Suchergebnisse

Drawing on interviews with women in precarious work, this text explores the everyday problems they face balancing work and care responsibilities. This crucial book exposes the failures of family-friendly rights and explains how to grant these women effective rights in the wake of COVID-19

"Much socio-legal scholarship assumes that even if experiences of law and time differ, people and laws exist within an overarching, shared time-frame. In Brewing Legal Times, Emily Grabham boldly departs from this assumption, drawing on perspectives from actor-network theory, feminist theory, and legal anthropology to advance our understanding of law and time. Grabham argues that human, material, and legal relationships constantly generate new temporalities because of human and nonhuman interactions. By engaging with the creative potential of "things" such as cells, viruses, reports, legal documents, and more, our understanding of law and time is subject to change. In challenging the scholarship on the materiality of time and law, Brewing Legal Times encourages us to confront the multiple and mundane ways in which time is enacted through legal networks."--

"This collection addresses the present and the future of the concept of intersectionality within socio-legal studies. Intersectionality provides a metaphorical schema for understanding the interaction of different forms of disadvantage, including race, sexuality, and gender. But it also goes further to provide a particular model of how these aspects of social identity and location converge - whether at the level of subjectivity, everyday life, in culture or in the institutional practices of state and other bodies. Including contributions from a range of international scholars, this book interrogates what has become a key organizing concept across a range of disciplines, most particularly law, political theory, and cultural studies."--Back cover

This article draws on original empirical research to explore the politics of experimental feminist statutes. It has two main aims. First, it traces how conventional legislative drafting techniques have participated in the wider social creation and continuance of sex/gender norms. It shows how dominant statutory expressions of sex and gender that might otherwise appear timeless have shifted with social change and legal innovation. The article contributes to debates in feminist legal studies, legal anthropology, and legislative drafting by making visible, and analysing the particular power of legislative text, its 'alchemy', in expressing and re-creating sex/gender as a social, cultural and political artefact. Second, drawing on this research, the article explores what the Future of Legal Gender project might consider and do when drafting an experimental statute to decertify legal gender. Addressing questions of positionality, believability, legal form and the use of potentially innovative or contested drafting techniques (the singular "they", the second person), the article explores tensions between legislative drafting and feminist legal method, as well as the benefits for bringing feminist analysis and perspectives to this important aspect of legal practice. Given that legislative drafting does not merely inscribe pre-agreed policy ideas into legal text but helps to shape emerging ontologies of gender, then drafting an experimental statute invites feminists to pay attention to interlinked questions of substance and form in the exploration of prefigurative legal futures.

This article draws on original empirical research to explore the politics of experimental feminist statutes. It has two main aims. First, it traces how conventional legislative drafting techniques have participated in the wider social creation and continuance of sex/gender norms. It shows how dominant statutory expressions of sex and gender that might otherwise appear timeless have shifted with social change and legal innovation. The article contributes to debates in feminist legal studies, legal anthropology, and legislative drafting by making visible, and analysing the particular power of legislative text, its 'alchemy', in expressing and re-creating sex/gender as a social, cultural and political artefact. Second, drawing on this research, the article explores what the Future of Legal Gender project might consider and do when drafting an experimental statute to decertify legal gender. Addressing questions of positionality, believability, legal form and the use of potentially innovative or contested drafting techniques (the singular "they", the second person), the article explores tensions between legislative drafting and feminist legal method, as well as the benefits for bringing feminist analysis and perspectives to this important aspect of legal practice. Given that legislative drafting does not merely inscribe pre-agreed policy ideas into legal text but helps to shape emerging ontologies of gender, then drafting an experimental statute invites feminists to pay attention to interlinked questions of substance and form in the exploration of prefigurative legal futures.

This paper aims to bring an appreciation of legal form, technicalities, and legislative drafting to growing interdisciplinary literatures on time and governance. Scholarship across politics, geography, science studies and anthropology continues to trace the productive force and specific qualities of diverse temporal horizons. At the same time socio-legal scholars increasingly focus on the work of making and negotiating law, engaging with the dogged, everyday work of legal experts and bureaucrats. Yet little attention has been paid, to date, to the work of legislative drafters. This paper follows the 'legal lives' of qualifying periods on family-friendly employment rights. As examples of legal technicalities that work with time, qualifying periods form an important part of the regulatory structure that separates precarious workers from 'regular' employees in UK law. Drawing on documentary research and interviews with policy experts, union activists and legislative drafters, this paper focuses on the formal qualities of qualifying periods, arguing that these legal technicalities conjure time and legal form as inextricable. Whenever law becomes relevant to conversations about time and governance, we could usefully pay attention to the idiosyncrasies and controversies occupying legal form and legislative drafting.

