This essay illustrates the potential of religion to both oppress and empower women, focusing on the role of Buddhism in Thailand in relation to the trafficking of women for the sex industry. After describing a number of ways that traditional Thai Buddhist culture functions to legitimate the trafficking industry, and thereby deny the human rights of women involved in sexual slavery, I draw on the analogy of Christianity in relation to slavery in the ante-bellum American South to (...) make the case that Buddhist teachings have the potential to oppose and condemn practices of sexual slavery as well as to justify and legitimate them. The essay concludes by discussing what are perhaps the most effective sources for empowering women involved in trafficking within the Thai Buddhist tradition. (shrink)

This article argues that some denialists of Japan’s military sexual slavery are responsible for past epistemic injustices. In the literature on epistemic responsibility, backward- and forward-looki...

Abstract:This paper explores multiple encounters between activist-survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery (“comfort women” or halmonis, meaning “elderly women” or “grannies” in Korean) and solidarity activists. I mainly focus on the stories of two foundational figures in the ongoing justice campaign for the survivors, both of whom faced that forceful military act (between 1932 and 1945) as teenage girls in colonized Korea, although in dramatically different ways: Yun Chung-ok, a leading scholar and activist who, having managed to escape (...) the fate of many other peers, first spoke out about Japanese military sexual slavery, and Kim Bok-dong, a survivor and human rights activist. This paper will address the multiple encounters and dialogues of memories to resituate subjects, which led to overcoming personal trauma and reaching out to others and continues to drive the redress movement. Drawing on oral history interviews, feminist ethnography, and various documented resources including survivors’ testimonies, which have been archived for around twenty years as part of my own scholar-activist work, I juxtapose these women’s lives to show how a community of responsibility has been formed to decolonize androcentric history. The women involved in the movement for the resolution of the Japanese military sexual slavery issue reinterpreted their experiences as having been formed by imperialism, colonialism, and patriarchy. While caring for and healing with one another, they suggested the possibility of a new subject formation. Through mutually constructed identities, activist-survivors broke away from social stigma and became agents who led transformation of a postcolonial society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies Edited by Bernadette J. BrootenEboni Marshall TurmanBeyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies EDITED BY BERNADETTE J. BROOTEN New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 352 pp. $30.00In her introduction to this edited collection of essays, Bernadette Brooten asserts that religion has long been complicit in the construction and practice of the logic of human enslavement. She (...) provocatively claims that religion and the racial and sexual norms that emerge from religious inquiry have historically [End Page 236] designated women and other bodies that defy white male normativity as inherently “slaveable.” She further contends that the religious and sexual legacies of slavery are not relegated to a moment in time, now past and gone. Rather, contemporary society is the heir of a flesh-and-blood hierarchy that continues to shape its “social values, religious thought, and economic realities” (3). The remnants of enslavement persist among human communities not only as a lived reality that, as Mende Nazer suggests in the epilogue, continues to threaten the lives and life chances of poor women and children throughout the world, but also as a blood memory—a recollection that runs so deep into the social fabric of our theopolitical worlds that in spite of slavery’s superficial obscurity, it remains as the pulse of human everydayness, lurking beneath the surface of daily exchanges.The insidious legacies of slavery that emerge from bigoted God-talk promote dehumanizing racial-sexual stereotypes, dictate the quality of marriage and intimate relationships, corrupt and exploit sexual expression, and drive the development of public policy and law in ways that disproportionately marginalize and disempower women and girls. Consequently, this volume proposes resistance and calls readers to communal action that renounces slavery in all its forms.In parts 2, 3, and 4, the essays detail the racial, religious, and sexual character of slavery by focusing on the experience of black women’s oppression in America. This focus on the varieties of black women’s enslavement—from legal chattel slavery and social-political bondage to incarceration—provides the groundwork for the volume’s subsequent engagement of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic law, which demonstrates how slavery and its concomitant assignment and rationalization of embodied inferiority has been primarily cultivated by sacred texts. In her essay, for example, Sheila Briggs explicitly connects religious belief and dehumanizing practices; she ingeniously links religious textual interpretation with the sexual violence of early Christian gladiatorial practices in ancient amphitheaters.In parts 5 and 6, the volume reintroduces the substance of slavery’s legacies by way of a historical survey that connects enslavement across social contexts. In linking Debra Blumenthal’s discussion of slavery in late medieval Spain and Catherine Clinton’s analysis of the racial hypocrisies of Thomas Jefferson and Strom Thurmond to the problem of the Bible and the oppression it yields for sexual minorities as uncovered by Sylvester Johnson, Brooten exposes the vast and prevailing scope of slavery that affects all of us—women and girls, men and boys, sexual minorities, and even those who dare to fall in love across racial boundaries. In parts 7 and 8, Frances Smith Foster and Dwight Hopkins directly engage the “herstories” of black women who are marked by the legacies of slavery and yet who have consistently resisted in creative and effective ways (271). [End Page 237]Undoubtedly, this volume is a critical contribution to the field insofar as it uncovers an enduring social issue that continues to influence how we engage each other across differences of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The breadth of its disciplinary scope proves to be overwhelming at times. Nonetheless, Brooten’s constructive method serves well to emphasize the titanic complexity of enslavement and the challenge of its demolition.Eboni Marshall TurmanDuke Divinity SchoolCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies Edited by Bernadette J. BrootenEboni Marshall TurmanBeyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies EDITED BY BERNADETTE J. BROOTEN New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 352 pp. $30.00In her introduction to this edited collection of essays, Bernadette Brooten asserts that religion has long been complicit in the construction and practice of the logic of human enslavement. She (...) provocatively claims that religion and the racial and sexual norms that emerge from religious inquiry have historically [End Page 236] designated women and other bodies that defy white male normativity as inherently “slaveable.” She further contends that the religious and sexual legacies of slavery are not relegated to a moment in time, now past and gone. Rather, contemporary society is the heir of a flesh-and-blood hierarchy that continues to shape its “social values, religious thought, and economic realities” (3). The remnants of enslavement persist among human communities not only as a lived reality that, as Mende Nazer suggests in the epilogue, continues to threaten the lives and life chances of poor women and children throughout the world, but also as a blood memory—a recollection that runs so deep into the social fabric of our theopolitical worlds that in spite of slavery’s superficial obscurity, it remains as the pulse of human everydayness, lurking beneath the surface of daily exchanges.The insidious legacies of slavery that emerge from bigoted God-talk promote dehumanizing racial-sexual stereotypes, dictate the quality of marriage and intimate relationships, corrupt and exploit sexual expression, and drive the development of public policy and law in ways that disproportionately marginalize and disempower women and girls. Consequently, this volume proposes resistance and calls readers to communal action that renounces slavery in all its forms.In parts 2, 3, and 4, the essays detail the racial, religious, and sexual character of slavery by focusing on the experience of black women’s oppression in America. This focus on the varieties of black women’s enslavement—from legal chattel slavery and social-political bondage to incarceration—provides the groundwork for the volume’s subsequent engagement of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic law, which demonstrates how slavery and its concomitant assignment and rationalization of embodied inferiority has been primarily cultivated by sacred texts. In her essay, for example, Sheila Briggs explicitly connects religious belief and dehumanizing practices; she ingeniously links religious textual interpretation with the sexual violence of early Christian gladiatorial practices in ancient amphitheaters.In parts 5 and 6, the volume reintroduces the substance of slavery’s legacies by way of a historical survey that connects enslavement across social contexts. In linking Debra Blumenthal’s discussion of slavery in late medieval Spain and Catherine Clinton’s analysis of the racial hypocrisies of Thomas Jefferson and Strom Thurmond to the problem of the Bible and the oppression it yields for sexual minorities as uncovered by Sylvester Johnson, Brooten exposes the vast and prevailing scope of slavery that affects all of us—women and girls, men and boys, sexual minorities, and even those who dare to fall in love across racial boundaries. In parts 7 and 8, Frances Smith Foster and Dwight Hopkins directly engage the “herstories” of black women who are marked by the legacies of slavery and yet who have consistently resisted in creative and effective ways (271). [End Page 237]Undoubtedly, this volume is a critical contribution to the field insofar as it uncovers an enduring social issue that continues to influence how we engage each other across differences of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The breadth of its disciplinary scope proves to be overwhelming at times. Nonetheless, Brooten’s constructive method serves well to emphasize the titanic complexity of enslavement and the challenge of its demolition.Eboni Marshall TurmanDuke Divinity SchoolCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Cet article analyse quatre affaires qui ont eu lieu entre 1902 et 1906 dans la région de Kayes (Mali), et qui montrent l’importance de la sexualité et du couple comme enjeux complexes de pouvoir entre colonisateurs et colonisé-e-s. Ces affaires permettent en particulier d’identifier la fabrique coloniale et genrée de catégories spécifiques telles que esclavage, mariage et sexualité, de même que leurs contestations et leurs reconfigurations par des acteurs et actrices finalement peu étudié-e-s dans l’histoire du Mali : les femmes (...) esclaves et les agents subalternes de la colonisation. (shrink)

