Gender and the Law Blog

New Books: The Preacher's Wife on Women's Search for Spiritual Authority

Kate Bowler, The Preacher's Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities

Whether standing alone or next to their husbands, the leading women of megaministry play many parts: the preacher, the homemaker, the talent, the counselor, and the beauty. Boxed in by the high expectations of modern Christian womanhood, they follow and occasionally subvert the visible and invisible rules that govern the lives of evangelical women, earning handsome rewards or incurring harsh penalties. They must be pretty, but not immodest; exemplary, but not fake; vulnerable to sin, but not deviant. And black celebrity preachers' wives carry a special burden of respectability. But despite their influence and wealth, these women are denied the most important symbol of spiritual power―the pulpit.

The story of women who most often started off as somebody's wife and ended up as everyone's almost-pastor, The Preacher's Wife is a compelling account of women's search for spiritual authority in the age of celebrity. 

New Book by Attorney, "Nobody's Victim" on Cases Challenging Title IX Sexual Violence and Revenge Porn

The Lily, Wash. Post, Carrie Goldberg's New Memoir "Nobody's Victim": How Schools Fail Black Girls

The following is an excerpt from attorney Carrie Goldberg’s memoir, “Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls,” which comes out Aug. 13. In 2014, Goldberg made a name for herself representing victims of sexual violence — specifically in cases of revenge porn. Her law firm, C.A. Goldberg, PLLC, specializes in handling cases of sexual harassment, sexual assault and blackmail.

 

This excerpt appears in Chapter 4, “Girls’ Lives Matter,” in which Goldberg describes her work with three clients — all middle-school-aged girls of color from New York City. In the chapter, she describes the Title IX complaint she filed with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights on behalf of Vanessa, who alleged a classmate sexually assaulted her when she was 13.

 

“When I opened my firm, the idea of representing clients who were still in middle school wasn’t even on my radar,” Goldberg writes. “But by 2018, I’d filed seven Title IX complaints with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, including five on behalf of middle and high school students who were sexually violated by their peers, then shamed and blamed by the school officials who were supposed to be protecting them.”

 

In this excerpt, Goldberg outlines the stories of two other clients and discusses a larger system of bias against black girls and women who report sexual assault.

Female Academic Voices Are Missing from the Media, Even when their Work Isn't

It's Not Just Sarah Milov. Female Academics aren't Credited in the Media All the Time

“The research we have shows that women’s voices are missing from the media,” said Kate McCarthy, who runs WMC SheSource for the Women’s Media Center, a national database designed to connect journalists with female experts. “And frequently when women are called on to offer something up, they are quoted without citation.”

 

The problem is particularly acute for black women, said Christen Smith, a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, and founder of the Cite Black Women Collective, an organization that promotes the citation of black women in academia. “Women in general don’t get quoted, but black women experience it threefold. We get it from all sides,” said Smith, who started the collective after a colleague paraphrased whole sections of her book in a conference presentation without any citation. Black women, Smith said, are far less likely to be seen as “experts” by the media, and are therefore less likely to be approached for an interview in the first place.

 

How Candidate "Likeability" is Gendered

Vox, "Likeability" Ratings in Recent New Hampshire Poll Show Just How Tough Female Candidates Have It

New Hampshire voters approve of the job Sen. Elizabeth Warren is doing; they just don’t like her all that much. Same goes for Sen. Kamala Harris.

 

Despite Harris’s recent bump in New Hampshire following her performance at the first Democratic debate, data in a recently released CNN/UNH Survey Center poll of likely New Hampshire voters found good favorability numbers for both Warren and Harris (67 percent for Warren, 54 percent for Harris). But when pollsters asked, “Which Democratic candidate do you think is most likable?” the numbers for both women were bleak.

 

Just 4 percent of likely voters polled said they found Warren “likable,” and 5 percent said the same about Harris. The candidates they liked better were all men: 20 percent found both Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders likable, while 18 percent found South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg likable. (Warren’s favorability rating was the same as Sanders’s and higher than either Biden’s or Buttigieg’s.)

 

Likability is a tricky, highly subjective political term. Pollsters used to get at the same question by asking, “Who is the candidate you’d rather grab a beer with?” But the question of who voters think is the most likable is difficult to pin down because different people have vastly different ideas of what it means, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

 

“The construct is an unclear construct,” she told Vox. “We are making it relevant without asking why should it be. We don’t know what it is, anyway.”

