Virtual Library

Controversy sets abortion apart from other issues studied by world society theorists, who consider the tendency for policies institutionalized at the global level to diffuse across very different countries. The authors conduct an event history analysis of the spread (however limited) of abortion liberalization policies from 1960 to 2009. After identifying three dominant frames (a women’s rights frame, a medical frame, and a religious, natural family frame), the authors find that indicators of a scientific, medical frame show consistent association with liberalization of policies specifying acceptable grounds for abortion. Women’s leadership roles have a stronger and more consistent liberalizing effect than do countries’ links to a global women’s rights discourse. Somewhat different patterns emerge around the likelihood of adopting an additional policy, controlling for first policy adoption. Even as support for women’s autonomy has grown globally, with respect to abortion liberalization, persistent, powerful frames compete at the global level, preventing robust policy diffusion.

Many sociologists have considered the intersection of race and gender in the production of social life, but while works on “intersectionality” have offered a useful paradigm for analyzing the experience of individual persons, a model for understanding how structures interact remains unclear. Appropriating Sewell's (1992) argument that structures consist of cultural schemas applied to resources, this article develops a more nuanced approach to intersectionality. It presents the argument that because the basis of race and gender as social structures is the inscription of cultural schemas on bodies, and because racial reproduction is predicated on the continued creation of these culturally inscribed bodies, race and gender as social structures necessarily intersect at the level of biological reproduction. The study uses this theoretical insight to analyze how physicians and suffragists contested the meaning of, and policy regarding, abortion in nineteenthcentury America. While most histories of abortion argue that nineteenth-century abortion politics concerned gender relations, this article argues that what was at stake was Anglo- Saxon control of the state and dominance of society. Abortion politics contested the proper use of a valuable social resource, the reproductive capacity of Anglo-Saxon women.

This paper examines why young women in rural Ethiopia decide to migrate as domestic workers to the Middle East. Based on survey data and 84 in-depth interviews, it explores the forces shaping young women’s aspirations and capabilities to migrate, challenging the dominant narratives of trafficking, deception, and victimization that surround this migration corridor. It finds, first, that migration to the Middle East is one migration trajectory embedded within a broader urban transition occurring across Ethiopia. For rural women, labor emigration is often a long-distance, short-term strategy to access the capital needed to realize a long-term, short-distance move to town. Second, the aspiration to migrate emerges at a particular moment in the life course, as young women transition from adolescence into adulthood and when local opportunities do not provide promising pathways to achieve their life aspirations. This paper shows why labor emigration can simultaneously be a reasonable, capabilities-enhancing choice for young women and a response to a critical lack of capabilities in other domains of their lives. Finally, through applying an aspiration–capability framework, this paper advances a theoretical approach that avoids the common binary between “forced” and “voluntary” migration and thus contributes to advancing research on other forms of precarious migration occurring under highly constrained conditions.

Digital space has provided an important platform for women by enabling them to defy religious and patriarchal values while rendering their demands more visible in the public sphere. By analyzing the stories of 3349 murdered women, consulting 57 activist‐published materials, studying 37 protest‐focused videos, and using digital ethnography, this article explores Turkish women's struggles against femicide. I propose the emancipatory and democratizing counterpublics as an analytical concept to demonstrate how women challenge epistemic injustice and male violence. To this end, I investigate the struggles of women by studying their use of digital space as a means of breaking the silence on femicide, creating data, disseminating knowledge, and seeking justice. This article highlights the essential role of new media technologies in empowering vulnerable groups through the generation of new forms of knowledge, the formation of collective memory, and the elimination of epistemic injustice in opposition to the ruling authorities. The present study contributes to our knowledge of the sociology of epistemic injustice by demonstrating how digital space plays a limited but critical role in the efforts of activists living under authoritarian regimes to defend their fundamental rights to survive and prevent femicide, which has a devastating impact on the lives of millions of women.

This article draws upon recent works in sociology, jurisprudence, and feminist theory in order to assess the ways in which feminism, and sex and gender more generally, have become intricately interwoven with punitive agendas in contemporary US politics. Melding existing theoretical discussions of penal trends with insights drawn from my own ethnographic research on the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States—the most recent domain of feminist activism in which a crime frame has prevailed against competing models of social justice—I elaborate upon the ways that neoliberalism and the politics of sex and gender have intertwined to produce a carceral turn in feminist advocacy movements previously organized around struggles for economic justice and liberation. Taking the anti-trafficking movement as a case study, I further demonstrate how human rights discourse has become a key vehicle both for the transnationalization of carceral politics and for the reincorporation of these policies into the domestic terrain in a benevolent, feminist guise. I conclude by urging greater and more nuanced attention to the operations of gender and sexual politics within mainstream analyses of contemporary modes of punishment, as well as a careful consideration of the neoliberal carceral state within feminist discussions of gender, sexuality, and the law.