The work of Cox, Bales, Dingwaney, and others is cited in an effort to construct an argument about the special rights violations of contemporary slavery. It is contended that two forms, debt bondage and sexual slavery, are related and bear close examination.

The purpose of this article is to examine Salvian of Marseilles’ (ca. 400–490 CE) invective in De gubernatione Dei against his Christian audience pertaining to their sexual roles and behaviour as slaveholders. It is argued that rather than considering the oppressive practice of slavery in itself as a reason for moral rebuke and divine punishment, Salvian highlights the social shame that arose from the sexual vices Christian slaveholders committed with their slaves. Salvian forwards three accusations against his (...) opponents that concern slavery and sexual vice. Firstly, he asserts that Christian slaveholders have no self-control. Secondly, the polyamorous relationships slaveholders have with numerous slaves resemble shameful and adulterous unions, namely concubinage and even polygamy. Thirdly, Roman-Christian slaveholders behave in a worse manner than barbarians (i.e. the argument of ethnicity). Each of these accusations is examined in detail in the study. (shrink)

Sexual violence during war varies in extent and takes distinct forms. In some conflicts, sexual violence is widespread, yet in other conflicts—including some cases of ethnic conflict—it is quite limited. In some conflicts, sexual violence takes the form of sexual slavery; in others, torture in detention. I document this variation, particularly its absence in some conflicts and on the part of some groups. In the conclusion, I explore the relationship between strategic choices on the part (...) of armed group leadership, the norms of combatants, dynamics within small units, and the effectiveness of military discipline. (shrink)

In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's "The Damnation of Women," which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.

: In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's "The Damnation of Women," which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.

In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's “The Damnation of Women,” which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.

In the past few years, there has been growing public awareness of the existence of slavery. This may be attributed in part to the media coverage of the civil war raging in the Sudan which, among other things, has revealed a bustling market in human trafficking. However, little or no attention has been directed to several other regions in the world, including, for example, the Arabian Gulf States, where rapid modernization tends to hide a gruesome reality of modern day (...) slavery. This paper examines three forms of slavery in the United Arab Emirates, used here as a case study—the exploitation of children as camel jockeys; the sexual enslavement of women; and the migrant workers who enslave themselves. By relating the data on present-day slavery to both the history of this ancient institution and to our current definitions of slavery, the author concludes that what is needed is a deeper awareness of the scope, nature, and forms of modern day slavery and a global effort to abolish it. (shrink)

20 years since the negotiation of the Palermo Protocol on Trafficking in 2000, the anti-trafficking field has gone from an early, almost exclusive preoccupation with sex work to addressing extreme exploitation in a range of labour sectors. While this might suggest a reduced focus on the nature of the work performed and a greater focus on the conditions under which it is performed, in reality, anti-trafficking discourse remains in the grip of polarised positions on sex work even as the carceral (...) effects of anti-trafficking law become evident and the Swedish model of criminalising the purchase of sexual services spreads. In this article, I demonstrate how despite the recent discursive shifts to ‘modern slavery’ and ‘forced labour’, the anti-trafficking transnational legal order itself reinforces, rather than diffuses cultures of sex work exceptionalism. The growing international sex workers’ movement has offered resistance, yet a closer look at the movement and the widespread support that it has garnered for decriminalisation from international organisations, while valuable, helps reveal the greatest cost yet of anti-trafficking discourse, namely, the inability of the sex workers’ movement to produce a sophisticated theory of regulation to reduce levels of exploitation within sex work, one which is commensurate with the informality and heterogeneity of sex markets the world over. Finally, to the extent that neoabolitionist projects derive legitimacy from interventions abroad, especially in the global South, I chronicle the edifice on which it rests in one such context, namely India, to demonstrate how countries in the global South are not merely conduits for the global North’s preoccupation with moral gentrification through neo-abolitionism, but rather, that the circuits of global governmentality while influential, are highly contingent, thus producing opportunities for creative forms of mobilisation by sex workers. (shrink)

The paper "The Dirt on 'White Slavery': The Construction of Prostitution Narratives in Early Twentieth-Century America" analyses the development of white slavery discourses in Progressive Era newspapers, reform books and trial records. White slavery involved both gendered and racialized fears of coercive prostitution. These prostitution narratives are used to uncover early twentieth-century American perceptions of appropriate femininity, inherent female weakness, and the sexual threat of racial and ethnic minorities.

In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's “The Damnation of Women,” which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.

In Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and James Moore contend that “Darwin would put his utmost into sexual selection because the subject intrigued him, no doubt, but also for a deeper reason: the theory vindicated his lifelong commitment to human brotherhood”. Without questioning Desmond and Moore’s evidence, I will raise some puzzles for their view. I will show that attention to the structure of Darwin’s arguments in the Descent of Man shows that they are far from straightforward. As Desmond (...) and Moore note, Darwin seems to have intended sexual selection in non-human animals to serve as evidence for sexual selection in humans. However, Darwin’s account of sexual selection in humans was different from the canonical cases that Darwin described at great length. If explaining the origin of human races was the main reason for introducing sexual selection, and if sexual selection was a key piece of Darwin’s anti-slavery arguments, then it is puzzling why Darwin would have spent so much time discussing cases that did not really support his argument for the origin of human races, and it is also puzzling that his argument for the origin of human races would be so poor. (shrink)

The era of globalization has been accompanied by an increased awareness of private wrongs as well as acceleration of many forms of cross-border labor exploitation. The essay explores how refined distinctions between forced and free sex work could improve anti-trafficking policies. It addresses the understudied linkages between other forms of migration and sexual exploitation and suggests a triage approach to all forms of labor exploitation—based on harms rather than type of labor or victim. A better understanding of freedom, sex, (...) and development will allow us to expand a human rights approach to these private wrongs. The best anti-trafficking policy is one of universal, indivisible human rights. Victims of sexual exploitation need the same things as all migrants and all workers—recognition, monitoring, resources, access to justice, and organization. (shrink)

The portrayal of the enslaved woman Fotis in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses exposes the intersection of gender, sexuality, and slavery. Apuleius’ novel allows a window into interactions beyond the relationship of slaveholder and the enslaved person over whom s/he claimed dominium. Centering Fotis in Apuleius’ narrative shows how a discourse of slavery worked: an enslaved woman is made present as a body that may be sexualized and surrounded with fantasies of sex and violence. The sexual episodes of Lucius and (...) Fotis reveal an aesthetic, facilitated by the system of slavery, of consuming bodies, watching bodies consumed by violence, and framing effacement and degradation as romance, an operation of power at the core of chattel slavery. (shrink)

No international agreement has been completely effective in reducing slavery. This stems in part from the evolution of slavery agreements and the inclination on the part of the authors of conventions to include other practices as part of the slavery defintion, resulting in a confusion of the practices and definitions of slavery. What has been missing is a classification that is dynamic and yet sufficiently universal to identify slavery no matter how it evolves. We have (...) attempted to build on theories and examples to clarify the identification of slavery by focusing on an irreducible core of three elements. Assessing the presence of all three can then be applied to a variety of social relationships: first, the complete control of one personal by another; second, appropriation of labor power; and third, the enforcement of these conditoins by threats or acts of violence. Many practices identified in international agreements have some but not all of these three aspects; all three are present in traditional forms of slavery, bonded labor, forced prostitution, and sexual slavery. Effective research and legislation against slavery is important, as it affects an estimated 27 million people worldwide, and as slavery is on the increase now that many developing countries are forced to compete for income in a global economy. Finally it is important to remember that slavery, like all social and economic relationships, evolves over time. Any definition that is based on a historical form of slavery will soon lose its power to capture new forms of slavery within its aegis. Our understanding and our definition of slavery must become as dynamic as the phenomenon itself. (shrink)

I shall forgive the white South much in its final judgment day: I shall forgive its slavery, for slavery is a world-old habit; I shall forgive its fighting for a well-lost cause, and for remembering that struggle with tender tears; I shall forgive its so-called “pride of race,” the passion of its hot blood, and even its dear, old, laughable strutting and posing; but one thing I shall never forgive, neither in this world nor the world to come: (...) its wanton and continued and persistent insulting of the black womanhood which it sought and seeks to prostitute to its lust. The assumption that one can privilege gender, in advance, as a category, setting the terms of inclusion without fully considering those for whom gender alone fails to capture the multiplicity of experience, is itself an Orientalist move. (shrink)

Aping apes: Edgar Allan Poe's "The murders in the Rue Morgue" and Richard Wright's Native son -- Slavery's bestiary: Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus tales -- Autoimmunity and ante-racism: Philip Roth's The human stain -- Ashamed of shame: J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.

As technology continues to grow (and sex-robots gain a more prominent position in our society), so too does concern about the way they will impact our lives and our sexuality. While many ethicists have started to assess what this impact could be (and if it would be positive or negative), the challenges and opportunities presented by sex-robots span over a wide range of topics and cannot be assessed easily. Hence, in this paper, I will attempt to categorize the main questions (...) concerning the ethics of sexual robotics in order to help ethicists gather their thoughts on this new technology. While doing so, I will principally identify four overarching issues: (1) how robots’ representation of human sexuality affects human gender issues; (2) how robots could potentially be utilized for medical purposes; (3) if robots could possibly deceive their users; (4) if sex-robots could end up as a new form of sex-slaves. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 409 Ariane Cruz Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable in this poem is not consent I do not consent —June Jordan, (...) Poem about My Rights Introduction: The Evidence of Slime Slavery, itself a kind of “slime,” remains an active marketplace for the production of Black female sexuality and its representations.1 The impact of chattel slavery and the pervasive rape of Black female slaves on modern 1. In using the term “Black women,” I am referring to African American women for whom the history of chattel slavery in the Americas has produced the socio-historical conditions that uniquely inform Black female subjectivity and sexual politics. My use of this term is not to essentialize Black American womanhood; rather, like Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I use the term to gesture to a Black women’s standpoint influenced by the condition and experience of gendered and racialized abjection, a “common experience of being Black women in a society that denigrates women of African descent.” Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990), 22. In this essay, I focus on Black women who practice BDSM, a small but nonetheless heterogeneous group of women in the already-marginalized larger kink community. 410 Ariane Cruz constructions and representations of Black women has been well theorized, in particular by a number of Black feminist scholars who have worked to rupture what Darlene Clark Hine terms the “culture of dissemblance,” the politics of silence shrouding expressions of Black female sexuality.2 While the antebellum legacy of sexual violence on Black women is substantive, what has not been effectively considered is how Black women deliberately employ the shadows of slavery in the deliverance and/or receiving of sexual pleasure. That is, how the “slime”—a staining sludge of pain and violence—becomes a type of lubricant to stimulate sexual fantasies, access sexual pleasure, and heighten sexual desire. In this paper, I explore how Black women facilitate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power in their performances in the fetish realm of BDSM.3 Situating my analysis in the context of hardcore BDSM Internet pornography and the controversial praxis of race play, I argue that BDSM is a critical site from which to reimagine the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. Race play is a BDSM practice that explicitly uses race to script power exchange and the dynamics of domination and submission. Most commonly an interracial erotic play, race play employs racism, often involving the exchange of racist language, role-playing, and the construction of racist scenes. Eroticizing not just racism, but the miscegenation taboo, racial difference, and (hyper) 2. See Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–920. For more on Black female slave sexual assault and its aftermath, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann duCille, “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (1990): 102–27; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory,” in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 100–24; and Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness As Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. 3. BDSM is an umbrella term that stands in for bondage/discipline (B/D), domination /submission (D/S), and sadism/masochism or sadomasochism (S/M). For the purposes of this paper I exchange S/M, S&M, and/or SM with the more contemporary label BDSM. For more about the terminology of BDSM, see Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Ariane Cruz 411 racialization itself... (shrink)

