Virtual Library

Although family and migration scholars recognize that intimate partner violence (IPV) can motivate women’s movement between countries, little research considers IPV or other gendered family violence further back in women migrants’ life histories or explores the legacy of gendered family violence in cases where such violence is not the primary push factor. Here, we analyze in-depth interviews conducted among thirty-four Latin American women seeking asylum or international protection from a diversity of threats to comprehensively understand their experiences with childhood and adult family violence prior to migration. Our analysis reveals three key takeaways. First, IPV, incest, abandonment, and other forms of gendered family violence can characterize women’s family dynamics across the life course even when these experiences do not directly prompt migration. Second, amidst pervasive patriarchal norms, family violence has the power to destabilize women’s social circumstances and fracture their ties to family members in ways that indirectly encourage migration. Third, owing to these same gender norms, even when gendered family violence directly prompts migration, women may conceptualize their primary motive as protecting their children rather than themselves. These findings move beyond common conceptualizations of the family violence–migration nexus and highlight the breadth and implications of gendered family violence among migrants seeking protection from a broad spectrum of intra- and extra-familial threats.

The notion of intimate partner violence (IPV) as gender-based has been widely questioned by advocates of antifeminist men’s rights movements, who have claimed that societal disregard for men’s victimization in intimate relations is a central component of discrimination against men in contemporary societies. Similar views have been expressed by researchers as part of a gender-neutral discourse articulated in opposition to feminist, or gender-sensitive, understandings of IPV. To date, the views of helping professionals who work with IPV in terms of men’s victimization have been underexplored. This study traces the discursive process of problem construction concerning gender and IPV in social and crisis workers’ (N=21) talk about men’s victimization through focus group interviews conducted in Finland. The analysis shows that social and crisis workers’ sense-making closely aligns with talk about men’s victimization by men’s rights advocates; they construct and justify men’s victimization in intimate relations as a pressing societal concern in ways that both posit gender-specific normative conceptions as a significant, oppressive context for men victims and simultaneously obscure gendered structural inequalities by advocating gender-neutral understandings and solutions for IPV. The analysis highlights challenges in attending to IPV with a gender-sensitive approach in the context of widespread politicization of men’s victimization.

Since the late 1990s, a growing body of literature has researched the cross-national diffusion of policies that affect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities. Studies stemming from world society consider how state ties to newly emergent global norms regarding the treatment of LGBT communities are a driver of this process. A shortcoming of these studies, however, is that they do not adequately consider which type of ties to global norms are most meaningful for policy adoption. Considering the ever-increasing notion that LGBT rights are human rights, this study contrasts the role of human rights international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and LGBT INGOs on LGBT policy diffusion between 1991 and 2015. While previous studies assume a global norm exists, focus on a narrow band of policies, or restrict analyses to key geographic areas, this study develops a new measure of global LGBT norms and offers a comprehensive LGBT Policy Index for a global sample of 156 countries. Through pooled cross-sectional time series with fixed effects, the results demonstrate that human rights INGOs are not adequate vehicles for pressuring national adoption of LGBT policies. Instead, targeted advocacy efforts, embodied through LGBT INGOs, are required in order for policy adoption to transpire.

The international diffusion of similar laws and policies across nations is now a well-covered theme in sociology, but no one has yet asked what these similar laws and policies mean. We take the case of anti-female-genital-cutting policies in Egypt, Tanzania, and the U.S. and turn our attention to how local political situations interacted with international discourse. Functional relevance and international standing combined to affect levels of contestation. This, in turn, influenced how states chose to implement anti-FGC policies and the extent to which they distanced themselves from international actors. Exploring these issues uncovered power differences in acquiescence to international norms, going to the heart of multi-level power relations in the international system.

This article examines how judicial human rights in Europe have adopted the security politics that have swept across Europe in recent years and how, through the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR)decision‐making over the veil they have contributed to the precarity of the Muslim woman’s body. While suffering from stigmatization through securitization of the veil (I am using ‘veil’ to describe various garments such as the hijab, niqab and burqa. For the purposes of this article, this is a useful shorthand), covered Muslim women’s (The concept of Muslim women is a misnomer because it suggests that Muslim women constitute a homogeneous group when they are not. Without denying their heterogeneity, its use here is suggestive of the way it is used by securitizing agents and narratives) attempts at strategic human rights litigation against bans on their clothing, including landmark cases such as SAS v. France, have failed. Institutional human rights in Europe have hijacked national governments’ security narratives and thus been complicit in furthering the bodily vulnerability of covered Muslim women by sanctioning the public stripping of their clothing. This transgresses human rights’ fundamental, normative, commitment to preventing bodily wounding. It exposes the conditionality and limitation of judicial human rights and endorses an idealized version of the exposed woman as free and equal. Moreover, by abandoning its role as neutral arbiter or audience, the ECtHR exposes human rights’ ongoing link with neo‐colonialism. The Court’s decision‐making raises the question of how veiled women might mobilize to desecuritize the veil. I suggest a return to the politics of rights combined with the “rebellious cosmopolitanism” resonant with Camus’ politics to mount relentless protests against governance feminism and the Eurocentrism of institutional human rights for a return to “normal politics”.

