{"title":"Hygiene, Morality and the Pre-Criminal: Genealogies of Suspicion from Twentieth Century British-Occupied Egypt","authors":"Alice Finden","doi":"10.1080/13200968.2021.1923189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2021.1923189","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The concept of the ‘pre-criminal space’ has seen increasing uncritical use in countering terrorism policy since 9/11. It is understood by critical scholars primarily as a new legal temporality that brings forward the ‘threshold of criminal responsibility’, thus allowing for pre-emptive, suspicion-based criminalisation. This has allowed for the validation of measures such as arbitrary arrest and detention, bogus trial and restrictions on liberty, and is evidenced as being applied in an Islamophobic and racialised manner to entire communities. Furthermore, in our contemporary moment of Covid-19 where the emergency tools used to regulate hygiene and infection intersect with those used in countering terrorism work, critics are increasingly concerned about the expansion and normalisation of the pre-criminal space and its use in pathologising and medicalised ways. Using archival research, this article adapts the contemporary concept of the ‘pre-criminal’ to a historical and medico-legal context. In doing so it traces how the history of infectious diseases – in particular VD – has shaped the space through slippages between hegemonic understandings of morality, hygiene, vagrancy and extremism. I show how the ‘vagrant’ nature of disease marked racialised, gendered and classed subjects as potentially infectious and immoral. Looking particularly at the regulation of sex workers in British-occupied Egypt, I conceptualise the power struggles between actors including the British administration, British abolitionist feminists and the Egyptian government as a securitisation network which infiltrated the lives of Egyptians and marked them as suspicious. I further show how the encroachment upon everyday lives was made even more possible through the implementation of martial law. In this way, I suggest that contemporary British forms of pre-criminality and risk can be understood as a latent form of coloniality present in law-making practices.","PeriodicalId":43532,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Law Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"27 - 45"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13200968.2021.1923189","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44248210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Construction of Motherhood in Semi-Colonial Egypt","authors":"Marianne Dhenin","doi":"10.1080/13200968.2021.1923182","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2021.1923182","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper argues that a new institution of motherhood was constructed through modernising reforms in law and medicine in semi-colonial Egypt. It shows that Egyptian women were characterised as ignorant of basic principles of health and hygiene and blamed for the high infant mortality rate in turn-of-the-century Egypt, which coincided with an ongoing reorientation of the Egyptian family in popular and religious literature, wherein the woman was being recast as the central figure in shaping the child and tending the home. At the intersection of these phenomena, new discussions emerged about the significance of women as mothers and the proper way to perform motherhood as an Egyptian woman. A new institution of motherhood was then constructed, concretised, and enforced through medical and legal discourse and interventions that were opposable against women across Egypt. This article shows that British and Egyptian lawmakers privileged the role of women as mothers in debates surrounding the drafting of new labour legislation and that they sought to ensure the maturity of mothers and the mental and physical health of the Egyptian family in a series of controversial personal status law reforms throughout the semi-colonial period. Through a socio-legal history of the institution of motherhood, it examines how colonialism, nationalism, and claims to modernity affected Egyptians’ daily lives and accessed family homes and women’s bodies. Throughout the article, a conceptualisation of modernisation as a dialectical process is emphasised. Modernisation claims to liberate individuals, women, or a nation, but, at the same time, it creates elaborate structures for their discipline. This article treats the institution of motherhood as one such structure and explores the roles of hygiene and domestic cleanliness, coloniality, and law in its construction in semi-colonial Egypt.","PeriodicalId":43532,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Law Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"9 - 26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13200968.2021.1923182","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46279300","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Impact of British Parliamentary Legislations on Enslaved Women of the British Caribbean 1780s–1800s.","authors":"J. Collins","doi":"10.1080/13200968.2021.1933801","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2021.1933801","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Colonial slavery contained three interrelated aspects of law that transformed with the introduction of African slavery. Firstly, defining enslaved people as property, secondly, establishing forms of control over enslaved people, and thirdly, developing legal definitions of race, which distinguishes African enslaved people and their descendants from the rest of the population. The introduction of Imperial laws and their transplantation within the relevant island colonies had serious consequences on the enslaved persons therein. However, their impact on enslaved women was far reaching and resonated even within post-emancipation societies. Slavery remained an integral aspect of Western society for so long that its dismantling was not an easy feat. After all, it had been vital to European expansion into the Americas and was therefore deeply embedded into all resultant legal, social, political and economic systems. This paper looks at the introduction of the British Parliamentary laws of the Amelioration Acts and the Emancipation Act within the English-Speaking enslaved person holding Caribbean colonies. These laws were initiated to supposedly alleviate the atrocities of enslavement. In reality, the plantocracy used these legislations