"An eloquent work. Somer Brodribb not only gives us a feminist critique of postmodernism with its masculinist predeterminants in existentialism, its Freudian footholdings and its Sadean values, but in the very form and texture of the critique, she literally creates new discourse in feminist theory. Brodribb has transcended not only postmodernism but its requirement that we speak in its voice even when criticizing it. She creates a language that is at once poetic and powerfully analytical. Her insistent and compelling radical (...) critique refuses essentialism-from both masculinist thinkers and their women followers. She demystifies postmodernism to reveal that it and its antecedents represent yet another mundane version of patriarchal politics. Ultimately Brodribb returns us to feminist theory with the message that we must refuse to be derivative and continue to originate theory and politics from the condition of women under male domination." -Kathleen Barry, author of Female Sexual Slavery An iconoclastic work brilliantly undertaken . . . Nothing Mat(T)ers magnificently shows that postmodernism is the cultural capital of late patriarchy. It is the art of self- display, the conceit of masculine self and the science of reproductive and genetic engineering in an ecstatic Nietzschean cycle of statis." -Andre Michel Nothing Mat(T)ers encapsulates in its title the valuelessness of the current academic fad of postmodernism. Somer Brodribb has written a brave and witty book demolishing the gods and goddesses of postmodernism by deconstructing their method and de-centering their subjects and, in the process, has deconstructed deconstructionism and decentered decentering! This is a long-awaited and much-needed book from a tough- minded, embodied, and unflinching scholar." -Janice Raymond. (shrink)

Available for the first time in English, this is the definitive account of the practice of sexual slavery the Japanese military perpetrated during World War II by the researcher principally responsible for exposing the Japanese government's responsibility for these atrocities. The large scale imprisonment and rape of thousands of women, who were euphemistically called "comfort women" by the Japanese military, first seized public attention in 1991 when three Korean women filed suit in a Toyko District Court stating that (...) they had been forced into sexual servitude and demanding compensation. Since then the comfort stations and their significance have been the subject of ongoing debate and intense activism in Japan, much if it inspired by Yoshimi's investigations. How large a role did the military, and by extension the government, play in setting up and administering these camps? What type of compensation, if any, are the victimized women due? These issues figure prominently in the current Japanese focus on public memory and arguments about the teaching and writing of history and are central to efforts to transform Japanese ways of remembering the war. Yoshimi Yoshiaki provides a wealth of documentation and testimony to prove the existence of some 2,000 centers where as many as 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Dutch, Australian, and some Japanese women were restrained for months and forced to engage in sexual activity with Japanese military personnel. Many of the women were teenagers, some as young as fourteen. To date, the Japanese government has neither admitted responsibility for creating the comfort station system nor given compensation directly to former comfort women. This English edition updates the Japanese edition originally published in 1995 and includes introductions by both the author and the translator placing the story in context for American readers. (shrink)

The scale and character of past injustice can seem overwhelming. Grievous wrongdoing characterizes so much of human history, both within and between different political communities. This raises a familiar question of reparative justice: what is owed in the present as a result of the unjust actions of the past? This article asks what should be done in situations where contemporary debts stemming from past injustice are massive in scale, and seemingly call for nonideal resolution or settlement. Drawing on recent work (...) by Sara Amighetti and Alasia Nuti on deliberative reparative processes, the article differentiates between two different approaches to settling claims for reparation. The first pursues settlement in a legal or quasi legal sense, seeking to close a matter through discussion, compromise, and bargaining in such a way as to maximize one’s interest while drawing a line under the events in question. The second is grounded not in one’s own interest but in an acknowledgement of the inevitable inadequacy of one’s reparative response. Such an approach to settlement centres the agency of the individuals and groups harmed by past wrongdoing. The article examines the reparations issue with reference to a range of recent cases of alleged settlement, including claims for reparation for torture by the British army in Kenya in the 1950s, for sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army in East Asia in the Second World War, and for genocide by German colonial forces between 1904 and 1908. (shrink)

Available for the first time in English, this is the definitive account of the practice of sexual slavery the Japanese military perpetrated during World War II by the researcher principally responsible for exposing the Japanese government's responsibility for these atrocities. The large scale imprisonment and rape of thousands of women, who were euphemistically called "comfort women" by the Japanese military, first seized public attention in 1991 when three Korean women filed suit in a Toyko District Court stating that (...) they had been forced into sexual servitude and demanding compensation. Since then the comfort stations and their significance have been the subject of ongoing debate and intense activism in Japan, much if it inspired by Yoshimi's investigations. How large a role did the military, and by extension the government, play in setting up and administering these camps? What type of compensation, if any, are the victimized women due? These issues figure prominently in the current Japanese focus on public memory and arguments about the teaching and writing of history and are central to efforts to transform Japanese ways of remembering the war. Yoshimi Yoshiaki provides a wealth of documentation and testimony to prove the existence of some 2,000 centers where as many as 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Dutch, Australian, and some Japanese women were restrained for months and forced to engage in sexual activity with Japanese military personnel. Many of the women were teenagers, some as young as fourteen. To date, the Japanese government has neither admitted responsibility for creating the comfort station system nor given compensation directly to former comfort women. This English edition updates the Japanese edition originally published in 1995 and includes introductions by both the author and the translator placing the story in context for American readers. (shrink)

This study investigates how students’ national identity affects their historical understanding by mediating their use of affective historical empathy. The research focuses on the case of “comfort women” (women forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers during WWII) in South Korea—a topic in which a strong nationalist narrative dominates social and educational discourses. I conducted semi-structured, task-based group interviews with 16 high school students in South Korea. In interviews, students’ national identity mediated how they utilized four types of (...) affective historical empathy: Students as ethnic Koreans cared more about “our” Korean comfort women over others; cared that Korean comfort women and others suffered from what “we” and “they” did as nations; cared for those women's voices from a humanitarian perspective beyond their ethnic and national boundaries; and cared to make social changes for those women and themselves as future citizens of their democratic nation. These findings help us understand how students’ emotional attachment to “our” nation and its members can mediate their historical understanding through affective historical empathy as well as how affective historical empathy can motivate students to move beyond purely nationalistic concerns. This case study also stimulates reflection on historical empathy's implications for students’ democratic civic participation. (shrink)

