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Book part
Publication date: 15 October 2013

Bianca Baggiarini

This chapter discusses how private military corporations (PMCs) and their employees have been implicated in discourses and practices of sexual violence. I examine how PMCs have…

Abstract

Purpose

This chapter discusses how private military corporations (PMCs) and their employees have been implicated in discourses and practices of sexual violence. I examine how PMCs have become seemingly permanent fixtures of international relations since the end of the Cold War. Furthermore, the purpose is to contribute to the ongoing conversations about PMCs and gender. To do this, I examine one instance of sexual violence in the context of PMCs. I argue that, since the legal case was forced into private arbitration, this maneuver reflects critical shifts in the normalizing power of law, away from a model of a social contract toward global neoliberal economics.

Design/methodology/approach

Utilizing postmodern feminist theory alongside a Foucauldian discourse analysis, I explore the case of one PMC contractor who alleged rape by multiple coworkers in Iraq. I examine the limitations of standpoint feminism in relation to theories and representations of sexual violence.

Social implications

I claim that military outsourcing raises serious concerns for feminists theorizing issues of gender and wartime sexual violence. PMC personnel are unaccountable when they are implicated in cases of sexual violence. Feminist critique is urgent given the various ways PMCs have been implicated in reproducing gender inequality and in sexual violence.

Originality/value

This chapter advances feminist knowledge about wartime sexual violence in a context where PMCs now play a significant role in the reproduction of practices that normalize sexual violence in public and private militarized spaces, both “at home” and “abroad.”

Details

Gendered Perspectives on Conflict and Violence: Part A
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78350-110-6

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 March 2004

Janice M. Irvine

Charts the unfortunate events surrounding the 1974 wedding of a couple who later, on their honeymoon, discovered that they had both had sexual relations with the minister. Billy…

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Abstract

Charts the unfortunate events surrounding the 1974 wedding of a couple who later, on their honeymoon, discovered that they had both had sexual relations with the minister. Billy James Hargis. Contents the revelations forced his resignation as he also admitted 3 further liaisons with male students at the American Christian College. Mentions Laud Humphreys and his work to classify the meeting of men for homosexual acts in the “tearoom”, a place where up to 20 men go for oral sex, without commitment, as some are heterosexual.

Details

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 24 no. 3/4/5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-333X

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 15 August 2022

Marla H. Kohlman

The objective of this discussion is to present an intersectional framework to better inform our reading and understanding of contemporary reports of sexual assault and sexual

Abstract

The objective of this discussion is to present an intersectional framework to better inform our reading and understanding of contemporary reports of sexual assault and sexual harassment. I posit that contemporary incidents of sexual violence must be read within the historical framework of slavery, where plantations served as the first site of sexual exploitation that has provided the ideological and practical scaffold for the continued erasure of the abuses of Black women and men in the workplace and under the law. This legacy, nonetheless, has yielded a coded language for according visibility to the “deep story” of rape and race in the United States.

Details

Gender Visibility and Erasure
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80382-593-9

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 21 April 2010

Daniel Skinner

Purpose – This chapter sketches the major historical shifts in American circumcision discourse and examines the sociopolitics of those shifts.Methodology/approach – The chapter…

Abstract

Purpose – This chapter sketches the major historical shifts in American circumcision discourse and examines the sociopolitics of those shifts.

Methodology/approach – The chapter centers on a critical analysis of competing narratives and knowledge claims about circumcision. It re-examines these narratives and claims, most of which are packaged in a rhetoric of health, specifically for their political valence.

Findings – The medical necessity of circumcision in the United States cannot be ascertained without attending to the disciplinary systems designed to produce and maintain religious, sexual and other cultural norms.

Contribution to the field – The chapter provides a clear and focused synthesis of many different literatures and contentions about circumcision that have yet to be brought together into a single narrative accessible for students and scholars of the medical humanities and medical politics.

Details

Understanding Emerging Epidemics: Social and Political Approaches
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84855-080-3

Book part
Publication date: 15 October 2013

Jane Kilby

The purpose of this chapter is twofold: to explore the difficulties and potential of turning to the perpetrator of sexual violence; and to track the affective economy of engaging…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this chapter is twofold: to explore the difficulties and potential of turning to the perpetrator of sexual violence; and to track the affective economy of engaging with perpetrator accounts.

Design/methodology/approach

This chapter will consider one of the earliest feminist studies of incest, Sandra Butler’s (1978) Conspiracy of Silence: The Trauma of Incest, followed by an analysis of Philippe Bourgois’ (1995, 1996, 2004) ethnographic study of Puerto Rican crack dealers. These are important studies for the fact that both Butler and Bourgois let the men speak freely of their violence, which for the Puerto Rican cracker dealers include tales of gang rape.

