Susan Sage Heinzelmann's "Riding the Black Ram" Is Published

From Stanford University Press:

Stanford University Press is pleased to announce the publication of Riding the Black Ram: Law, Literature, and Gender, by Susan Sage Heinzelman. Susan Sage Heinzelman is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Unruly women are not often represented in a good light. Whether historical, or fictional, disruptive women with their real or imagined excesses have long provided the material for literary and legal narratives. This probing new work analyzes a series of literary, legal, and historical texts to demonstrate the persistence of certain gender stereotypes.

In her 1820 adultery trial, Queen Caroline was depicted in a cartoon riding into the House of Lords on a black ram that had the face of her Italian lover. As this book reveals, a number of women, remembered largely for their insubordinate presence, have metaphorically "ridden the black ram" in the last 700 years. Heinzelman's historicized understanding of the relationship between law and literature reveals a disquieting pattern in the legal and literary representations of women and provides a new recognition of the significance of sexuality and gender in the way we narrate our world.

More information about this book may be found at http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=11686.

The publisher has sent me a copy of this book, and I will be publishing a review in the near future.

Gender, Evidence, and Language Usage

Janet Ainsworth, Seattle University School of Law, has published The Performance of Gender as Reflected in American Evidence Rules: Language, Power, and the Legal Construction of Liability as part of the proceedings of the International Gender and Language Association (Victoria University Press, 2009). Here is the abstract.

The rules of evidence both govern the admissibility of evidence in trials and determine the scope of meaning to be accorded to that evidence. This article examines two American evidence rules and suggests that both rules incorporate ‘masculine’ norms of language usage. The evidence rule defining adoptive admissions provides that, when a person is confronted with an accusation of wrong-doing and fails to assertively deny it, the allegation is deemed to be admitted through silence. This rule presumes that one’s natural reaction upon an accusation would invariably be an explicit denial, such that silence can fairly be taken as a confession. Thus, this rule privileges assertive and confrontational modes of speech - all coded as ‘masculine’ - and additionally ignores the ways in which power assymmetries impact responses to accusation. Likewise, the evidence rule construing apology as an admission of fault denigrates expression of emotional solidarity - coded as ‘feminine’ - in favor of a presumption that penalizes those who say ‘sorry’ by presuming it means ‘I’m sorry I did something wrong’ rather than ‘I’m sorry that something bad has happened to you.’ Evidence rules such as these both channel and constrain the legal interpretation of language in ways that sustain linguistic ideologies of gender and gendered hierarchies of legal power.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Literature, Sexuality, and Law

Timothy Stewart-Winter, Yale University, and Simon Stern, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, have published Picturing Same-Sex Marriage in the Antebellum United States: The Union of 'Two Most Excellent Men' in Longstreet's 'A Sage Conversation', at 19 Journal of the History of Sexuality 197-222(May 2010). Here is the abstract.

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s short story “A Sage Conversation” appears, at first glance, to be an astonishingly modern tale. It assembles an elaborate social tableau that has at its center “George Scott and David Snow; two most excellent men, who became so much attached to each other that they actually got married” and “raised a lovely parcel of children.” The story appeared in Longstreet’s 1835 collection Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents &c. in the First Half Century of the Republic, an early contribution to the tradition of American humor. This collection was reprinted more than twenty times before the end of the century, and has been an object of ongoing fascination for literary critics. However, critics have overlooked the question of how to situate “A Sage Conversation” in relation to the history of sexuality. We interpret “A Sage Conversation” as an artifact of a profoundly different moment from our own in the long, intersecting histories of marriage and sexuality in the United States. To that end, we contextualize the story, from a literary perspective, in relation to the traditions of the tall tale and the narrative of domestic life, and from a social and legal perspective, in relation to nineteenth-century American thought about same-sex sexuality, gender roles, and restrictions on marriage.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Gender and Reproductive Rights Talk

Lia Alexandra Mandaglio, currently a law student at the George Washington Law School, has posted Speaking Across the Divide: A Functional Grammar Analysis of Feminist and Masculist Reproductive Rights Rhetoric in the United States on SSRN. Here is the abstract.