This research paper is part of a broader project on law and time. I am in the midst of studying the time-related concepts and assumptions that structure some of the key initiatives in the area of equalities regulation in the UK over the past two decades. Time fulfils certain legal and political functions in equalities law and policy, establishing the parameters through which a person might claim a legal identity in order to argue a discrimination case, for example, or providing a paradigm for thinking about the allocation of care responsibilities. Yet, far from merely tracing how legal concepts and communities symbolise time, or how they use temporal concepts in their world-making features, I am also interested in the materialisation of time and interconnections between time, matter, form and objects in the making of law. Key temporalities within work-life balance law - balance, equilibrium and flexibility, for example - therefore become amenable to inquiry through the actions of documents and documentary practices, administrative forms and the form of law itself in materialising time alongside and in relationship with human legal subjects. As Michel Serres puts it: 'Time doesn't flow; it percolates' (Latour and Serres, 1995, 58). With this in mind we might ask: how has work-life balance percolated? What role have human and non-human legal actors played in confabulating this temporal form?

My current research focuses on gaps in UK law which exclude women in precarious work from using work-life balance mechanisms. UK government policy-makers currently use two key strategies to address women's care commitments and participation in the paid labour market. First, recent New Labour and Coalition governments have promoted flexible work as a means of managing unpaid care commitments alongside paid employment. Yet flexibility often produces precarious work conditions and does very little to resolve underlying gender inequalities in the quality, remuneration, and longevity of women's paid work. Second, women and other carers have been provided with employment equality rights, for example to request flexible work, with the aim of changing working environments to accommodate a wider range of working patterns. Yet, these rights consistently benefit women in relatively permanent, professional jobs and for legal and other reasons, exclude the workers who need them most: precarious workers, whose status within the workplace is often low and whose ability to negotiate work around care is compromised. This is even more of a problem for those entering the labour market as a result of conditionality requirements in new welfare legislation. I am working on a three-year, ESRC-funded project, which combines doctrinal analysis of UK labour and equality law with empirical socio-legal research on the experiences of female precarious workers in managing work and care. In this paper, I outline preliminary findings from the research, focusing in particular on legal gaps in work-life balance provision, with the hope of analysing those gaps in context once empirical research is complete. My aim overall is to asess how work-life balance measures operate (or not) for those who need them the most.

Surgeries inevitably raise questions of bodily integrity: how the post-surgical body reframes (or does not reframe) its experiences of functionality to incorporate new features. Nevertheless, when we try to define or delimit the concept of bodily integrity, it becomes increasingly important to think about how the physical and social unease caused by some forms of surgeries sits alongside the more transformative potential of surgical bodily modification. This article focuses on aesthetic genital surgeries on infants with disorders of sex development (DSD, previously termed 'intersex' conditions). Using the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Elizabeth Freeman on time, bodies and 'chrononormativity', this article excavates not only the temporalities that produce what I would term 'chrono-abnormalities' of sex development, but also the temporalized medical responses, including surgeries, which retrieve 'abnormal' bodies into more normative time-lines. My conclusion is that when DSD-affected individuals experience aesthetic genital surgeries as painful and full of social unease this is not necessarily because the pre-surgical body was the 'natural', 'whole' or 'intact' body prior to surgery. Instead, it is because these surgeries interrupt what Bourdieu would term a sense of corporeal 'immersion into the forthcoming'; an immersion which, in his theory of time as social action, is intimately linked with social power and possibilities.

AbstractThis paper focuses on the increasing significance of flexibility arguments to UK employment equality law. It makes use of the well-evidenced legal and governmental preoccupation with working time to investigate the production and circulation of concepts of flexibility through equality law case reports from the period 2001–2010. With case reports as my main focus, I trace how flexibility emerges through legal documental networks, so as to work out the contours of our collectively imagined "efficient" and "well-balanced" working practices. Human actors and significant non-human actors combine within and across case reports to produce and support a general set of understandings about legal flexibility. These understandings, as we have seen, suggest that flexibility is just as much a matter of organic or physical capabilities as it is of time. Concepts of elasticity, adaptability, and balance, therefore, force us to reconsider the meanings and motivations of governmental and oppositional constructions of work-life dilemmas.

The UK Gender Recognition Act 2004 contains a provision requiring that transgender applicants intend to remain in their acquired gender 'until death'. While apparently a straightforward administrative demand within a piece of archetypal New Labour legislation, this article argues that the requirement is unnecessary on the legislation's own terms. Focusing instead on the temporal work that the provision performs in relation to gender recognition, I situate it in relation to New Labour's 'social cohesion' rhetoric in the areas of immigration and race relations and argue that the permanence requirement is a temporal mechanism that links the supposedly linear development of trans bodies with racialized cultural and national integration.

Just as the nation is imagined and produced through everyday rhetoric and maps and flags, it is also constructed on the skin, and through bodies, by different types of corporeal `flagging'. In this article, I use two examples of contemporary surgical procedures to explore these dynamics. Aesthetic surgeries on `white' subjects are not often interrogated for their racializing effects, but I use the concept of `flagging' to explore how these surgeries work in the UK to align `white' bodies with a white nation. US media coverage of Iraq invasion veterans with prosthetic limbs circulates narratives of heroism and patriotism, and I explore how the apparent `visibility' of these limbs works to re-embed notions of the US as a transcendent Christian nation. In these two examples of corporeal modification, the nation is `flagged' on the skin, reiterating relationships of belonging that echo practical and conceptual links with property. Propertied belonging — possessive and constitutive — unfolds through bodies, producing whiteness not only as property itself, but also as unmarked, habitual terrain.