 

One thing is clear: Likability applies differently to male and female candidates. But female candidates need to be liked in order to be elected, research has found.

 

“This likability dimension is a real barrier for women,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told Vox. “Voters are perfectly willing to vote for a man for executive office that they think is qualified that they don’t like, but they are not willing to vote for a woman they think is qualified that they don’t like.”

CFP Center on Applied Feminism 12th Legal Theory Conference on Applied Feminism and Privacy

The Center on Applied Feminism at the University of Baltimore School of Law seeks paper proposals for the Twelfth Feminist Legal Theory Conference.  We hope you will join us for this exciting conference on April 2 and 3, 2020.  The theme is Privacy. As always, the conference focuses on the intersection of gender and race, class, gender identity, ability, and other personal identities. We are excited that Dr. Leana Wen, President and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, has agreed to serve as our Keynote.

We are at a critical time for a broad range of privacy issues. State level abortion bans have put a spotlight on the importance of decisional privacy to women’s equality. Across America, advocates are fighting for reproductive justice and strategizing to preserve long-settled rights. At the same time, our informational privacy is increasingly precarious. Data brokers, app designers, and social media platforms are gathering and selling personal data in highly gendered ways. As a result, women have been targeted with predatory marketing, intentionally excluded from job opportunities, and subject to menstrual tracking by marketers and employers. In online spaces, women have been objectified, cyber-stalked, and subject to revenge porn.  With regard to physical privacy, the structural intersectionality of over-policing and mass incarceration impacts women of color and other women.  And while a man’s home may be his castle, low-income women are expected to allow government agents into their homes – and to turn over reams of other personal information -- as a condition of receiving state support. In addition, families of all forms are navigating the space of constitutionally-protected family privacy in relation to legal parentage, marriage and cohabitation, and child welfare systems.

 We seek submissions of papers that focus on the topic of Applied Feminism and Privacy.  We will interrogate multiple aspects of privacy, including its physical, decisional, informational, and family dimensions. This conference aims to explore the following questions:  Is privacy dead, as often claimed?  If so, what does this mean for women? How can privacy reinforce or challenge existing inequalities?  How has feminist legal theory wrestled with privacy and what lessons can we draw from past debates? What advocacy will best advance privacy protections that benefit women? How do emerging forms of surveillance impact women? Can intersectional perspectives on privacy lead to greater justice? Who defines the “right to privacy” and what do those understandings mean for women? How is privacy related to other values, such as autonomy, anti-subordination, vulnerability, justice, and equality?

 We welcome proposals that consider these questions and any other related questions from a variety of substantive disciplines and perspectives. The Center’s conference will serve as a forum for scholars, practitioners, and activists to share ideas about applied feminism, focusing on connections between theory and practice to effectuate social change. The conference will be open to the public.

To submit a paper proposal, by Friday, November 1, 2019, please complete this form and include your 500 word abstract: https://forms.gle/k4EPNLaYmEvo4KHUA

We will notify presenters of selected papers by early December. About half the presenter slots will be reserved for authors who commit to publishing in the annual symposium volume of the University of Baltimore Law Review, our co-sponsor for this conference. Thus, the form requests that you indicate if you are interested in publishing in the University of Baltimore Law Review's symposium issue. Authors who are interested in publishing in the Law Review will be strongly considered for publication. The decision about publication rests solely with the Law Review editors, who will communicate separately with the authors. For all presenters, working drafts of papers will be due no later than March 20, 2020. Presenters are responsible for their own travel costs; the conference will provide a discounted hotel rate as well as meals.

We look forward to your submissions. If you have further questions, please contact Prof. Margaret Johnson at majohnson@ubalt.edu. For additional information about the conference, please visit law.ubalt.edu/caf.

Interpreting the Reasonable Expectation of Sexual Privacy in Canada's Digital Technology Criminal Laws

Moira Aikenhead, A '"Reasonable" Expectation of Sexual Privacy in the Digital Age, 41 Dalhousie L.J. 274 (2018)

Two Criminal Code offences, voyeurism, and the publication of intimate images without consent, were enacted to protect Canadians’ right to sexual privacy in light of invasive digital technologies. Women and girls are overwhelmingly targeted as victims for both of these offences, given the higher value placed on their non-consensual, sexualised images in an unequal society. Both offences require an analysis of whether the complainant was in circumstances giving rise to a reasonable expectation of privacy, and the use of this standard is potentially problematic both from a feminist standpoint and in light of the rapidly evolving technological realities of the digital age. This article proposes a feminist-inspired, technology-informed approach to the reasonable expectation of privacy standard in relation to these offences, and examines the extent to which the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent voyeurism decision, R. v. Jarvis, aligns with this approach. 