This paper applies Systemic Functional Grammar and Critical Discourse Analysis to assess the linguistic choices of feminist and masculist reproductive rights rhetoric in the United States. It explains these methodologies and provides a discursive history of the reproductive rights movement. Publications of advocacy groups and the mass media are analyzed as data of current rhetorical trends. These interpretations conclude that female-affirmative rhetoric offsets contemporary feminist efforts by marginalizing men and excluding considerations of paternity. This paper suggests that in solely emphasizing women’s procreative rights, such feminist rhetoric potentially renders women to the role of primary parental agent, reinforces traditional sex-stereotypes, and incites inter-sex antagonism.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. Ms. Mandaglio is also the author of earlier interesting work, including Hannah More, the Conventionalist, and Mary Robinson, the Radical: Differing Feminist Perspectives on 19th Century Women's Progress, Purity and Power, 2 Lethbridge Undergraduate Research Journal (2007).

And check out this odd "6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon" sort of connection. I blogged about Hudson Taylor, the wrestler/magician elsewhere a few weeks ago, based on a piece in the Washington Post, without paying any particular attention to the name or occupation of his fiancee. As I did a search on Ms. Mandaglio's name while preparing this post to turn up what else she might have written, what other info should appear but yes--that article about Hudson Taylor, the wrestler/magician, and his fiancee, Lia Mandaglio, GW law student. Ah, magicology!

Conference Announcement

American University Washington College of Law’s
Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Women and the Law Program, and Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

present

IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections
Gender and Invention

Friday, April 16, 2010
9:00 am – 5:00 pm

Washington College of Law, Room 100
4801 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20016

Registration: www.wcl.american.edu/secle/registration
Webcast: http://www.wcl.american.edu/pijip/webcast.cfm


Christine Haight Farley
Associate Dean and Professor of Law, Washington College of Law
Welcome
Ann Shalleck
Professor of Law and Director
Women and the Law Program
Washington College of Law & Michael Carroll
Professor of Law and Director
Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property
Washington College of Law
Opening Remarks

GENDERED HISTORY– 9:30 AM -11:30 AM

Dr. Rayvon Fouché
Associate Professor of History
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign & Sharra Vostral
Associate Professor, Gender Studies and History,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Selling Women: Lillian Gilbreth and Gendered IP
Annette I. Kahler
Director, Center for Law & Innovation, Albany Law School
Examining the Right to Exclude: Historical, Social, and Economic Perspectives on Women and Invention
Dan Burk
Chancellor’s Professor of Law, University of California, Irvine
Comments

GENDERED DOCTRINE – 11:30 AM -12:30 PM

Kara W. Swanson
Associate Professor, Earle Mack School of Law, Drexel University
Merry Widows: Egbert v. Lippman and the Corset as Patented Technology

Ann Bartow
Professor of Law, University of South Carolina School of Law
Gender, Innovation and Inventorship: Every Patent Tells a Story

Shubha Ghosh
Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin Law School
Comments

GENDERED GOALS: LUNCHEON & KEYNOTE – 12:30 PM -2:30 PM

Joshua Sarnoff
Professor of the Practice of Law, Washington College of Law
Introduction

Zorina Khan
Associate Professor of Economics, Bowdoin College
What Do Intellectual Property Rights Promote? Innovation Among Women Inventors in the 19th and 20th Centuries

GENDERED PRODUCTION– 2:30 PM -4:30 PM

Bernardita Escobar
Instituto de Políticas Públicas‐ Expansiva UDP, Santiago, Chile
Women and Science Production in Developing Countries: Chile in the 1990‐2008 Period

Dr. Shlomit Yanisky Ravid
Head of the Comparative Legal Research Center, Faculty of Law, Ono Academic College, Israel
Patents and Gender: The Exclusion of Women Inventors from IP Rights

Laurel Smith-Doerr
Associate Professor of Sociology, Boston University
Gendering Science, Gendering Ethics: The Intersecting Production of Knowledge, Gender and Ethics

Mario Biagioli
Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University
Comments

CLOSING & ADJOURNMENT

Victoria Phillips
Professor of the Practice of Law, Washington College of Law
Closing Remarks

How Right (Or Wrong) Does Television Get It?

From MSNBC.com, two stories about how television reflects the real world; a piece on the progress women have made in breaking through the glass ceiling since the 1970s,and a story on those interesting older woman/younger man relationships. Along the way: do anti-discrimination laws help or hurt, or have no effect? Do women flooding into the workplace eventually have the effect of flooding into the boardroom, or not?

Madeleine Albright has some interesting things to say about the power of a woman's word, even if it's expressed symbolically. In her new book, Read My Pins: Stories From a Diplomat's Jewel Box (HarperCollins, 2009) the first female U.S. Secretary of State discusses how Saddam Hussein inspired her use of jeweled pins to make subtle pronouncements on behalf of the government. "It would never have happened if not for Saddam Hussein. When U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright criticized the dictator, his poet in residence responded by calling her "an unparalleled serpent." Shortly thereafter, while preparing to meet with Iraqi officials, Albright pondered: What to wear? She decided to make a diplomatic statement by choosing a snake pin. Although her method of communication was new, her message was as old as the American Revolution—Don't Tread on Me." (From the B&N website). The pins are part of a special exhibit at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York, and then will travel to several cities in the country including Little Rock and Indianapolis.