to create harsher conditions and mask cruelty which enslaved women felt the major brunt of especially as their health was increasingly compromised. Female enslaved persons' stories are often overlooked therefore, this paper also addresses the plight of enslaved women and tactics they used to protect their bodies within colonial enslavement and in the aftermath of its ending. Ultimately, the paper depicts what this signified for scholarship on the role of enslaved women within colonial Caribbean slavery as a whole.","PeriodicalId":43532,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Law Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"85 - 103"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42757706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Governing Conjugality: Social Hygiene and The Doctrine of Restitution of Conjugal Rights in England and India in the Nineteenth Century","authors":"Laura Lammasniemi, Kanika Sharma","doi":"10.1080/13200968.2021.1923252","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2021.1923252","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article focuses on the doctrine of restitution of conjugal rights (RCR) as a colonial legal transplant and examines how ideas of social and moral hygiene manifested in the debates around the doctrine in late-nineteenth century England and India. Originating in ecclesiastical law, the doctrine of RCR provides remedies and sanctions for the deserted spouse when one party has violated the obligation to cohabit as husband and wife. Through a critical examination of the history and application of the doctrine, the article traces the specific ways in which such suits developed and became rooted in Hindu, Parsi and Muslim marital law in India, while simultaneously falling out of favour in England. It places the doctrine in the context of changing ideas of marriage and argues that social hygiene became the tool through which the doctrine was both resisted in England and lauded in colonial India.","PeriodicalId":43532,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Law Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"67 - 84"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13200968.2021.1923252","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45593020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Prostitution and Moral and Sexual Hygiene in Mandatory Palestine: The Criminal Code for Palestine (1921–1936)","authors":"Paola Zichi","doi":"10.1080/13200968.2021.1933806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2021.1933806","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that at the turn of the twentieth century British feminists’ expertise on hygiene, sexuality and morality projected an early prototypical form of governance feminism in Mandate Palestine by producing a common language and a governmental apparatus which reflected racialised and orientalist assumptions, and limited indigenous women’s rights through tropes of progress and civilisation. The article analyses women’s contributions to penal reform in Mandatory Palestine, focusing on the regulation of sex work/prostitution, treatment of prisoners and adultery as proposed for the draft Criminal Code for Palestine between 1921 and 1933. It relies on the correspondence between transnational organisations (such as the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene), women’s groups and charities active on gender and women’s rights to reveal how penal reform was discussed nationally and internationally in women’s debates. It offers an analysis of the history of feminist advocacy in criminal justice on the regulation of prostitution and trafficking, adultery and treatment of prisoners, and adultery in mandate international law on Palestine during the interwar period. It contributes to the scholarship reassessing women’s engagements in criminal justice from a postcolonial perspective by highlighting processes of silencing and marginalisation within the geopolitical space of the mandates and the Empire.","PeriodicalId":43532,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Law Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"47 - 65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13200968.2021.1933806","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45618972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to the Special Issue on Hygiene, Coloniality and Law","authors":"Alice Finden, G. Heathcote, Paola Zichi","doi":"10.1080/13200968.2021.1949144","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2021.1949144","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue was conceived in September 2019, just a few months before the outbreak of a virus that quickly became know as COVID-19—a strain of coronavirus causing, among other symptoms, a se...","PeriodicalId":43532,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Law Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"1 - 8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48583744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Sterilisation Must be Done Against Her Will’: Coloniality, Eugenics and Racism in Brazil 2018 — The Case of Janaína Quirino","authors":"Amanda Muniz Oliveira","doi":"10.1080/13200968.2021.1933804","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2021.1933804","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper aims to demonstrate how the discourse of reproductive rights, led by the Global North, is close to a eugenic bias based on population control, and exercises direct influence in countries of the Global South, such as Brazil. To this end, I demonstrate that entities such as Planned Parenthood International (IPPF), have considerable relevance in national and international spaces dedicated to debate on reproductive rights and thereby influence the production of eugenicist and colonial speeches about the countries of the Global South. Applying a Black feminist lens of reproductive justice to the Brazilian context, this article shows how discourses relating to the birth control of Black and poor Brazilian women were absorbed by Brazil when the country oversaw a mass sterilisation process under the influence of the United States between 1970 and 1990. I further demonstrate how such eugenicist policies still remain in force in the Brazilian State today, which in 2018 carried out, through its judiciary, a forced sterilisation surgery on Janaína Quirino, a poor Black Brazilian and woman. This analysis shows that the colonial discourse regarding the control of