In this essay I analyze citational practices around Heinrich von Kleist in Italian postmodern theater and Italian feminist biopolitics. In this realm, the reference to Kleist performs a gesture of interruption of traditional eroticism (Catholic, modern, based on women’s sexual slavery), in particular, by using and rewriting Kleist’s narrative of the Amazons, the legendary tribe of women who would cut their breast to embrace the art of war. Postmodern citations of Kleist introduce a new language around sexuality instead (...) of reenacting the ferocious narrative embedded in the ancient icon. The essay conducts a contrastive reading of two postmodern versions of the Kleistian Amazon in Italy: the first version is Lina Mangiacapre’s and Angela Putino’s philosophical conversation in “Androgina/Amazzone” as well as in Mangiacapre’s stage plays; the second version is Carmelo Bene’s cycle of performances on Achilles’s “necrophilia.” While intellectuals like Laura Mulvey in the UK and Gilles Deleuze in France tend to condemn Kleist for his necrophiliac account of romantic love, in Italy Kleist’s pessimistic image of romantic relationships offers a queer standpoint to develop a sustained critique of violent forms of desire. (shrink)

The Trafficking Victims’ Protection Act of 2000 has been presented as an important tool in combatingthe exploitation and abuse of undocumented workers, especially those forced into prostitution. Through a close reading of the legislation and the debates surrounding its passage, this article argues that the law makes strategic use of anxieties over sexuality, gender, and immigration to further curtail migration. The law does so through the use of misleading statistics creating a moral panic around “sexual slavery,” through the (...) creation of a gendered distinction between “innocent victims” and “guilty migrants,” and through the demand that aid to victims be tied to their willingness to assist in the prosecution of traffickers. As a result, the legislation is less a departure from, than of a piece with, other recent antisex and antiimmigrant policies. (shrink)

During the Asian and Pacific War, the Japanese government mobilized approximately 200,000 Asian women to military brothels to sexually serve Japanese soldiers. The majority of these victims were unmarried young women from Korea, Japan’s colony at that time. In the early 1990s, Korean feminist leaders helped more than 200 Korean survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery to come forward to tell the truth, which has further accelerated the redress movement for the women. One major issue in the redress (...) movement and research relating to the so-called “comfort women” issue is whether Japan’s colonization of Korea or gender hierarchy was a more fundamental cause of the Korean women’s suffering. Using an intersectional perspective, this article analyzes how colonial power, gender hierarchy, and class were inseparably tied together to make the victims’ lives miserable. By doing so, it shows that a one-sided emphasis on colonization or gender hierarchy will misrepresent the feminist political issue and misinterpret the “comfort women’s” experiences. (shrink)

En más de 100 conflictos bélicos que se han producido en los últimos diez años, más del 80 por ciento de las víctimas son civiles. Se ha producido un desarrollo acelerado en las investigaciones concernientes a las consecuencias psico-sociales de la guerra en la población civil, la cual es el blanco principal de las víctimas en la guerra contemporánea. Este trabajo constituye una revisión bibliográfica sobre la guerra como desastre, acerca de los conceptos “modernos” de “guerra total”, desastre y las (...) consecuencias psicológicas de la guerra en la población civil, la utilización de los niños como soldados lo cual acarrea desórdenes mentales marcados y se aborda el problema de la violencia sexual como arma de guerra. Las mujeres, las jóvenes, e incluso niñas, son a menudo sometidas, violadas, secuestradas y forzadas a la esclavitud sexual o cualquier tipo de abuso sexual; son vejadas, humilladas y dañadas en lo más profundo de sus sentimientos psicológicos, y valores morales, lo que también trasciende al grupo social, comunidad, clase social o etnia a la que pertenecen. El deterioro o la destrucción de la infraestructura económica, social y política de las naciones en conflicto impide la atención de las necesidades básicas de la población. El trastorno por estrés postraumático es la entidad nosológica más frecuente en las víctimas de la guerra, pero existen otros trastornos mentales que hay que tener en cuenta In over 100 war conflicts that have occurred in the last 10 years, m ore than 80 percent of the victims were civilians. The scope of recent studies has been increasingly focused on psychological and social effects among civilians who are the target and main victims of contemporary wars. This article is an explanation of why war is considered a disaster, a revision of modern terms for war, disaster and the psychological effects of war on civilians, the training of children as soldiers, and the resulting mental disorders. It touches upon sexual violence problem as a war weapon. Women, adolescents and young children are often violated and forced into sexual slavery or any other type of sexual abuse, causing humiliation and psychological, ethical and moral damage, which can affect social groups, communities, social classes, or races. The deterioration or destruction of the economic, social and political infrastructure of the countries in conflict hinders the satisfaction of the citizens' basic needs. The most common psychological effect among war victims is posttraumatic stress, but there are also other mental disorders which must be taken into consideration. (shrink)