Catharine MacKinnon on What MeToo Has Changed

Catharine MacKinnon, What #MeToo Has Changed

But #MeToo has been driven not by litigation but by mainstream and social media, bringing down men (and some women) as women (and some men) have risen up. The movement is surpassing the law in changing norms and providing relief that the law did not. Sexual-harassment law prepared the ground, but #MeToo, Time’s Up, and similar mobilizations around the world—including #NiUnaMenos in Argentina, #BalanceTonPorc in France, #TheFirstTimeIGotHarassed in Egypt, #WithYou in Japan, and #PremeiroAssedio in Brazil among them—are shifting gender hierarchy’s tectonic plates.

 

Until #MeToo, perpetrators could reasonably count on their denials being credited and their accusers being devalued to shield their actions. Many survivors realistically judged reporting to be pointless or worse, predictably producing retaliation. Complaints were routinely passed off with some version of “She isn’t credible” or “She wanted it” or “It was trivial.” A social burden of proof effectively presumed that if anything sexual happened, the woman involved desired it and probably telegraphed wanting it. She was legally and socially required to prove the contrary. In campus settings, in my observation, it typically took three to four women testifying that they had been violated by the same man in the same way to even begin to make a dent in his denial. That made a woman, for credibility purposes, one quarter of a person.***

 

The #MeToo movement is finally breaking this paralyzing logjam. Structural misogyny, with sexualized racism and class inequalities, is being challenged by women’s voices. No longer liars, no longer worthless, today’s survivors are initiating consequences few could have gotten through any lawsuit—in part because the laws do not permit relief against individual perpetrators, more because the survivors are being believed and valued as the law seldom has.***

 

The #MeToo mobilization, this uprising of the formerly disregarded, has made increasingly untenable the assumption that the one who reports sexual abuse is a lying slut. That is already changing everything. A lot of the sexual harassment that has been a constant condition of women’s lives is probably not being inflicted at this moment.

The Informal (yet Effective) Process of MeToo

Jessica Clarke, The Rules of #MeToo, Univ. Chicago Legal Forum (forthcoming)

Two revelations are central to the meaning of the #MeToo movement. First, sexual harassment and assault are ubiquitous. And second, traditional legal procedures have failed to redress these problems. In the absence of effective formal legal procedures, a set of ad hoc processes have emerged for managing claims of sexual harassment and assault against persons in high-level positions in business, media, and government. This Article sketches out the features of this informal process, in which journalists expose misconduct and employers, voters, audiences, consumers, or professional organizations are called upon to remove the accused from a position of power. Although this process exists largely in the shadow of the law, it has attracted criticisms in a legal register. President Trump tapped into a vein of popular backlash against the #MeToo movement in arguing that it is “a very scary time for young men in America” because “somebody could accuse you of something and you’re automatically guilty.” Yet this is not an apt characterization of #MeToo’s paradigm cases. In these cases, investigative journalists have carefully vetted allegations; the accused have had opportunities to comment and respond; further investigation occurred when necessary; and the consequences, if there were any at all, were proportional to the severity of the misconduct. This Article offers a partial defense of the #MeToo movement against the argument that it offends procedural justice. Rather than flouting due process values, #MeToo’s informal procedures have a number of advantages in addressing sexual misconduct while providing fair process when the accused person is a prominent figure.

What #BelieveWomen Means, and Doesn't Mean

Sherry Colb, What Does #BelieveWomen Mean?, Verdict, Justia

As the #MeToo movement gathered steam, exposing many long-ignored instances of sexual misconduct, other hashtags followed in its wake. One of these is #BelieveWomen. In this column, I will analyze some ways of understanding #BelieveWomen and suggest that properly understood, it can provide us with a better way to approach not only women but anyone who brings disfavored messages to our doorstep.

What Does “Believe Women” Mean?