Women and Wall Street

Christine Sgarlata Chung, Albany Law School, has published "From Lily Bart to the Boom Boom Room: How Wall Street's Social and Cultural Response to Women Has Shaped Securities Regulation." Here is the abstract.

In Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel House of Mirth, Lily Bart learns in one brutal moment what happens to women who get tangled up with the stock market. Though she is beautiful and well-born, Lily is vulnerable when she seeks salvation in the stock market - she has no family to support her, no fortune of her own, no training in business matters, and no socially acceptable means of acquiring money, save marriage. When the husband of a friend (Gus Treanor) offers to help Lily by speculating in the stock market, Lily agrees. And when Treanor begins presenting Lily with money, she gladly accepts what she assumes are trading profits. One night, however, after luring Lily to his house under false pretenses, Treanor makes his true intentions known. After accusing Lily of leading him on, Treanor demands sexual favors, telling Lily that she must "pay up". Even though Lily manages to extricate herself from the house without submitting to Treanor’s demands, she is ruined by this encounter. Cast off by her social circle, Lily eventually leaves her last pennies to Treanor, takes an overdose of sleeping medication and dies alone in a boarding house room.

One hundred years later, when senior Morgan Stanley executive Zoe Cruz sought her fortune in the stock market, she appeared to have none of Lily Bart’s limitations. Ms. Cruz was a long-time Wall Street warrior. She began working on Wall Street in 1982 after graduating from Harvard College and Harvard Business School. After proving herself on the trading desk, she spent more than twenty years working her way up through management, eventually earning millions of dollars per year in compensation, and billions in profits for her employer. By 2007, she was the heir apparent for the CEO job. Just months after praising Ms. Cruz's market insights and her contributions to the Morgan Stanley’s bottom line, however, Ms. Cruz's boss called her to his office. With the subprime mortgage crisis unfolding, losses mounting and his own job under pressure, Ms. Cruz's boss said that he had "lost confidence" in her and asked her to resign. After a ten minute meeting, Ms. Cruz left the building and never went back. In the wake of termination, some former colleagues questioned whether the woman they had nicknamed "the Cruz Missile" had ever understood the markets, trading or how to manage financial risk.

In this article, I argue that even though Lily Bart’s fictional ruin and Ms. Cruz's rise and fall are separated by more one hundred years, "stories" like theirs are typical, and reflect Wall Street’s fixed and surprisingly narrow social and cultural response to women who wish to trade securities or work in the financial industry. In Wall Street lore, the "masters of the universe" are almost invariably men - they are the high-flying traders, the crusading regulators and even the notorious scoundrels though to have shaped the markets and our system of securities regulation. Women, by contrast, are portrayed as social and cultural outsiders to the Wall Street world. Drawing upon industry narratives, articles from the popular press and selected academic commentary from the past one hundred years, I show how women are either omitted from Wall Street narratives entirely, as if they are (and should remain) absent from securities markets, or relegated to the status of hapless victims or allegedly incompetent shrews. In either case, Wall Street's prevailing narrative assumes that women lack the skills and characteristics necessary to navigate on Wall Street, and risk financial and reputational ruin if foolish enough to venture into the markets alone.

I further argue that Wall Street’s social and cultural response to women has become embedded in our system of securities regulation. Drawing upon selected case law, legislative history and administrative agency reports from the 1920s to the present, I show how reform-minded legislators, courts and regulators have used stories of vulnerable female victims of investment abuse - particularly "poor widows" - when seeking to curb abusive sales practices on Wall Street. Drawing upon employment discrimination cases, I show how Wall Street firms have used the same stereotypes about women to justify excluding women from employment on Wall Street and to rebut discrimination, harassment and retaliation claims.

