, but in what Marc Augé has termed the ‘non-places of supermodernity’, where much of the day-to-day material practices of mothering in Western late-modern urban contexts actually occurs. As is often the case, it is when experience is dislodged from the contexts in which we expect to find it that its contours are shown up in relief, and we are called on to re-configure our understandings of experiences in ways that also shift our understandings of the contexts in which they occur. In this sense, mothering, that I am claiming ‘makes things public’, as well as occurring frequently and importantly ‘in public’, not only shows up something we may overlook about the maternal, but also deforms and reforms our understandings of ‘the public’ itself. (shrink)

I argue that political philosopher Charles W. Mills’ twin concepts of ‘the epistemology of ignorance’ and ‘white ignorance’ are useful tools for thinking through racial injustice in the British education system. While anti-racist work in British education has a long history, racism persists in British primary, secondary and tertiary education. For Mills, the production and reproduction of racism relies crucially on cognitive and epistemological processes that produce ignorance, and which promote various ways of ignoring the histories and legacies of European (...) colonialism and imperialism, as well as the testimonies and scholarship of those who experience racism in their everyday lives. I survey these concepts within Mills’ work then marshal evidence in support of my claim that ‘the epistemology of ignorance’ and ‘white ignorance’ provide a useful framework for thinking through problems of racial injustice in British education. (shrink)

This article discusses and develops some recent debates in feminist epistemology, by outlining the concept of an ‘emancipatory value’. It outlines the optimum conditions that a ‘community’ of knowers must satisfy in order that its members have the best chance of producing knowledge claims. The article thus covers general ground in epistemology. The article also argues that one of the conditions that any ‘emancipatory community’ must satisfy is that its underlying values should not oppress women. It is related to feminist (...) debates, therefore, in two ways: first, it develops its arguments by drawing on those debates; and second, after developing the general concepts of emancipatory value and epistemic community, it argues that feminist values are one set of emancipatory values to which an epistemic community should pay regard. (shrink)

Equality has become a highly controversial concept within feminism, not least because standard egalitarian accounts have been accused of neglecting both difference and also issues of real concern to feminists, such as the structure of the `domestic' sphere, contexts of power, and responsibility for domestic work. Michael Walzer's theory of `complex equality' promises a commitment to equality that deploys a much broader analytical focus, and yet is sensitive to difference. As such, it merits attention from feminists. In this article, I (...) will begin to investigate the possibilities offered by this theory, by examining the positions it can generate on issues of domestic work and decision-making power. It will be my contention that Walzer's own position on these issues is a little abbreviated, but that a distinctive and worthwhile account can be developed merely by applying arguments he has advanced elsewhere. (shrink)

The public/private dichotomy has long been the object of considerable attention for feminists. We argue that, by focusing their attention on a divide which has declined in importance, feminists may fail to keep up with the current means by which sexual inequalities are perpetuated. Furthermore, by concentrating on this divide feminists risk reproducing such dichotomous thinking in their own work, discursively perpetuating that which they had initially hoped to displace. We begin by surveying feminist critiques of the public/private dichotomy, consider (...) recent moves to go beyond critique, yet suggest that the dichotomy continues to be a framing concern within feminist work. We then survey the way in which space has been understood within geography, and consider the implications of adopting a relational conception of space for analysis of public and private in political theory. We offer a broader framework for examining the ways in which sexual inequalities are reproduced in contemporary society. We therefore open up the possibility that over time inequalities may be mediated to a greater or lesser degree by spatial divisions. This places a further pressure on the assumption that the public/private divide, or some variation thereof, must be at the heart of feminist theorizing. (shrink)

An examination of case law on forced marriage reveals that in addition to physical force, the role of emotional pressure is now taken into consideration. However, in both legal and policy discourse, the difference between arranged and forced marriage continues to be framed in binary terms and hinges on the concept of consent: the context in which consent is constructed largely remains unexplored. By examining the socio-cultural construction of personhood, especially womanhood, and the intersecting structural inequalities that constrain particular groups (...) of South Asian women in the UK, we argue that consent and coercion in relation to marriage can be better understood as two ends of a continuum, between which lie degrees of socio-cultural expectation, control, persuasion, pressure, threat and force. Women who face these constraints exercise their agency in complex and contradictory ways that are not always recognised by the existing exit-centred state initiatives designed to tackle this problem. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to make sense of the possibility of several forms of voluntarily undertaken “sexual obligation.” The claim that there can be sexual obligations is liable to generate worries with respect to concerns for gender justice, sexual freedom, and autonomy, especially if such obligations arise in a context of unjust background conditions. This paper takes such concerns seriously but holds that, despite unjust background circumstances, some practices that give rise to ethical sexual obligations can actually ameliorate some (...) of the problems caused by such background conditions. Similarly, despite a surface appearance that sexual obligation and sexual autonomy are in tension, this need not be the case. By understanding how practices and conventions regulate the way such obligations can arise, this paper shows how supporting the possibility of sexual obligation can actually facilitate individual efforts to achieve sexual autonomy. (shrink)

While Okin's feminist appropriation of Rawls's theory of justice requires that principles of justice be applied directly to the family, Rawls seems to require only that the family be minimally just. Rawls's recent proposal dulls the critical edge of liberalism by capitulating too much to those holding sexist doctrines. Okin's proposal, however, is insufficiently flexible. An alternative account of the relation of the political and the nonpolitical is offered by Jürgen Habermas.

In this paper, I aim to critically examine a set of assumptions that pervades human resource management and HR practices. I shall argue that they experience a remarkable ethics deficit, explain why this is so, and explore how the UN Global Compact labor principles may help taking ethics seriously in HRM. This paper contributes to the understanding and critical examination of the undisclosed beliefs underlying theory and practice in human resource management and to the examination of how the UN Global (...) Compact’s ideal of “decent work” may offer some promising avenues for the development of ethics in HRM. (shrink)