The #BelieveWomen hashtag responds to a very old and longstanding prejudice. The prejudice held (and, to some extent, still holds) that when women say that they were raped, there is a good chance that they are lying. Seventeenth century English jurist Lord Chief Justice Matthew Hale said “[rape] is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never so innocent.” Well into the second half of the twentieth century, Hale’s concern about women’s false rape accusations distorted the process of adjudicating rape claims in criminal courts.

Judges, for instance, gave juries special instructions cautioning them about the danger of lying rape victims and the need to be extra skeptical of their testimony. Courts often required corroborating evidence as well, even though witnesses who testified about other crimes required no similar corroboration. As Susan Estrich put it in her 1988 book, Real Rape, the law had difficulty believing women who came forward to complain of rape. The law accordingly placed stumbling blocks in the path of prosecution and conviction, including the special cautionary instruction and the need for corroboration.

. . .

So What Would It Mean to Believe All Women?

If we acknowledge that women sometimes bring false accusations, does that mean we should believe only some women but not all women? We can still believe all women, so long as we make sure to follow up with other potential evidence sources before convicting the defendant of rape.

Using Laws in the UK to Ensure Gender Equality in Digital Spaces

Guardian, Far From Empowering Young Women, the Internet Silences Their Voices

If you walked past a craft beer store regularly, and subsequently received obscene messages on Facebook from the store account, what would you do?

 

Former Austrian Green party MP Sigrid Maurer wanted to sue a beer shop owner in Vienna after receiving a series of abusive online messages.

 

But Maurer wasn’t able to sue for public sexual assault, because the messages were private. Instead, she reposted the messages online, including the name of the store and its owner – who then sued her, successfully, for libel. She is now appealing against the ruling in Vienna that would mean her having to pay more than €4,000 in damages, because she couldn’t prove he personally posted the obscene messages. He argued that anyone in the store could have accessed his account and sent the message.

 

The case is just one example of the chilling impact of online abuse and sexual harassment of women, particularly those prominent in public life.

 

The continuing struggle to combat abuse against women, particularly female politicians, has been highlighted in the UK recently. MPs on the women and equalities select committee have called for a new law to criminalise all non-consensual creation and distribution of sexual images “on the basis of the victim’s lack of consent rather than perpetrator motivation”. Labour MP Yvette Cooper has also called for the naming of Conservative MPs who used “vile and dehumanising language” about the prime minister.

Exploring the Feminist Critique of #MeToo

Brenda Cossman, #MeToo, Sex Wars 2.0 and the Power of Law, Asian Yearbook of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (Forthcoming)

In this essay, I explore these contestations between and among feminists within the #MeToo movement. Some feminists have expressed discomfort and disagreement with elements of the #MeToo. This critique was quickly framed as a generational one, with media reports focusing on the conflict between millennials and second wave feminists. I argue that it is more productive to situation the disagreements and contestations of #MeToo within the context of what I refer to as Sex Wars 2.0 – that is, the return of the feminist sex wars of the 1970s and 1980s. I also explore the controversies around role of law in the #MeToo movement. #MeToo critiques, including some feminist voices, have denounced the absence of the rule of law, with individual men losing their livelihoods without the due process of law. I argue that this critique is itself symptomatic of the broader role of law in the legal regulation of sexual violence. Law has long been the arbiter of sexual violence, both defining and harms and deciding whether that harm has occurred. Even in its apparent absence, law is I argue deeply present. It is this power of law that casts a long shadow over #MeToo and helps explain the due process critiques and some of the feminist contestations around the overreach of law.

More Perfect Podcast: The Nineteenth Amendment with a Song by Dolly Pardon

The Most Perfect Album: Episode 4

This season, More Perfect is taking its camera lens off the Supreme Court and zooming in on the words of the people: the 27 amendments that We The People have made to our Constitution. We're taking on these 27 amendments both in song and in story. This episode is best listened to alongside 27: The Most Perfect Album, an entire album (an ALBUM!) and digital experience of original music and art inspired by the 27 Amendments. Think of these episodes as the audio liner notes.

Episode Four begins, as all episodes should: with Dolly Parton. Parton wrote a song for us (!) about the 19th Amendment and women (finally) getting the right to vote.

 

Also in this episode: Our siblings at Radiolab share a story with us that they did about how the 19th Amendment almost died on a hot summer night in Tennessee. The 19th Amendment was obviously a huge milestone for women in the United States. But it was pretty well-understood that this wasn’t a victory for all women; it was a victory for white women.

 

Read the lyrics to Dolly Parton's 19th Amendment song here.