By the time Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, many employers had created maternity leave programs. Analysts argue that they did so in response to the feminization of the workforce. This study charts the spread of maternity leave policies between 1955 and 1985 in a sample of 279 organizations. Sex discrimination law played a key role in the rise of maternity leave policies. Building on neoinstitutional theory, this article explores how the separation of powers shapes employer response to law. Details of the law are often specified in administrative rulings‐the weakest link in the law because they can be overturned by the courts and by Congress. Yet an administrative ruling requiring employers with disability leave programs to permit maternity leave, which employers successfully fought in the courts, was at least as effective as the identical congressional statute that replaced it. In the American context, the legal vulnerability of administrative rulings can draw attention to them, thus making the weakest link in the law surprisingly powerful.

Human rights entered the language and practice of humanitarian aid in the mid-1990s, and since then they have worked in parallel, complemented or competed with traditional frameworks ordering humanitarianism, including humanitarian principles, refugee law, and inter-agency standards. This article positions the study of rights within a sociology of praxis. It starts from a premise that interpretation and realisation of international norms depends on actors’ social negotiation. We seek to contribute to the sociology of rights with insights from legal pluralism and to analyse human rights as a semi-autonomous field in a multiplicity of normative frameworks. Based on cumulative research into humanitarian aid in disaster response, refugee care and protracted crises, the article explores how humanitarian agencies evoke different normative frameworks to legitimate their presence and programmes. How aid is shaped through the ‘rights speak’ of aid workers and recipients alike is illuminated by cases of programmes promoting women’s rights against sexual abuse from Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The so-called ‘gay age of consent’ was the most high-profile issue in UK lesbian, gay and bisexual politics during the 1990s. Campaigning for an equal age of consent provoked a series of extended public and parliamentary debates, concluding with the passage of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act (2000).This article analyses these debates to reveal emerging social relationships between heterosexuality and homosexuality. It is argued that age of consent debates witnessed the ascendance of a new ‘hegemony’ supporting ‘equality at 16’, constituted through the interweaving of knowledge-claims generated within the mainstream epistemologies of biomedicine, law, criminology and child welfare.The analysis integrates critical sociological perspectives on these various forms of knowledge, with reference to epistemological transformations occurring in late modernity. Particular attention focuses on claims concerning the age at which the fixity of sexual identities is established. It is argued that the debate’s structure enabled ‘equality at 16’ to be endorsed alongside the persistent operation of rationales of containment in the political mainstream, and hence that legal equality does not imply recognition of the equal value of homosexuality and heterosexuality. The implications are examined for ongoing struggles over sex offences, Section 28, and the social status of same-sex sexualities.

Between one-fifth and a third of people who are transgender have been refused treatment by a medical provider due to their gender identity. Yet, we know little about the factors that shape public opinion on this issue. We present results from a nationally representative survey experiment (N = 4,876) that examines how common justifications issued by providers for the denial of healthcare, and the race and gender identity of the person being denied care, intersect to shape public opinion concerning the acceptability of treatment refusal. We find that religious objections are viewed as less acceptable compared to a medical justification, in this case, inadequate training. However, the difference between religious objections and inadequate training is larger when the person being denied healthcare is White or Asian than when the person is Black or Latinx. Analysis of open-ended responses indicates the modest effect of doctor’s rationale on attitudes toward treatment refusal with respect to Black and Latinx patients is partially attributable to a racialized, free-market logic. Respondents were more likely to advocate for a doctor’s fundamental right to refuse service when evaluating Black and Latinx patients compared to White patients. We discuss the implications of these findings for intersectional approaches to trans studies and future public opinion research.

This study provides a first descriptive mapping of support for women’s equal rights in 34 African countries and assesses diverse theoretical explanations for variability in this support. Contrary to stereotypes of a homogeneously tradition-bound continent, African citizens report high levels of agreement with gender equality that are more easily understood with reference to global processes of ideational diffusion than to country-level differences in economic modernization or women’s public-sphere roles. Multivariate analyses suggest, however, that gender liberalism in Africa may be spreading through mechanisms not typically considered by world-society scholars: Support for equal rights is largely unrelated to countries’ formal ties to the world system, but it is stronger among persons who are more exposed to extra-local culture, including through internet and mobile phone usage, news access, and urban residency. Forces for gender liberalism are conditioned, moreover, by local religious cultures and gender structures.