Feminist Law Professors

Don’t get caught in a bad hotel!!!

Information here!

Many law profs are respecting the boycott and will not enter the Hilton during the AALS. I will be one of them. As the linked website notes:

The cleaners, cooks, dish washers, and kitchen, door, bar, bell hop, wait, laundry, and desk staff have asked that we honor the boycott they have called. The hotel employs many immigrants who are among the most vulnerable workers in the labor force. The Hilton workers already bear a significant part of the costs of the boycott they have called in lost shifts, tips, and overtime hours. They face the Blackstone Group, the world’s largest private equity “asset manager,” which recently acquired Hilton and is now attempting to drive down costs. Blackstone insists on wage and benefit concessions. The workers have refused and have worked without a contract for more than a year. They are represented by UNITE HERE Local 2, a notably progressive union.

^{Support Economic Justice
for Hilton Workers.}

From Adam Candeub:

Hot Topics Panel at the AALS
E-Marriage:  Emerging Trends Meet the Law

Mae Kuykendall          (MSU College of Law)                 Moderator
Adam Candeub          (MSU College of Law)                 Presentation of the E-Marriage Concept
Larry Ribstein            (Illinois College of Law)               Critical Analysis
Anita Bernstein          (Brooklyn Law College)                Commentary on Marriage Essentials
Monu Bedi                (Stetson School of Law)               The Military Context
Aviva Abramovsky     (Syracuse College of Law)            State Export of Other Legal Arrangements
June Carbone            (UMKC School of Law)                 Redefining Law and Geography

Background is available at the Legal E-Marriage website:  http://www.law.msu.edu/e-marriage/. It includes a working paper first posted on SSRN in October 2009, advocating full modernization of the historical precedent of proxy precedent through the use of modern communications technology, and forthcoming in the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform.

The panel explores the likelihood that technology, modern-day mobility, and patterns in affiliation will produce increasing numbers of marriage formalizations that do not strictly conform to a requirement of physical presence by all parties in the granting jurisdiction.  Technology likely will be increasingly seen as a natural means of accessing laws across jurisdictions and for deepening ceremonial moments by combining across distance the factors that the parties value.  For gay couples, the factors driving interest in distance marriage ceremonies are the embargo in many states on official marriage for them and their wish for the presence in their home city of friends and family for a formal, “real” ceremony.  For other couples, the factor could be a wish to have a marriage in their new home location, with a religious figure from their childhood presiding by remote connection.  For couples who are separated by distance, combined with military duties, illness, or limited means, the factor is the ability to marry when the time and need for their marriage has become apparent to them.  Other couples would like to do destination weddings to exotic locales, but still rely upon the marriage procedures and official recordation of their home state.  The likely trend, the history of marriages across borders and the existing scholarship on the importance of the state’s playing a facilitative role given its monopoly over marriage access, and the need for consistency, clarity, and predictability in state treatment of marriages that depart from the letter of the statutes will be examined and assessed against critique.

Among the issues the panel will explore are 1) the practical value to a couple of an official marriage ceremony in a state that will deny recognition to the marriage, 2) the potential for backlash in the instance of gay marriage, 3) the legal and long-term cultural acceptability of limiting relief from the physical presence requirement to couples either chosen by state statutory law (active duty military, prisoners, the moribund) or clerk discretion, 4) prudent forms that state legislation might take, 5) the incentives for states to pass legislation modernizing marriage procedure for a mobile society, and 6) the risks that states will withhold recognition to marriages on the basis of the procedure, despite being willing to recognize the substance, of a marriage authorized by another state.

Program: Hot Topic Program – E-Marriage: Emerging Trends Meet the Law
Date/Time: 01/07/2011, 4:00 pm-5:45 P. M.

Place: Hilton (Room Not Yet Known; please note that the AALS organizers assigned the panel to this room).

The twin horizons of many people and organizations in the lesbian and gay community – achieving marriage equality and repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell – seem like obvious civil rights goals.  They both enshrine official, legally sanctioned discrimination against gay men and lesbians.  Yet as sites for the elaboration of a free-self, military service and state regulation of homo-coupledom strike some of us as rather curious choices.

I’ve aired my issues with the marriage equality movement enough in earlier posts, but on the eve of a Senate vote on the repeal of DADT, might we consider whether, and if so how, open military service for lesbians may hold greater, or at least different, peril for lesbians than it does for gay men.