MeToo One Year Later: More Awareness, More EEOC Success, New Laws in CAL and NY

A Year After it Began has #MeToo Become a Global Movement

In the year since, the global conversation about sexual harassment — and worse — has shifted, but the lasting impact of the moment remains unclear.

From Stockholm to Seoul, from Toronto to Tokyo, a torrent of accusations has poured forth. Survivors spoke out, and many were taken seriously. Powerful men lost their jobs. A few went to prison. How diverse societies — some liberal, others conservative — saw sexual harassment seemed to be changing.

On Friday, a year after the New York Times and the New Yorker published their stories about Weinstein, two activists who have sought to end sexual violence in conflict zones — Congolese gynecologist Denis Mukwege and Yazidi assault survivor Nadia Murad — were awarded the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.

But for all the early anticipation that things had changed forever, in many countries the #MeToo movement either fizzled or never took flight.

1 Year Later, How MeToo is Changing America

Joanna Grossman, Beneath the Fray: Federal Courts Continue the Work of Enforcing Sexual Harassment Laws

This week marks the one-year anniversary of Harvey Weinstein’s fall from grace, after the New York Times published a bombshell investigative article about a lifetime of egregious sexual misdeeds. One year later, the #MeToo movement came into sharp contrast with the GOP-controlled Senate, which voted to elevate Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court despite credible allegations of sexual misconduct. But while we ponder questions big and small about the problem of sexual misconduct and how to deal with it, courts continue the everyday work of hearing sexual harassment cases. In a recent case, EEOC v. Favorite Farms, Inc., a federal district court in Florida did exactly that, refusing to grant an employer’s motion for summary judgment in a workplace rape case that deserves a full trial on the merits.

Eric Bachman, In Response to #MeToo Movement, EEOC is Filing More Sexual Harassment Lawsuits, and Winning

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) recently announced how the #MeToo movement has impacted its enforcement efforts, which has implications across the country and particularly in corporate America.

Not surprisingly, the heightened awareness about sexual harassment-including what constitutes harassment and the harm it inflicts-generated by the #MeToo campaign has resulted in the EEOC filing "a 50% increase in suits challenging sexual harassment over FY 2017."  More broadly, the total number of EEOC Charges of Discrimination alleging sexual harassment increased by about 12% from last year, and the EEOC found reasonable cause to believe discrimination had occurred in nearly 20% more charges in 2018 than in 2017.

Allyson Hobbs, One Year of #MeToo: The Legacy of Black Women's Testimonies, New Yorker

We can create a more inclusive narrative. As the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw recently argued, “black feminist frameworks have been doing the hard work of building the social justice movements that race-only or gender-only frames cannot.” To do better by all women, we must listen and recognize the historical and contemporary circumstances that shape their experiences and have real consequences on their lives. The historian Elsa Barkley Brown has written, “We have still to recognize that being a woman is, in fact, not extractable from the context in which one is a woman—that is, race, class, time, and place.”

Congress Still Can't Pass its Own Sexual Harassment Bill

The House and the Senate passed two different bills earlier this year—but months after those votes, lawmakers are doubtful that they can reconcile the two pieces of legislation before the midterm elections.

“Here on Thursday, there is this very high-profile hearing and questions of sexual harassment, and yet Congress is allowing this bill to deal with sexual harassment in Congress [to languish],” said Meredith McGehee, the executive director at Issue One, a government watchdog group that advocates for stronger ethics laws.

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), who along with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) is overseeing the process of reconciling the House and Senate versions, predicted that the effort would not be completed before the midterm elections.

“[The] discussion continues to be active,” he told The Daily Beast. “I think we’ll get this done, but I do not think we’ll get it done before the election.”

See also 2018 Legislation on Sexual Harassment in the Legislature

 California Law Prohibits Nondisclosure Agreements as Part of Sexual Harassment Settlements

NY Enacts Sweeping Sexual Harassment Legislation

Amid #MeToo NY Employers Face Strict New Sexual Harassment Laws

Before MeToo: Was Media Representation of Sexual Harassment Accurate?

Joni Hersch & Beverly Moran, He Said, She Said, Let's Hear What the Data Say: Sexual Harassment in the Media, Courts, EEOC, and Social Science, 101 Kentucky L.J. 753 (2013)

In this article, we examine whether two national newspapers (the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) provide a realistic representation of sexual harassment in the workplace. Whether intentional or inadvertent, the national media influences attitudes and subsequent behavior. Victims of sexual harassment who encounter such accounts may find comfort and validation in learning that others have had similar experiences, and that may lead to greater willingness to report their own harassment. It is only through exposing illegal behavior that such workplace practices can be eradicated.