Finally, having exposed links between Wall Street's social and cultural response to women and our regime of securities regulation, I argue that Wall Street’s singular narrative for women has come at a cost, and one that we have yet fully to explore. Securities regulation purports to be a gender-neutral exercise. It uses supposedly gender-neutral standards like "reasonable", "sophisticated" and "unsophisticated", and it assigns rights and obligations based on purportedly gender-neutral roles like "trader" "broker" and "customer". In reality, however, relevant standards and systems reflect unstated gender norms about who is sophisticated and skilled when it comes to the markets, and who is not. And because the law, with its tendency to use labels and stereotypes, has seized upon Wall Street’s image of women as incompetent outsiders, it has reinforced and in some cases legitimized Wall Street’s gender norms. As a result, instead of examining the skills and characteristics of individual market participants, we assume that some people are competent merely because they "look the part" (say, Bernard Madoff) and we are skeptical of those who do not. We presume that some people are vulnerable and in need of protection (poor widows), but we are skeptical when people who do not fit this stereotype allege investment abuse. And, we assume that norms and systems impact all system participants equally, when in reality, they may reflect the experiences and perspectives of one or more dominant groups.

This paper examines links between Wall Street's prevailing image of women and case law, legislative and regulatory activity as a first step in understanding how Wall Street's gender norms have affected securities regulation. Going forward, this paper urges scholars to ask hard questions about the unexamined underpinnings of our system of securities regulation (including but not limited to unexamined gender stereotypes), so that our regulatory regime might be as effective and efficient as our times demand.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Hollywood, Women's and Children's Rights, and the News

FindLaw's Marci Hamilton discusses the popular culture image of polygamy in Big Love and the reaction to the news of the arrest of director Roman Polanski here, arguing that some media can sometimes present a very particularized interpretation of child abuse and women's rights. Interesting views, interesting reading.

The Effects of Advertising

Mark Bartholomew, University at Buffalo Law School, has published "Advertising and Social Identity." Here is the abstract.

This essay takes a stand in the brewing legal academic debate over the consequences of advertising. On one side are the semiotic democratists, scholars who bemoan the ability of advertisers to take control of the meanings that they create through trademark law and other pro-business legal rules. On the other side are those who are more sanguine about the ability of consumers to rework advertising messages and point to several safety valves for free expression existing in the current advertising regulation regime. My take on this debate is that the participants have failed to address the impact of advertising on personal development. Particularly important to this discussion is the recent trend of using targeted niche marketing to appeal to particular social groups. Using social identity theory - an influential psychological theory positing that identities develop through categorization and comparison of ourselves with the social groups around us - I argue that modern advertising has a tremendous and unrecognized influence on our sense of self. My chief example of the impact of niche marketing on identity formation is the recent targeting of the gay and lesbian market. By constructing the gay market in a particular way, advertisers shrink the identity models available for individuals grappling with whether to self-categorize themselves as gay. Advertisers have forced an essentialist model of gay sexuality on consumers while painting the gay market as white, male, healthy, and affluent. At the same time, advertisers have invaded gay cultural space, co-opting gay political symbols and taking over once relatively ad-free community spaces. Meanwhile, this targeted marketing threatens to split the gay community apart by emphasizing lines of difference that are based on class and taste and socioeconomic station. All of these practices threaten the processes that psychologists using social identity theory deem crucial to developing a healthy sense of self. I suggest that the real focus in the debate over legal regulation of advertising should be not on First Amendment protections for artists and activists, but on training our minds to be more aware of advertising’s growing influence on our psyches.

Download the essay from SSRN here.

Writing Domestic Violence Scholarship

Lively discussion between Nancy Lemon and Christina Hoff Sommers over Myths or Facts in Feminist Scholarship? in The Chronicle Review.

New Film From Women Make Movies

From Women Make Movies

WMM NEW RELEASE! MRS. GOUNDO'S DAUGHTER

A new film about a young Malian mother's fight with the U.S. legal system to protect her daughter from female genital mutilation


"Heart-wrenching testament to the integrity and solidarity of women in the face of staggering adversity."-Ed Gonzalez, The Village Voice



WMM is pleased to announce the release of MRS. GOUNDO'S DAUGHTER from Barbara Attie and Janet Goldwater, which had its world premiere at Silverdocs last month, followed by a screening at the Human Rights

Watch International Film Festival. Threatened with deportation, Mrs. Goundo must convince an immigration judge that her two-year-old daughter is in danger: if returned to her family’s native country of Mali, she will be forced to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM).



Sensitive and moving, MRS. GOUNDO'S DAUGHTER reveals how women are profoundly affected by immigration law and political asylum struggles and travels between an FGM ceremony in a Malian village to the expatriate community of Philadelphia, where Mrs. Goundo navigates the American legal system for her daughter's future.



VIEW A CLIP



CLICK HERE TO ORDER OR LEARN MORE

The Geography of Crime; Crime and Reality TV

Found while I was looking for something else:

Lisa Kadonaga, Strange Countries and Secret Worlds in Ruth Rendell's Crime Novels, 88 Geographical Review 413-428 (July 1998).