Surely gay men who will serve openly will be vulnerable to hazing, harassment and even violence from other service members who do not welcome their presence in the U.S. military.  Even in countries that have allowed gays and lesbians to serve openly for some time find their gay soldiers brutally harassed from time to time.  (See e.g. here)

But lesbians will face harassment on account of their sexual orientation in a way that compounds the kind of harassment and violence all women in the military suffer as a routine matter.  A routine matter about which the military already knows and does very little to combat.

The regular harassment of women starts in the military academies: numbers released this week showed that reported sexual assaults at the three U.S. military academies rose 64 percent in the 2009-10 academic year.  The academies acknowledge that the number of reported incidents of sexual assault represents less than 10% of actual incidents that have taken place.  It gets worse – the number of sexual assaults within the armed services rose 73 percent from 2004 to 2006 and 11 percent from 2008 to 2009.  By some estimates, one in three women in the military experience sexual assault during their enlistment.  Again, these are reported assaults, the tip of the iceberg.  A Pentagon report in March 2007 found that more than half of the investigations dating back to 2004 resulted in no action. When action was taken, only one third of the cases resulted in courts-martial.  Then there’s this: 71 percent of female veterans seeking VA disability benefits for PTSD have been sexually traumatized, not by the enemy but by their own “comrades.”

This week the ACLU of Connecticut, the national ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, and a Yale Law School Clinic filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of SWAN, the Service Women’s Action Network, seeking government records (that they had unsuccessfully sought in previous Freedom of Information Act requests) documenting incidents of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment in the military – what the military terms “MST” or “Military Sexual Trauma.”  The complaint is here, press release is here.

U.S. Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway, among others in the military and in Congress, opposes the immediate repeal of DADT arguing that they simply aren’t ready yet.  Conway points out that Marines in particular recruit “pretty macho young Americans” (read men) who are largely unfriendly to the idea of rooming with an openly gay person.  Of course, Conway is only thinking about gay men here, lesbians aren’t even on his radar.   Many other opponents of repeal of DADT seem unanimous that the military needs more time to prepare and train active duty personnel for the open services of gay men and lesbians in order to assure a smooth transition.  If the track record on women’s service in the military (no matter their sexual orientation) is any indicator, these opponents may be right.  The military has done a horrendous job of preventing and prosecuting violence against female service members under the current regime, why should we think they’d do any better in addressing harassment and violence against lesbians and gay men?

The significant uptick in “MST” may tell us that some significant precincts of the U.S. military, bracing itself for and reacting to the integration of lesbians and gay men, has become more heterosexist and violent.  The “pretty macho young Americans” of whom Commandant Conway speaks are likely becoming more macho and less tolerant of threats to the military’s masculinity.  The handy thing about DADT is that it serves as a way of “vouching” for the heterosexuality of those who are currently serving in the military.  That’s the nifty flip side of barring lesbians and gay men from open military service.  The repeal of DADT means the revocation of this kind of sexual credential.

It seems likely that on the verge of a change in the U.S. military’s official sexual orientation, many in the institution are responding with a kind of exaggerated hetero-machismo that takes its largest toll on female members of the military in the form of increased sexual harassment, assault and violence.

While the time has surely come to repeal DADT, we should worry about what that repeal will hold for lesbians, and all women, who will serve in this new, “more equal,” military.  It may get worse.

Katherine Franke – cross-posted from Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

A lot of people are firing back at Alastair Macaulay, the New York Times critic who opined that Sugarplum Fairy Jenifer Ringer had eaten one too many holiday sweets. “This didn’t feel, however, like an opening night. Jenifer Ringer, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, looked as if she’d eaten one sugar plum too many; and Jared Angle, as the Cavalier, seems to have been sampling half the Sweet realm.” The drive to lose weight hits home not just for dancers, who strive to be ultrathin, but for women in general, and many readers apparently took Mr. Macaulay’s remark more than just a zinger. It was hurtful. He attempts to explain himself here in a second column called “Judging the Bodies in Ballet.”