The ability to decide if, when, and how often to reproduce is a human right and a biomedical and sociopolitical goal. Infertility impinges upon this right by restricting the ability of individuals and couples to meet their reproductive desires. While biomedical interventions to address infertility have proliferated recently, their distribution has been inequitable; inequalities in rates of infertility, infertility-specific distress, and access to reproductive healthcare to address infertility abound. Using a reproductive justice framework, and focusing on the United States, we examine the collection and utilization of the Integrated Fertility Survey Series, the inception and provisions of Title X, and the structural limitations of the private healthcare system. This analysis highlights systematic and linked exclusions of marginalized groups from reproductive health surveillance and the public and private provision of reproductive healthcare, including older, non-white, working class, LGBTQ, geographically remote, less educated, HIV-positive, institutionalized, and disabled individuals. Individuals who are excluded from infertility tracking, services, and treatment—the invisible infertile—are limited in their ability to realize their human right to reproductive health. Utilizing existing resources in public and private clinical spaces may be a useful starting point for addressing these disparities, but a broader commitment to equitable and inclusive surveillance and healthcare provision is also needed.

Neutrality has been the classic answer of the liberal state to religious and cultural difference. A number of multicultural critics recently debunked it as “myth” and group power in disguise. Comparing Islamic headscarf laws in France and Germany, I argue that neutrality is more complex and multifaceted than this. The comparison shows that neutrality leaves space for particularistic and universalistic, unity- and rights-oriented stances, the first located in the sphere of democratic politics, the second in the legal–constitutional sphere. Recent headscarf laws may then be understood as political backlash against the rights-oriented neutrality that has emerged in the legal spheres of both countries.

In this article, I build a new line of health inequality research that parallels the emerging structural racism literature. I develop theory and measurement for the concept of structural sexism and examine its relationship to health outcomes. Consistent with contemporary theories of gender as a multilevel social system, I conceptualize and measure structural sexism as systematic gender inequality at the macro level (U.S. state), meso level (marital dyad), and micro level (individual). I use U.S. state-level administrative data linked to geocoded data from the NLSY79, as well as measures of inter-spousal inequality and individual views on women’s roles as predictors of physical health outcomes in random-effects models for men and women. Results show that among women, exposure to more sexism at the macro and meso levels is associated with more chronic conditions, worse self-rated health, and worse physical functioning. Among men, macro-level structural sexism is also associated with worse health. However, greater meso-level structural sexism is associated with better health among men. At the micro level, internalized sexism is not related to physical health among either women or men. I close by outlining how future research on gender inequality and health can be furthered using a structural sexism perspective.

Why do so few live-in migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Singapore utilize their weekly rest-day entitlement? Using data drawn from 3,886 online profiles of prospective MDWs and 40 interview sessions with MDWs, employers, and manpower agencies, we demonstrate how the industry encourages a “logic of submission” around rest-days. Through processual analysis, we unearth multiple, repeated moments of capitulation at key moments in a MDW’s work-life: (1) their interactions with a recruitment agency while still in their home country; (2) their matching with an overseas employer; (3) the duration of their two-year contract; and (4) the time of contract renewal. Submission to less frequent rest-days can secure their employability and financial mobility but also further individuates the MDW within the employer’s household and may lead to the engraining of a habitus of submissiveness towards their employers that can open the door to workers’ exploitation. We demonstrate how nationality and work experience further inflect this logic of submission to motivate non-Filipina and inexperienced MDWs to request even fewer rest-days than their counterparts. By combining feminist migration scholarship on Asian MDWs, with a sociology of law analysis, we offer up an example of how the same act of submission can simultaneously embody both resistance and victimhood depending upon the temporal and spatial scale used, and varying interpretations of the rest-day benefit as a much-needed respite, a monetizable benefit, or a signaling mechanism.

Most studies of rape-law reform outcomes focus on single cases. We advance this literature by studying outcomes more systematically—leveraging new cross-national and longitudinal reform data—and showing that reform outcomes have both global and national determinants. Our exploratory analyses show three main findings: (1) Rape-law reforms are strongly associated with elevated police reporting between 1945 and 2005. (2) The strength of the association depends on domestic contexts. The association is stronger in countries characterized by individualism, women's mobilization, wealth, and education; it is weaker in countries with greater democracy and police strength. (3) The strength of the association also depends on global contexts. It is stronger in countries with dense linkages to world society and weaker under conditions of global institutionalization, as widespread diffusion gives rise to both ceremony without substance (i.e., domestic rape-law reforms without subsequent increases in reporting) and substance without ceremony (increased police reporting without antecedent reforms). In multivariate regression analyses, rape-law reforms, women's mobilization, and links to world society all have positive and significant effects on police reporting. It appears that both global and domestic contexts—together and independently—importantly shape policy and practice.