Virtual Library

In Faces at the Bottom of the Well, civil rights activist and legal scholar Derrick Bell uses allegory and historical example to argue that racism is an integral and permanent part of American society. African American struggles for equality are doomed to fail so long as the majority of whites do not see their own well-being threatened by the status quo. Bell calls on African Americans to face up to this unhappy truth and abandon a misplaced faith in inevitable progress. Only then will blacks, and those whites who join with them, be in a position to create viable strategies to alleviate the burdens of racism. "Freed of the stifling rigidity of relying unthinkingly on the slogan 'we shall overcome, '" he writes, "we are impelled both to live each day more fully and to examine critically the actual effectiveness of traditional civil rights remedies.

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.

The development of feminist jurisprudence in recent years has made a rich and fruitful contribution to legal theory. Few areas of domestic law have avoided the scrutiny of feminist writers, who have exposed the gender bias of apparently neutral systems of rules. A central feature of many western theories about law is that the law is an autonomous entity, distinct from the society it regulates. A legal system is regarded as different from a political or economic system, for example, because it operates on the basis of abstract rationality, and is thus universally applicable and capable of achieving neutrality and objectivity. These attributes are held to give the law its special authority. More radical theories have challenged this abstract rationalism, arguing that legal analysis cannot be separated from the political, economic, historical, and cultural context in which people live. Some theorists argue that the law functions as a system of beliefs that make social, political, and economic inequalities appear natural. Feminist jurisprudence builds on certain aspects of this critical strain in legal thought. It is much more focused and concrete, however, and derives its theoretical force from immediate experience of the role of the legal system in creating and perpetuating the unequal position of women.

Whether in characterizing Catharine MacKinnon’s theory of gender as itself pornographic or in identifying liberalism as unable to make good on its promises, Wendy Brown pursues a central question: how does a sense of woundedness become the basis for a sense of identity? Brown argues that efforts to outlaw hate speech and pornography powerfully legitimize the state: such apparently well-intentioned attempts harm victims further by portraying them as so helpless as to be in continuing need of governmental protection. “Whether one is dealing with the state, the Mafia, parents, pimps, police, or husbands,” writes Brown, “the heavy price of institutionalized protection is always a measure of dependence and agreement to abide by the protector’s rules.” True democracy, she insists, requires sharing power, not regulation by it; freedom, not protection.

Refusing any facile identification with one political position or another, Brown applies her argument to a panoply of topics, from the basis of litigiousness in political life to the appearance on the academic Left of themes of revenge and a thwarted will to power. These and other provocations in contemporary political thought and political life provide an occasion for rethinking the value of several of the last two centuries’ most compelling theoretical critiques of modern political life, including the positions of Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, and Foucault.

This article situates forced migration amid intersections of burgeoning human insecurities that force increasing numbers of people to leave their homes and become susceptible to exploitation. Drawing upon data on trafficking in Pakistan, the author argues that marginalized groups often go through multiple migrations that can include episodes of trafficking for sex, labor, or other purposes. The disjuncture between policies and realities on the ground, and the trend of current interventions do little to address the human security of these migrants. The article emphasizes that the human security frame provides a more nuanced human rights-based approach to analyze this form of migration and address the root causes and risks associated with the forced displacement of people.

Sociologists have long recognized that social problems do not derive solely from objective conditions but from a process of collective definition. At the core of some social issues are framing competitions, struggles over the production of ideas and meanings. This article examines competing cultural meanings about the fat body. Through frame analysis of organizational materials, I map the contested field of obesity and document three cultural frames—medical frame, social justice frame, and market choice frame—as represented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), and the food industry group the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), respectively. Using the “framing matrix,” I explore each frame's key signature elements and discuss its social and cultural significance. Notably, each frame leads to different outcomes for social equality and how society thinks about fat bodies, health, and public policy.

Growing recognition of bioethics' shortcomings, associated in large part with its heavy reliance on abstract principles, or so-called principlism, has led many scholars to propose that the field should be reformed or reconceptualised. Principlism is seen to de-contextualise the process of ethical decision-making, thus restricting bioethics' contributions to debate and policy on new and emergent biotechnologies. This article examines some major critiques of bioethics and argues for an alternative normative approach; namely, a sociology of bio-knowledge focusing on human rights. The article discusses the need for such an approach, including the challenges posed by the recent rise of ‘the bio-economy’. It explores some potential alternative bases for a normative sociology of bio-knowledge, before presenting the elements of the proposed human rights-focused approach. This approach, it is argued, will benefit from the insights and concepts offered by various fields of critical scholarship, particularly the emergent sociology of human rights, science and technology studies, Foucaultian scholarship, and feminist bioethics.

The history of the genesis and institutionalization of the European Convention on Human Rights offers a striking account of the innovation of a new legal subject and practice—European human rights—that went along with, but also beyond, the political and legal genesis of Europe following World War II. The rise of the European human rights institutions shows not only how law and lawyers played key roles in the early politics of European integration but also how the subtle combination of law and politics—as both national and international strategies—continued to play a decisive part in the institutionalization of European human rights. The article generally argues that the interplay between law and diplomacy had a fundamental impact on the innovation of European law and that lawyers capable of playing an intermediary role between the two were particularly central to this development.

The international campaign to eliminate female genital cutting (FGC) has, since the early 1990s, actively attempted to divorce itself from a health framework, adopting instead a human rights framework to justify intervention. Several key questions emerge regarding the prominent placement of FGC in the international human rights movement: What are the ramifications of framing FGC as a human rights violation? What actions are mandated by a human rights approach? What perils and pitfalls potentially arise from the adoption of a rights-based framework, and how might they be avoided? In exploring these questions it becomes clear that, although a human rights approach is promising, careful deliberation is required to develop action strategies that offer both protection and respect for the culture and autonomy of those women and families concerned.

This article examines how undocumented immigrants mobilize for greater rights in inhospitable political and discursive environments. We would expect that such environments would dissuade this particularly vulnerable group of immigrants from mobilizing in high profile campaigns because such campaigns would carry high risks (deportation) and have little chance of success. However, we have witnessed many mobilizations by undocumented immigrants in both Europe and the United States over the past 20 years. This article uses the case of undocumented youths in the United States (DREAMers) to examine how a group of undocumented immigrants have overcome important barriers and become a powerful voice for immigrant rights in the country. The article suggests that while undocumented immigrants faced inhospitable contexts, cracks and “niche-openings” they continued to present themselves to groups with the right set of cultural, legal, and economic attributes. Immigrants in possession of these attributes (in this case, youth) could target a niche-opening and argue that they are particularly deserving of legalization. This article also highlights an important dilemma: In contexts characterized by general closure and hostility, narrow mobilizations targeting niche-openings provide the only path to legal status for some, but they can also differentiate (discursively and legally) between “deserving” and “undeserving” undocumented immigrants. Differentiation can contribute to stratifying the immigrant population, with those deemed more deserving facing greater rights and entitlements and those deemed less deserving facing greater restrictions and repression. This carries the risk of magnifying normative and legal inequalities between immigrant groups while introducing many points of conflict within the broader immigrant rights movement.