This paper explores multiple encounters between activist-survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery and solidarity activists. I mainly focus on the stories of two foundational figures in the ongoing justice campaign for the survivors, both of whom faced that forceful military act as teenage girls in colonized Korea, although in dramatically different ways: Yun Chung-ok, a leading scholar and activist who, having managed to escape the fate of many other peers, first spoke out about Japanese military sexual (...) class='Hi'>slavery, and Kim Bok-dong, a survivor and human rights activist. This paper will address the multiple encounters and dialogues of memories to resituate subjects, which led to overcoming personal trauma and reaching out to others and continues to drive the redress movement. Drawing on oral history interviews, feminist ethnography, and various documented resources including survivors’ testimonies, which have been archived for around twenty years as part of my own scholar-activist work, I juxtapose these women’s lives to show how a community of responsibility has been formed to decolonize androcentric history. The women involved in the movement for the resolution of the Japanese military sexual slavery issue reinterpreted their experiences as having been formed by imperialism, colonialism, and patriarchy. While caring for and healing with one another, they suggested the possibility of a new subject formation. Through mutually constructed identities, activist-survivors broke away from social stigma and became agents who led transformation of a postcolonial society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Other Dreams of Freedom: Religion, Sex, and Human Trafficking by Yvonne C. ZimmermanAbbylynn HelgevoldReview of Other Dreams of Freedom: Religion, Sex, and Human Trafficking YVONNE C. ZIMMERMAN New York: Oxford, 2013. 223 pp. $35.00In Other Dreams of Freedom, Yvonne Zimmerman develops a genealogical analysis of US antitrafficking policy. She aims to show how antitrafficking initiatives in the United States are influenced by and expressive of distinctively Protestant norms (...) regarding gender, sex, and freedom. Zimmerman argues that US antitrafficking initiatives are limited in their ability to promote [End Page 229] diverse expressions of freedom because they are both implicitly and explicitly framed from within such a religious worldview. As a result of the biases that have shaped US antitrafficking efforts, the complex social phenomenon of human trafficking, which involves a variety of forms of exploitation and abuse, has become essentially identified with the sexual exploitation of vulnerable women and girls. According to Zimmerman, this has led to a disproportionate focus on “freeing” trafficking victims from sexual slavery and exploitation to “choose” to live lives that better reflect “good old American values” (126). Instead of respecting the agency of victims and promoting their freedom to make diverse choices about their own lives, current initiatives encourage conformity to “American” (i.e., middle class, white, and Protestant) values. If dreaming “other dreams of freedom” is ever to become a reality for the wide range of individuals who are or have been trafficked, becoming critically aware of these biases is an important first step.Zimmerman’s primary aim is to reveal these biases, and she examines them from a number of different angles. Thus, she examines the historical development of antitrafficking legislation; the gendered and theological language of US antitrafficking public policy; the implementation of policy under the Bush and Obama administrations; and the historical influence of distinctively Protestant conceptions of human freedom, morality, and sexual expression on what many typically consider to be “traditional American values.” Zimmerman’s analysis urges readers to become critically aware of how the language used in public policy communicates and enforces particular norms. She highlights the gendered language that normativizes female passivity and male aggression, and pays close attention to the deeper theological meaning of terms like “evil” and “God-given potential” used in US public policy that link Christian understandings of freedom to sexual expression. According to Zimmerman, understanding the religious moral imagination evoked by such language helps to explain the otherwise unreasonable “conflation of sex work and human trafficking” in US policy (173).On the whole, the threads of sex, gender, and freedom that Zimmerman picks up are generally well supported throughout Other Dreams. Her research also raises some difficult questions that are beyond the scope of her book but worth considering. For example, even if the language of evil carries with it certain theological assumptions, is it possible that there are good reasons for using such language in addition to the language of justice? Or, even if one challenges the Protestant norms that are being used to shape antitrafficking efforts, are there other reasons for supporting the policy that is in place?Zimmerman’s book is clear, well-written, and accessible. Other Dreams of Freedom will likely appeal to a number of different audiences: diverse scholars interested in the relationship between religion and public policy; political activists, social workers, or policy makers interested in the problem of human [End Page 230] trafficking; and teachers of advanced undergraduate or graduate courses that deal with these issues. Other Dreams of Freedom is edifying, thought-provoking, and timely. As more attention turns toward the global social problem of human trafficking it is important that the policies in place and the activities of those who implement them are not hampered in their usefulness by unexplored biases.Abbylynn HelgevoldUniversity of Northern IowaCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In the street life of the Mission District in San Francisco, two opposite ways of understanding the female ownership of the body circulate among women who are drug-using sex workers: sexual slavery and women's liberation. This article analyzes how both models obfuscate the manner in which lack and scarcity govern the economy of needs and desires when drug abuse intersects with sex work. Lack and scarcity are shown to pervade not only economic resources but also drug-related gratification, bodily (...) well-being, sexual desire and body commitment during sexual practices. Even though both women and men are involved in this economy, there is an `artificial scarcity' of drug-related gratification for women. Controlling women's ability to close this circuit, men reinstate and reproduce the gender stereotypes that dominate in the street culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coeditors’ IntroductionRetro III: As We RestartAlyson Cole and Kyoo Leethe covid-19 pandemic drags on, and, as the world is now trying to recover from it by learning to at least live with it better, philoSOPHIA has arrived at the third and final issue of RETRO. The fact that this series ended up being framed by the turbulent temporality of the current pandemic is something that some future editors of (...) philoSOPHIA, too, might find worth remembering.For now, we return to the now-point, as expected. To that end, here we have assembled articles on historical, individual, and gendered stigmas and wounds and traumas, among others, focusing also on their relationships to existential time, namely, present moments that persist.We turn first to the pressing issue presented by “Shackling Pregnant Women: US Prisons, Anti-Blackness, and the Unfinished Project of American Abolition”: Brady Heiner offers a lucid “interpretation of the social meaning of shackling imprisoned pregnant women and its persistence despite widespread normative consensus in favor of its abolition,” a joltingly specific, haunting reminder of how deeply the legacy of slavery is embedded in the US criminal legal system and the ways in which American abolition remains an “unfinished project.”Finally, RETRO III marks an ending and a restart of another kind. As of this issue—or, rather, this volume—philoSOPHIA is transitioning from a biannual to an annual publication schedule. In recent years, the journal has transformed in various ways. In 2018, we adopted a new transContinental approach and, with it, a new subtitle. We have expanded to include different [End Page v] genres, media, and voices, always aiming to reflect on our current moment and rethink persistent feminist philosophical questions from divergent angles. Publishing one volume per year is, we are certain, the best way to sustain this breadth of inquiry and continue deepening our alliances with critical race, disability, literary, media, and queer studies, among other fields. As we restart, readers can expect us to keep pushing boundaries, as we always have, while maintaining the same high quality and standards. This is essentially a change in the journal’s format, not in its substance.Wound/stigma as process also emerged as a key notion in Retro III partly because of our preliminary editorial conversation with Annette-Carina van der Zaag about three years ago, who, in response to our call for proposals on “retro” themes, had proposed an idea of guest editing an issue. Although that plan unfortunately did not materialize as we dealt with various pandemic challenges still faced by so many of us on a daily basis, Annette did write a spirited article while encouraging some other colleagues to explore related ideas, for which we remain grateful. In this piece, “Touching Wounds: On the Fugitivity of Stigma,” which explores stigma’s queer-responsive “transformational energy,” van der Zaag articulates ways of “inhabiting” wounds on three registers—material, affective, and fugitive—as an open-ended, future-embracing pathway beyond identity-bound ontology. Ghalya Saadawi, in turn, in her engagingly autobiographical essay “Critical Incision: Hypochondria, Autotheory, and the Health-Illness Dialectic,” autotheoretically draws out “critical” energy from this critical “illness” of hers, hypochondria, to the effect of destabilizing the temporally linearized and medically coordinated discursive ideals of health and being/living well.Survival, at the end of the day, often requires some literal transcending. A case in point has been movingly portrayed and theorized by Na-Young Lee, a sociologist and justice activist who, in “Multiple Encounters and Reconstructed Identities,” revisits questions of historical trauma and collective stigma. Here, she introduces and reflects on her oral history interviews with Korean “Halmoni Activist-Survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery as Postcolonial Subjects,” with whom she herself continues to fight in solidarity. Focusing on the stories of two foundational figures, “Yun Chung-ok, a leading scholar and activist who, having managed to escape the fate of many other peers, first spoke out about Japanese military sexual slavery, and Kim Bok-dong, a survivor and human rights activist,” Lee shows how “overcoming trauma and reaching out to others continues to drive the redress movement” and how “through mutually constructed identities, activist-survivors broke away from... (shrink)

European women dominate images of beauty, presumably because Europe has dominated the world for the past few centuries. Yet this presumed cause poorly explains “white slavery”-the commodification of European women for export at a time when their continent was much less dominant. Actually, there has long been a cross-cultural preference for lighter-skinned women, with the notable exception of modern Western culture. This cultural norm mirrors a physical norm: skin sexually differentiates at puberty, becoming fairer in girls, and browner and (...) ruddier in boys. Europeans are also distinguished by a palette of hair and eye colors that likewise differs between the sexes, with women more often having the brighter hues. In general, the European phenotype, especially its brightly colored features, seems to be due to a selection pressure that targeted women, apparently sexual selection. Female beauty is thus a product of social relations, but not solely those of recent times. (shrink)