so-called disposable populations never left the country, being institutionalised even by the entities that should protect (and not violate) Brazilian women.","PeriodicalId":43532,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Law Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"105 - 122"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13200968.2021.1933804","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44703884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Narrative of Feminist Resistance: Exploring Regulations of Leprosy in Postcolonial India","authors":"D. Jain, K. Kartik","doi":"10.1080/13200968.2021.1935475","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2021.1935475","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Colonial policies on leprosy were predicated on the enactment of laws and the administration of systems that targeted ‘vagrancy' as disease control, subsuming classist, casteist, gendered and racial narratives within state response to the disease. Colonial state power, juxtaposed with the social capital of the Indian elite and ‘employed' middle classes, created exclusive spaces for containment of (hyper visible, and therefore most vulnerable) leprosy sufferers belonging to ‘lower-caste,' poor communities. Colonial regimes of disease control built on underlying notions of ‘morality' and ‘hygiene’ subsist, in one form or another, in the post-colonial state, furthered by neoliberal institutions that repurpose these notions through their development policies. Leprosy regulation narratives are still predicated on rationales relating to hygiene and economic development, which focus on caste, gender and hygiene markers for regulation. Resistance, in the background of colonial conceptions, policies and legislations relating to leprosy, has manifested within the very structures that have been set up to forcibly confine and isolate poor and marginalised persons with leprosy. In this article, we examine spaces of power created by the colonial state, giving rise to community spaces, unique power negotiations and narratives of resistance of the most marginalised. We critically trace the resistance of the ‘leper’ against draconian legislations, as well as ostracisation in the colonial and postcolonial period. Leprosy colonies have become sites of resistance where persons affected with leprosy did not passively suffer, but could reclaim their agency and re-imagine identities more positive than those ascribed to the infection. The alternative kinship structures that develop in these colonies facilitate unique care models that challenge dominant notions of families, hitherto predicated on marriage, adoption, or relatedness. Thus, we argue that leprosy colonies can be thought of not only as places of healing but as healing in and of themselves.","PeriodicalId":43532,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Law Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"123 - 142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13200968.2021.1935475","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43842150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Collateral Damage’: Consent, Subjectivity and Australia’s #MeToo Moment","authors":"Sarah Ailwood","doi":"10.1080/13200968.2021.1993615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2021.1993615","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Australia’s #MeToo moment has witnessed the publication of women’s experiences of sexual violence without their knowledge, involvement or consent. Focusing on Eryn Jean Norvill, Catherine Marriott and Ashleigh Raper, this article explores relationships between consent and subjectivity within the unauthorised public disclosure of women’s experiences of sexual violence that target high-profile alleged male perpetrators. These cases reveal that the absent presence of consent signifies a denial or repudiation of subjectivity, and responses by the women at their centre highlight discursive relationships between narrative, consent and subjectivity. The article explores the failure of recent and proposed law reform to protect women from such harms, and the conceptual efficacy of consent in enabling women’s subjectivity in #MeToo storytelling.","PeriodicalId":43532,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Law Journal","volume":"46 1","pages":"285 - 303"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48625248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"White Law/Black Deaths: Nomocide and the Foundational Absence of Consent in Australian Law","authors":"Maria Giannacopoulos","doi":"10.1080/13200968.2021.1959994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2021.1959994","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract State and police brutality around the globe in 2020 brought into sharp focus the role of legal apparatuses in causing death, particularly of black and Indigenous lives. Against the backdrop of Black Lives Matter (#BLM) events and protests, #endSARS in Nigeria and amid the ongoing fight against Aboriginal deaths in custody in Australia, the critique made by Isobell Coe in Nulyarimma v Thompson, the case that sought to have the crime of genocide and its impact as part of ongoing colonialism recognised in Australian law, is more urgent than ever. Following Coe’s critique that Australian law becomes complicit in genocide if it fails to hear Indigenous peoples protests, how do and how should legal thinkers engage with the system of Australian law especially in a climate where the direct link between settler-colonial legal infrastructures (courts, prisons, police and legislators) and the violation of Indigenous and black lives has been laid bare. A legal system lacking consent at its foundation and characterised in the present day by a refusal to hear and engage with its violent origin, while seeking to acquire consent retrospectively is nomocidal. Nomocide captures the function performed by all arms of the law in committing genocide in Australia. As such, the complicity and culpability of a system of law founded in non-consensual conditions must be reckoned with, without delay. This requires a willingness among scholars and practitioners of law to see it as deathly or nomocidal in order to begin addressing the colonial violence that stems from it.","PeriodicalId":43532,"journal":{"name":"Australian Feminist Law Journal","volume":"46 1","pages":"249 - 263"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48344668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}