 

We expected the news articles to provide more information about age, marital status, and race of the parties. These facts are almost never given in the newspaper accounts. Nevertheless, the demographics of the victims
covered in the newspaper articles we surveyed are largely reflective of the victims of sexual harassment reported in the three data sources we analyze. We also find that there is fairly limited information provided about the
specific nature of the harassment.

 

We expected a more even distribution of attention between the accuser and the accused in all accounts. In fact, the accused is almost always the focus where the incident only generates one news story. On the other hand,
where the incident generates several reports, the articles tend to become more even-handed in their coverage of the accused and the accuser. We also expected that the parties would speak for themselves. In fact, a large
part of the communication with the press is through attorneys. We found that there is virtually no coverage of events taking place before litigation.... [T]he articles on sexual harassment tend to wait for litigation, despite studies showing that the majority of incidents are not reported, much less litigated. Although understandable from the press' point of view, the focus on litigation gives the impression that most sexual harassment is handled in the courts....

 

Our main focus is on identifying whether the media's portrayal of sexual harassment accurately reflects the reality of sexual harassment as indicated in surveys, charge filings with the EEOC, and in complaints filed in district court. We provide and compare empirical evidence from these four different sources, and conclude with
an assessment of whether the media does accurately characterize sexual harassment.

The 411 on the Second New Ruth Bader Ginsburg Movie "On the Basis of Sex"

Absolutely cannot wait for this.  (Coming in December).  So cool that the costumes (at least in the trailer) closely align with the archival photos.

On the Basis of Sex Official Movie Site

Felicity Jones is Ruth Bader Ginsburg in New Trailer for "On the Basis of Sex"

Felicity Jones makes a damn good Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Jones plays the iconic Supreme Court justice in the upcoming film based on RBG’s life, “On the Basis of Sex.” A new trailer for the film follows a young Ginsburg as she starts law school at Harvard, where she was only one of nine other female students in her class.

“Protests are important, but changing the culture means nothing if the law doesn’t change,” Ginsburg says to political activist and fellow lawyer Dorothy Kenyon (Kathy Bates) in the trailer. 

"On the Basis of Sex" Trailer: Can Felicity Jones Handle Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Accent?" [sic the NYT's headline snark]

A biopic of the Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg could hardly seem timelier, given the current headlines about President Donald J. Trump’s new nominee for the high court, Brett Kavanaugh, as well as the surprise box-office success of the recent documentary “RBG.” But based on the first trailer for “On the Basis of Sex,” fictionalization may prove stranger than truth in this case.

For two years, Natalie Portman was slated to play Justice Ginsburg, but dropped out in 2017, only to be replaced by Felicity Jones. Ms. Jones was born in Birmingham, England, and initial impressions indicate she may not have nailed Ms. Ginsberg’s distinctive Brooklyn accent.

Felicity Jones is Ruth Bader Ginsburg in First Trailer for "On the Basis of Sex"

Felicity Jones Transforms into Young Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Trailer

CFP The Uses and Abuses of History in the Trump Era

Call for Papers

Conference: “The Uses and Abuses of History in the Trump Era”

Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY

March 28-29, 2019

“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” –George Orwell

Scholars, artists, and writers are invited to submit proposals for presentations at this interdisciplinary conference.

Conference theme:

The past is infinitely productive as a deep well of symbolic persuasion. Political actors dip into the well for inspirational tales of heroes and cautionary tales of reprobates and failed experiments. Evocations of the past insinuate messages of belonging, the contours of the polity, values, and leadership.

During the 2016 US presidential campaign, the candidates harnessed public memory to gain support. While Hillary Clinton aligned herself with the suffragists as she aimed to become the country’s first female president nearly a century after women gained the right to vote, Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” stirred up nostalgic visions of hope for white, working-class male prosperity and pride.

Since the election, the historical imagination has been pushed into overdrive, as a highly polarized electorate aims to promote its vision of the nation’s future, often by asserting certain narratives about the past. Examples can be seen in debates about the racism of famous suffragists, the statues of confederate soldiers, a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, “Pocahontas” as a slur, Harriett Tubman’s image on the $20 bill, the flag as a symbol of “our heritage,” “chain migration” and “anchor babies,” whether the country is a “nation of immigrants,” and whether it was “founded on Judeo-Christian principles.”