Among his critics: the blogger at Haglund’s Heel, who says,

Macaulay did not like the physical appearance of the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier.  But he did not have the tools, knowledge, or experience to equate it to the effect on their dancing – which is their work product.  If Macaulay had made similar statements to a colleague at The New York Times, he could have been fired with cause.  It is regrettable that Macaulay doesn’t have the skill or craft needed to explain how a dancers’ dancing has been adversely affected by what Macaulay perceives to be substandard conditioning.

From La Flaneuse,  

The central, serious problem of Macaulay’s review is not only about misogyny and size-ism, but about bad critical practice. This is not a simple case of calling a ballerina fat, which, of course, is reprehensible, tacky, and, often, downright dangerous—Gelsey Kirkland’s Dancing on my Grave is the ne plus ultra of anorexic-dancer stories, but it’s hardly necessary to point out the extreme standards to which ballerinas must push themselves. And those standards are not the problem: the ballet is an art form that is premised upon a certain aesthetic (one which has become, for better or worse, ever stricter and more demanding since Balanchine’s time). To those who say that the ballet discourages ballerinas from eating like regular people, I offer the (perhaps inflammatory) rejoinder that they are not regular people, but artists whose odies are in service of a very particular visual vocabulary. Whether Macaulay meant the dancers actually looked fat or was commenting on a general sluggishness is neither here nor there—the main issue, counter to Jezebel’s reaction, is not one of body image or the judgment and oppression of women, but, quite simply, of poor criticism.

The Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins sums up:

It’s a tricky area, this: bodies, after all, are the material for the art form of dance and come under intense scrutiny. But there is a general agreement among critics that commenting on body shape is not done, unless it relates directly to the interpretation of the work.

Macaulay defends himself:

The issue of scrutiny came up this week in a review of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” at New York City Ballet. I wrote that Jenifer Ringer, cast as the Sugar Plum Fairy, “looked as if she’d eaten one sugarplum too many,” and that Jared Angle, as her Cavalier, “seems to have been sampling half the Sweet realm.” …This has caused a certain brouhaha online, and a minor deluge of reader e-mails, in many cases obscene and abusive. The general feeling was that my characterizations went beyond the pale of civilized discourse. …Notably, the fuss has been about Ms. Ringer’s appearance. No one took issue with what might be considered a much more severe criticism, that the two danced “without adult depth or complexity.” And though I was much harder on Mr. Angle’s appearance, scarcely a reader objected. When I described Nilas Martins as “portly” in The New York Times and Mark Morris as “obese” in the Times Literary Supplement, those remarks were also greeted with silence. Fat, apparently, is not so much a feminist issue as a sexist one. Sauce for the goose? Scandal. Sauce for the gander? No problem.

Ballet demands sacrifice in its pursuit of widely accepted ideals of beauty. To several readers that struggle is, regrettably but demonstrably and historically in the case of many women, concomitant with anorexia. (For the record, I have sometimes observed in print that certain dancers of either sex look too thin.)

…

Size in ballet is not only a modern obsession. In the mid-18th century at the Paris Opera, the ballerina Marie Allard was dismissed for her inability to lose weight (and the frequency of her pregnancies), while her contemporary Marie-Madeleine Guimard was nicknamed “the skeleton of the graces.” History remembers both, however, as exceptional artists. And it enshrines Marie Taglioni, the archetypal Romantic ballerina of the 19th century. Yet Taglioni as a student was derided by her classmates as a “hunchback.” In due course she became “Marie full of grace” (the echo of the Virgin Mary was intentional), the supreme sylph.

…

Some correspondents have argued that the body in ballet is “irrelevant.” Sorry, but the opposite is true. If you want to make your appearance irrelevant to criticism, do not choose ballet as a career. The body in ballet becomes a subject of the keenest observation and the most intense discussion. I am severe — but ballet, as dancers know, is more so.”

To be fair, Mr. Macaulay does point out that both sexes must keep up their bodies in order to do justice to the art. I note that size is also an issue in opera performance. Several years ago, the soprano Deborah Voigt lost a contract with Covent Garden to sing in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” because of her weight. She slimmed down, made a comeback and is now singing Minnie in the Met’s revival of Puccini’s “Fanciulla del West” this season. Do audiences care if the heroine looks the part, even if she can sing the high C, D, and F? The management thinks so. The days of the willing suspension of disbelief seem to be over, and sopranos are hitting the gym and the diets just like dancers.