The article examines the emergence in the 1990s of the issue of “Comfort women” and the conditions that led to the holding of The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal for the Trial of Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery. It argues that it was a response both to victims’ needs and to the prevailing revisionism concerning the violence committed during the Asian-Pacific war by the Japanese army, which had been the subject of the Tokyo war crimes trials of 1946-1948. The (...) women’s tribunal represents a significant moment in the recognition and condemnation of the specific violence perpetrated against women in wartime and during armed conflicts: it is both the result of of new paradigms in women’s history and oral history, and the starting point for active support for women victims of violence. L’article examine les conditions qui ont permis la tenue du Tribunal international des femmes de Tokyo pour juger du système de l’esclavage sexuel institué par l’armée impériale japonaise pendant la guerre d’Asie-Pacifique (1937-1945). Il considère qu’il a été à la fois une réponse aux besoins des victimes et au révisionnisme ambiant sur les questions des violences commises pendant la guerre d’Asie-Pacifique et jugées lors du procès militaire de Tokyo en 1946-1948. Moment important pour la reconnaissance et la condamnation des violences exercées à l’encontre des femmes en temps de guerre et lors des conflits armés, il est à la fois l’aboutissement de nouveaux paradigmes en histoire des femmes et histoire orale, et le point de départ pour un soutien actif aux femmes victimes de violence. (shrink)

This chapter brings together the two sets of concerns, the first clustering around ethics and sexual difference, the second around race, slavery, and colonialism. The author suggests that, for Derrida, each of these concerns implicates the other, and to the extent that this is true, his reflections on Hegel's Antigone have not been read as carefully as they need to be. At the same time, the author says that Derrida has not read Sophocles as well or as closely (...) as he might have done. The claim is rather to read Hegel, who himself, as many have pointed out, could be called to account for not reading Sophocles closely, for not even wanting to do so, for appropriating Antigone only as a pretext, using her as fodder for his dialectical machine–and that is precisely the issue at stake here. (shrink)

Carol Pateman has said that the public/private distinction is what feminism is all about. I tend to be sceptical about categorical pronouncements of this sort, but this book is a work of feminist political philosophy and the public/private distinction is what it is all about. It is motivated by the belief that we lack a philosophical conception of privacy suitable for a democracy; that feminism has exposed this lack; and that by combining feminist analysis with recent developments in political philosophy, (...) we can meet the philosophical and political need for a distinctively democratic conception of privacy. This book then, is an effort to sketch and defend such a conception of privacy. It aims to show that while some conceptions of privacy are inconsistent with democracy, others are not. Indeed, the book asserts, the belief that privacy can be valuable and that it can justify basic legal rights, is implicit in a democratic conception of persons as free and equal beings, and a democratic conception of politics as the self-governing, or regulating, activity of such individuals. Just as we can and should reject undemocratic conceptions of the suffrage in favour of democratic ones, so the book maintains, we can and must reject undemocratic conceptions of privacy in favour of ones that reflect the moral equality of men and women, and a commitment to democratic forms of government. Democracy is often described as government by and for the people. On such a view, democracy is a political regime which can be contrasted with monarchies or aristocracies on the one hand, or with theocracies and despotisms on the other. By contrast with the former, it is a form of government that views individuals as citizens and as equal members of the agency which authorizes the use of political power. By contrast with the latter, it is a form of government whose purposes and aims are established by the common interests of individuals, conceived as free and equal citizens. It is my contention that there is a plausible and attractive conception of privacy implicit in this view of democracy. Hence, I show that individuals have fundamental interests in privacy because privacy enables them to participate in politics freely and as the equal of others and, beyond that, to lead lives that they can each affirm to be reasonable, valuable and right. As I think that the ideal of democratic government is properly associated with this latter and broader goal, as well as with the former one, I call my account of privacy a democratic conception of privacy to signal its connection to a particular ideal of politics, and to the conception of persons that makes this ideal a convincing and inspiring one. As this is a work of political philosophy, however, no effort is made to address the legal merits of competing accounts of the right to privacy, or to resolve legal dispute about the content and justification of particular constitutional rights in the United States. Thus, while I use Supreme Court decisions and works of legal theory to illustrate and support my arguments, my use of these materials is governed by philosophical concerns and my conclusions, therefore, are strictly of a philosophical, not a legal, nature. The book is divided into four chapters, moving from feminist criticisms of privacy to an engagement with the philosophical literature on privacy and an account of the right to privacy in a democratic society. It proceeds as follows. In Chapter 1, I examine feminist concerns about privacy, through a close reading of the work of Catherine MacKinnon. I argue that MacKinnon persuasively shows that protection for privacy has frequently licensed the coercion and subjection of women, and that her arguments are supported both by feminist scholarship, key Supreme Court decisions, and by familiar conceptions of privacy and equality. However, I argue, these criticisms do not imply that privacy, like slavery, can never be democratic, because wholly inconsistent with the equality of individuals. Rather, feminist criticisms of privacy suggest that privacy, like the suffrage, can be necessary to the equality of women and can have a legitimate and important place in a democratic society. In Chapter 2, I examine the philosophical literature on privacy in light of the need to distinguish democratic from undemocratic accounts of its nature and value. This literature, I show, can help us to provide an account of privacy that is sensitive both to its inegalitarian aspects and to its importance for a democratic commitment to the freedom and equality of women. However, I argue, we cannot embrace current philosophical accounts of privacy uncritically, because to a striking extent they are, themselves, indifferent to the ways that privacy has licensed sexual inequality. Thus, in Chapter 2, I set about interpreting privacy as a moral and political value, in light of the strengths and weaknesses of the philosophical literature on privacy. Their strength is that they show that there are many reasons for caring about privacy, or many ways in which we might define it as a democratic value. Their weakness is that they tend to assume that we must choose amongst these different conceptions of privacy, in order to provide a philosophically cogent account of privacy. This, I show, is a mistake and one that can be remedied by remembering that a commitment to the equality of individuals requires us to acknowledge the reasonable differences in value and interest that may characterize their relations in a democracy. When we do so, I show, it is possible to define privacy in terms of its protection for self-definition, intimacy and confidentiality, without having to choose between the three of them. For individuals may legitimately disagree about the differences between privacy and other values, even while holding that privacy is a distinctive and important democratic good; and they may also disagree about the importance of privacy compared to other goods, such as equality, without denying that self-definition, intimacy and confidentiality can be morally and politically desirable in a democracy. In Chapter 2, therefore, I show that we can provide a philosophically adequate account of what privacy is and why it is valuable without supposing that privacy is always sexually egalitarian, or denying that it has a distinctive place in a democratic conception of value. Chapter 3 then extends this account of privacy, by considering the justification for a legal right to privacy. Just as we cannot provide a democratic conception of privacy without attending to the different, though equally valid, concerns that individuals may have so, I show, we cannot provide a democratic account of privacy rights if we forget that individuals can, quite reasonably, differ in the importance that they attach to privacy. The result, I argue, is that we can distinguish two main reasons for protecting privacy by right in a democracy, the one personal and the other political. Whereas the former emphasizes the importance of self-definition, intimacy and confidentiality to the personal freedom and equality of individuals, the latter emphasizes their importance to their prospects for voluntary and equal participation in the processes of collective choice and deliberation that define a democratic government. These two justifications of privacy rights reflect the fact that in a democracy the personal can be political, as feminists have insisted, but need not be in order to merit protection by right. Indeed, I argue, we can distinguish democratic from undemocratic accounts of the right to privacy in this way: for whilst the former acknowledge the variety of individuals’ interests in personal and collective choice, the latter either collapse the political into the personal, or assume that the legitimate claims of individuals are merely a function of collective needs, interests and values. Neither of these is consistent with familiar assumptions about the nature and justification of democratic institutions and rights, nor can they be reconciled with a commitment to sexual equality. Thus, I conclude, though the fact that there are different justifications for privacy rights in a democracy means that individuals may legitimately disagree over the content and justification of basic rights, it is wrong to confuse democratic debate with moral or conceptual confusion and so, arbitrarily, to truncate our accounts of privacy, equality and democracy. Finally, in Chapter 4, I test and develop these claims by examining the justification for abortion rights in a democracy. I argue that women have legitimate interests in abortion, as well as in bearing children, because they have fundamental, and legitimate, interests in privacy and equality. Although safe and legal abortion is necessary to sexual equality, as feminists claim, I show that we can provide a convincing and democratic account of women’s claims to abortion only if we recognize women’s interests in self-definition, intimacy and confidentiality. This is because women have both personal and political interests in abortion and we will be unable adequately to identify these if we overlook their interests in privacy. Indeed, I show, the difference between democratic and undemocratic solutions to conflict over abortion lies precisely in this: that whereas the former acknowledge the importance of privacy to the personal and political equality of women, the latter overlook or deny this. As a result, the latter license both mandated abortions, although women have legitimate interests in bearing and raising children, and prohibitions on abortion that cannot be reconciled with the freedom and equality of women. That is not to say that abortion is not a politically significant matter, or that we can resolve moral conflict over abortion simply by giving women a legal right to abortion. Neither is the case. However, the chapter shows, in a democracy individuals are entitled to make morally and politically controversial decisions for themselves not simply because this is expedient or useful, but because this is right. To overlook this feature of democracy, I argue, is to make moral and political conflict utterly intractable by democratic means. Thus, while controversy over abortion has been held to show that privacy is an incoherent and undemocratic right, this chapter argues that it shows the reverse: for controversy over abortion makes clear that privacy is essential to democracy, and why this should be so. This overview of the book, I hope, makes clear that its concerns are methodological as well as substantive, and moral as well as political. Thus, its central methodological claim is that we cannot reconcile privacy with the equality of individuals unless we make a deliberate effort to do so. Its central moral and political claims are that privacy is compatible with the equality of individuals, and sufficiently important to the latter that, in a democracy, the privacy of individuals merits legal protection by right. However, this summary of the book also exposes its limitations. Chief amongst these, I fear, is that it provides no sustained discussion of the place of property on a democratic conception of privacy, and that the latter, itself, is rather a broad preliminary sketch than a polished and detailed portrait. I regard these limits on the scope and arguments of the book as limitations, albeit ones that I hope to be able to remedy before too long.However, limited though the book clearly is, I believe that it lays out the essential components of a democratic conception of privacy and that, by analysing and synthesizing several diverse bodies of literature, it may help those who are interested in the relations between privacy, equality and democracy. (shrink)