If you're interested in crime, gender, and reality TV, here's something of interest:

Gray Cavender, Lisa Bond-Maupin, and Nancy C. Jurik, The Construction of Gender in Reality Crime TV, 13 Gender and Society 643-663 (October 1999).

Full texts available via JSTOR.

Women's Memoirs

From History Today: Julie Peakman writes about "blaming and shaming in whore's memoirs." Men may have had power, but women often got the last laugh. Says Dr. Peakman,

Just as the exploits of the likes of Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse and Charlotte Church fill today’s gossip magazines, notorious 18th-century women frequently found themselves in the limelight for their emotional outbursts, drunken revellings or pub brawls. Juicy titbits about them and other famous people were delivered in exposés of their affairs, adulteries and divorce cases, which in turn became part of the social make-up of public life. Gossip about sexual liasions first started to be broadcast in an explosion of print at the beginning of the century. Sex and how it figured within the lives of prostitutes, bawds and aristocrats became a topic aimed at an audience with an increasing appetite for titillation.

Read more here.

GLAAD: HBO Features More Gay, Bi, Transgender Characters On Its Shows Than Other Networks

The AP reports on a Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) study that found that HBO features more gay, bisexual, and transgender characters on its series than any other network. The survey looked at original primetime series on ten cable and the five major networks, more than 6000 hours of original programming.

Here's a link to the news release from GLAAD. Here's a link to the full report, formally called the Network Responsibility Index.

New Film About Women Judges and Attorneys in South Africa

Courting Justice, a new film from Women Make Movies, may interest readers of the Law and Humanities Blog. Here's the description.

From tyranny to democracy. Fourteen years after the defeat of apartheid, South Africa’s fledgling democracy is acclaimed for its constitutional promise of comprehensive human rights and unprecedented judicial reform. But what is essential for transformation to succeed?

Courting Justice takes viewers behind the gowns and gavels to reveal the women who make up 18 percent of South Africa’s male-dominated judiciary. Hailing from diverse backgrounds and entrusted with enormous responsibilities, these pioneering women share with candor, and unexpected humor, accounts of their country’s transformation since apartheid, and the evolving demands of balancing their courts, country, and families.

Creator Ruth Cowan, a feminist and developing world scholar, is a leader in the fields of microfinance, human rights, judiciary development, and gender and race issues. With acuity and spirit, her film chronicles the hard fought progress of achieving gender and racial justice in a burgeoning new judiciary. It is a pivotal work that examines the exciting transformation of an entire legal system, through the intimate, unique, and inspiring stories of women working to change it from the bench.

Getting Published

The manager of the acquisitions department for the University of Michigan Press suggests that women authors need to "get more aggressive" about approaching presses with their manuscripts and she offers suggestions on just how to do that. Read Ellen Bauerle's essay on getting your work in front of acquisitive eyes here.

Women Attorneys and Their Image

From Concurring Opinions, this post from Deven Desai discussing a Law.com article about what some judges think about how women lawyers dress.

"There Oughta Be a Law!" A Scholar Re-Examines Fairy Tale History

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Jennifer Howard writes about Ruth B. Bottigheimer, whose works on the origins of fairy tales have other scholars up in arms.

Gender, Copyright, and Filk Literature

Melissa L. Tatum, University of Arizona College of Law, Robert E. Spoo, University of Tulsa College of Law, and Benjamin Pope, University of Arizona, have published Does Gender Influence Attitudes toward Copyright in the Filk Community? as Arizona Legal Studies Discussion Paper No. 09-21. Here is the abstract.

Over the past few decades, the filk community has expanded from a small group of science fiction convention-goers who occupied unused convention rooms during the late night hours to a community large enough to organize several dedicated filk conventions each year, a Hall of Fame, and an annual awards ceremony. While many filk songs are original lyrics set to original music, many more filk songs consist of lyrics written to existing music and/or lyrics based on characters/worlds created by other people. These practices potentially create problems in light of existing intellectual property law. In this paper, we explore those issues and whether a filker's gender influences his or her attitude towards intellectual property law. After setting out a basic explanation of filk and the intellectual property issues, the article details the various statistical results generated from the databases we built (one objective and one subjective) and draws some conclusions about gender and filk.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Marilyn French Dies

Marilyn French, author of the 1977 bestseller The Women's Room has died at the age of 79. Her last novel will be published this fall. Read more here in a BBC article.