Tuesday, 13 May 2008

Feminism, Sexuality and the Law

Between 15 and 20 attended the annual day-long Keele Gender, Law and Sexuality postgraduate symposium. Participants were treated to a question and answer session with academics for whom their completed PhDs lay in the very recent past as well as a presentation on the vexing post-doctorate research application procedures. A number of students within the law school also took the opportunity to present some aspects of their research.

Up first was Wei Wei Cao who looked at the application of feminist legal and ethical methodologies to bioethical research. She began identifying the main streams of feminist thought; liberal, Marxist/socialist, radical and postmodern, and suggested there are two themes uniting these disparate perspectives: the distinction between sex and gender; and the recognition masculine culture has traditionally defined women and womanhood. What feminism does is to build on these core insights by using women's experience to help liberate women.

Where bioethics are concerned feminism opposes legal obstacles placed in the way of women's access to (reproductive) medical services. But, Cao argued, there has been a tendency for feminism to place emphasis at different times on legal arguments, and at others ethical arguments, instead of a more coherent approach. This failure to combine them effectively can lead to the enshrining of progressive legal rights on paper, but in practice, serving to perpetuate the patriarchal structures they aimed to combat. For example, in Cao's native China, abortion law is very liberal. But far from enhancing women's reproductive rights, it has strengthened patriarchy's hold over women's fertility by "encouraging" the abortion of female foetuses, particularly in rural China. Taken with the one child policy this has resulted in there being somewhere in the region of 50-60 million more (mainly young) men than women.

And as we know, in the more liberal societies of the West, abortion is still taboo. Many women who undergo the procedure often have to deal with the difficulties of doing so in silence.

Therefore, Cao suggests that while the fight for reproductive autonomy remains a key feminist objective it needs to be more sensitive to women's experience. It should avoid reifying legal objectives as the desired outcome and adopt a more sensitive, intuitive strategy. For Cao this 'relational feminism' would be about fusing the legal and the situational, of somehow encoding a moral dimension to prevent the abuse of reproductive freedoms. For example, how can China's abortion law be modified to assist the struggle against forced terminations? How can the law be reformed here to aid the movement against restrictions to access?

Suzanne Jenkins' paper was concerned with her methodological choices for her research on "higher end" sex work and prostitution. Feminist debates on sociological method have typically critiqued quantitative methodologies for suppressing information that does not fit the variables, decontextualises data and exploits it. Instead, research should embody feminist ethics and be reflexive, interactive and empowering. Taking this on board, feminism's desire for emancipatory context-sensitive research ill-disposes it toward computer mediated research methods - mainly because email or chat-based surveys and interviews do not take place face to face, and with it the rapport and dialogic elements of the process are absent.

Jenkins experience with CMC-based research suggests some of these concerns maybe overstated. Looking at a simple comparison of face to face and phone interviews with email and instant messenger discussions, the former tend to be more costly, more prone to digressions, more time-consuming and less convenient than the latter. In contrast, CMC requires less time, less money and above all negates the need to transcribe! Though the appreciation of non-verbal cues are missing in these research settings, Jenkins believed interviewees were more likely to take time over their answers and provide more detailed and precise responses. Also, contrary to feminist suspicions, following Nicola Illingworth's argument, online research can be more egalitarian and less intimidating than a corporeal encounter. The distance, the faux anonymity of the internet and the absence of the researcher can actually be liberating and allow respondents to unburden themselves to a degree not usually possible in a real-world meeting. Jenkins concluded with a call to feminists to embrace CMC, albeit critically.

The final session was Ella Hayes on the conceptualisation of domestic abuse in gay women's relationships. When she was working in a women's refuge she was struck by the small but significant number of women who were seeking sanctuary from abusive lesbian relationships, and simultaneously the gap in feminist literature on same sex domestic violence. Generally speaking, feminism has understandably concentrated on explaining the gendered patriarchal dynamics underpinning domestic and sexual violence perpetrated by men on women. But to use this as a lens through which to theorise such violence among lesbian relationships is, in Hayes' view, deeply unsatisfactory.

She argued available research, such as it exists, tries to explain the violent partner in terms of an internalisation of the male, of assuming a male role and 'being a man' as she pummels her partner to a pulp. This is problematic for a couple of reasons. First is the essentialisation of violence as inherently male, and second is the reinforcement of the heteronormative myth that all same sex partnerships adopt conventional gendered husband/wife roles. Instead research needs to look at the specific experiences of victims and perpetrators of this violence and generate theory on that basis instead of trying to fit it into pre-existing perspectives. This will not only be fruitful in this context, but could point to ways in which gay male and female-perpetrated domestic violence could be thought through, and offer insights to traditional approaches to "conventional" abuse.

Overall these contributions each in their own way helped illustrate fertile avenues for feminist thinking that can enrich sociological and "movement-relevant" theory alike. Whereas British feminism as a visible social movement may largely be in abeyance it nevertheless demonstrates that feminists are still at the cutting edge of social research, research that the rest of the left would do well to engage with.