Findings

The chapter endorses the need to study the perpetrator, arguing that it is imperative to ensure the demythologization of perpetrators. It finds also that feminists must explore how they will teach emotionally difficult material, and how they negotiate the legacy of radical feminism. The chapter concludes that there are times when politics requires little theoretical innovation, requiring instead a willingness to repeat known insights and to fight back with words.

Social implications

This chapter has implications for classroom practice.

Originality/value

The value of this chapter is its demand to reconsider the doing of feminism in the classroom when the split between feminist theory and activism appears greater than ever.

Details

Gendered Perspectives on Conflict and Violence: Part A
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78350-110-6

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 1 January 2004

Verta Taylor, Leila J. Rupp and Joshua Gamson

This paper presents a theoretical definition of protest that overcomes the bifurcation of politics and culture in mainstream social movement research. The model is grounded in a…

Abstract

This paper presents a theoretical definition of protest that overcomes the bifurcation of politics and culture in mainstream social movement research. The model is grounded in a study of drag performances, which have a long history in same-sex communities as vehicles for expressing gay identity, creating and maintaining solidarity, and staging political resistance. Extending Tilly’s concept of repertoires of contention, we propose the term “tactical repertoires” to refer to protest episodes, and we identify three elements of all tactical repertoires: contestation, intentionality, and collective identity. We combine social constructionist perspectives on gender and sexuality, the social movement literature, and writings in performance studies to understand how drag performances function as tactical repertoires of the gay and lesbian movement. We argue that because they are entertaining, drag shows illuminate gay life for mainstream audiences and provide a space for the construction of collective identities that confront and rework gender and sexual boundaries.

Details

Authority in Contention
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-037-1

Abstract

Details

Pedagogies of Possibility for Negotiating Sexuality Education with Young People
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78769-743-0

Open Access
Book part
Publication date: 1 December 2022

Heike Pantelmann and Tanja Wälty

Sexual harassment and violence are taboo topics at German universities. Accordingly, there is a large gap in research on the prevalence and functioning of sexual harassment and…

Abstract

Sexual harassment and violence are taboo topics at German universities. Accordingly, there is a large gap in research on the prevalence and functioning of sexual harassment and assault in higher education as well as on social, cultural, and organizational conditions that foster and reproduce gender-based violence at universities. Previous research and our own data suggest that there is a perception among students, faculty and staff that normalizes, trivializes, and even legitimizes the problem. Based on a quantitative survey with students on the prevalence of sexual harassment and violence as well as the results of our analysis of how German universities deal with the issue, we relate this perception to the organizational structures of the higher-education system and discuss historically evolved hierarchies and androcentric structures as well as their reformulation in the wake of neoliberalization as causal for the tabooing and hiding of sexual harassment at German universities.

Details

Diversity and Discrimination in Research Organizations
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-959-1

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 15 December 2005

Dayo F. Gore

This article examines the early post-World War II civil rights organizing of black women radicals affiliated with the organized left. It details the work of these women in such…

Abstract

This article examines the early post-World War II civil rights organizing of black women radicals affiliated with the organized left. It details the work of these women in such organizations as the Civil Rights Congress and Freedom newspaper as they fought to challenge the unjust conviction and sentencing of black defendants caught in the racial machinations of U.S. local and state criminal justice systems. These campaigns against what was provocatively called “legal lynching” formed a cornerstone of African American civil rights activism in the early postwar years. In centering the civil rights politics and organizing of these black women radicals, a more detailed picture emerges of the Communist Party-supported anti-legal lynching campaigns. Such a perspective moves beyond a view of civil rights legal activism as solely the work of lawyers, to examining the ways committed activists within the U.S. left, helped to build this legal activism and sustain an important left base in the U.S. during the Cold War.

Details

Crime and Punishment: Perspectives from the Humanities
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-245-0

Book part
Publication date: 17 September 2021

Manisha Desai

In this chapter, I revisit an important debate about dalit feminism that took place in the pages of the Economic and Political Weekly, a leading publication in India, from 1995 to…

Abstract

In this chapter, I revisit an important debate about dalit feminism that took place in the pages of the Economic and Political Weekly, a leading publication in India, from 1995 to 2000 (Datar, 1999; Guru, 1995; Rege, 1998, 2000). Reexamining this debate in the context of contemporary dalit and savarna feminist activism, I show that while the debate was key in making visible (1) the heretofore unmarked savarna nature of autonomous feminism and (2) the male domination of dalit politics, in the decades following the debate, dalit politics remains primarily male, and autonomous feminism while cognizant of and in conversation with dalit feminism is not necessarily transformed by dalit standpoint. Further, dalit feminism itself while visible nationally and transnationally has focused at home largely on “difference,” from savarna feminism without adequately addressing the differences among dalit subjectivities in neoliberal India, limiting the possibilities of radical, coalitional politics.

Details

Producing Inclusive Feminist Knowledge: Positionalities and Discourses in the Global South
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-171-6

Keywords

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