For those open to the possibility that philosophical thought can improve life, David Hume's Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary have something to say. In the first comprehensive study of the Essays, Margaret Watkins engages closely with these neglected texts and shows how they provide important insights into Hume's perspective on the breadth and depth of human life, arguing that the Essays reveal his continued commitment to philosophy as a discipline that can promote both social and individual progress. Addressing topics such (...) as politics, war, slavery, the priesthood, the development of industry, aesthetics, emotional disorders, egoism, friendship, sexuality, gender relations, and the nature of philosophy itself, the volume examines Hume's purposes and aims against the backdrop of the eighteenth century society in which he lived. It will be of interest to scholars of modern thought in philosophy, politics, history, and economics. (shrink)

Human trafficking is both a human rights violation and the fastest growing criminal industry in the world. This article examines cross-border trafficking of girls and women in Nepal to India. It gives a brief explanation of what is meant by trafficking and then looks at the reasons behind trafficking. In Nepal, women and children are trafficked internally and to India and the Middle East for commercial sexual exploitation or forced marriage, as well as to India and within the country (...) for involuntary servitude as child soldiers, domestic servants, circus entertainment, and factory workers. Nepal and India are both signatories to international conventions and bound by domestic law to combat trafficking, and yet, this scourge continues. There are many laws in place, both in Nepal and India, which regulate the trafficking and prostituting of girls and women. This article looks at how effective these laws and regulations actually are and will look at the reasons for the continuation of trafficking. Despite the formal recognition of girl trafficking as a major problem and the existence of laws to curtail it, trafficking continues. The major problem with Nepal’s and India’s domestic laws is in the lack of enforcement. Finally, this article will look at ways to fight trafficking and make the governments of India and Nepal more effective in their fight against trafficking. (shrink)

Serious gender-based crimes were committed against women and girls during Sierra Leone’s decade-long armed conflict. This article examines how the Special Court for Sierra Leone has approached these crimes in its first four judgments. The June 20, 2007 trial judgment in the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council case assists international criminal law’s limited understanding of the crime against humanity of forced marriage, but also collapses evidence of that crime into the war crime of outrages upon personal dignity. The February 22, 2008 (...) appeals judgment attempts to correct this misstep. In contrast, the August 2, 2007 trial judgment in the Civil Defence Forces case is virtually silent on crimes committed against women and girls, although the May 28, 2008 appeals judgment attempts to partially redress this silence. This article concludes that the four judgments, considered together, raise the specter that the Special Court could potentially fail to make a significant progressive contribution to gender-sensitive transitional justice. (shrink)

An early task in fighting oppression is to address undeserved negative judgments and unfriendly stereotypes of the oppressed. Thus early feminism addressed undeserved negative judgments and stereotypes of women. The medical model operative in the terms "Hostage Identification Syndrome" and "Stockholm Syndrome" suggests that the victim is overcome by something like an illness, that the identification process is not voluntary and the victim not morally responsible for her choices. Women have suffered the evils of oppression globally and for millennia. And (...) women have been implicated in perpetrating evils not only of misogyny but of slavery, racism, anti‐Semitism, classism, hatred of sexual diversity, and hatred and fear of the poor. Women can inhabit gray areas in relation to children and in paying male protection rackets for protection against violence. Women have lived in many gray areas, including those of slavery, death camps, and ghettos. (shrink)