This conference celebrates the publication of and features work by contributors to the interdisciplinary volume, Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 US Presidential Election (Christine A. Kray, Tamar W. Carroll, and Hinda Mandell, eds., University of Rochester Press, forthcoming October 2018). While the book sits at the heart of the conference, we also call upon scholars, artists and writers to present new works related to the conference themes.

Possible topics:

We seek presentations that: analyze recent evocations of the past in national political discourse, offer correctives of such representations, and/or situate contemporary developments in historical context.

Possible areas of investigation include (but are not limited to):

• Critical analyses of heritage, tradition, nostalgia, commemoration, and politics
• “Alternative facts” and alternative histories
• The historical role of news media in U.S. politics and charges of “fake news”
• Social media, popular media, and national politics
• Stephen Bannon’s historical vision
• History and nationalism, including the global resurgence of nationalism and the history and contemporary expressions of White nationalism in the U.S.
• Men’s movements and the alt-right
• S.-Russia relations
• Policymaking, including environmental, industrial, and trade; “Bring back coal”; “Bring back manufacturing”
• Religious histories and histories of religion in U.S. politics
• Contemporary social movements, including #BlackLivesMatter, #NoDAPL, #MeToo, #NeverAgain, and the Women’s Marches
• Histories of resistance and history-within-resistance; creativity and history in art, craft, dance, and song
• Suffragist history and “pro-life feminism”
• The occupation at Standing Rock and symbols of sovereignty; Right by prior occupation: indigenous sovereignty and Zionism, compared
• Immigration policy and race relations; “genealogical activism” and #ResistanceGenealogy; Rep. Steve King (R-IA): “We cannot restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”
• Post-election memoirs and public memory of the 2016 presidential election
• The historical significance of women running for election in the 2018 midterms
• The right, the left, and the FBI
• Kanye West on Harriet Tubman and slavery as a “choice”
• Public anthropology, public history, and national politics

Presentation proposals:

Abstracts of 300-500 words should be sent to Christine Kray: cakgss@rit.edu.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: Sept. 1, 2018

Accepted presenters will be notified by Sept. 15, 2018

Questions? Contact the conference organizers:

Christine A. Kray, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Rochester Institute of Technology, cakgss@rit.edu

Tamar W. Carroll, Department of History, Rochester Institute of Technology, twcgsh@rit.edu

Conference participants will have the option of participating in a tour of the Susan B. Anthony Museum and House and a trip to the Mount Hope Cemetery to visit the graves of Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony. The conference will also feature a showing of “Election Day 2016,” a documentary film about the convergence on Susan B. Anthony’s grave in 2016.

A nominal registration fee for conference presenters will cover all meals. Information about hotel group rates, directions, parking, and tours is forthcoming. All conference rooms will be equipped with projector, screen, Internet connection, and microphone. Sign-language interpreters are available upon request, subject to availability.

Conference website: https://www.rit.edu/cla/socanthro/conference-uses-and-abuses-history-trump-era

New Ruth Bader Ginsburg Movie Finds its Heart in Love, not Law

Vogue, A New Ruth Bader Ginsburg Movie Finds its Heart in Love, not Law

The Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary, RBG, directed by Betsy West and Julie Cohen, is probably not what you think it is, or even what, given the partisan hoopla in which we attempt to live our lives, you’d be forgiven for thinking it might be: a fawning polemic detailing a liberal justice battling the court’s right wing. There is fawning, though a fair amount is done by conservatives, including soon-to-retire Republican Senator Orrin Hatch and Antonin Scalia, the conservative justice and, until his death in 2016, the BFF of RBG. But the film is a deftly crafted portrait of a refreshingly wildly mild-mannered legal mind who was a powerful force in American life long before she donned the black robes and her trademark collars (one for dissenting opinions, one when she is siding with the majority, a fashion touch she developed with her female justice predecessor, Sandra Day O’Connor). What’s surprising to a casual follower of the judicial branch is that you’ll be reaching not for your legal pad while watching the film, but the tissues, given that what actually underpins RBG is a love story.

Film "I Am Evidence" on the Rape Kit Backlog

Film: I Am Evidence

I AM EVIDENCE exposes the alarming number of untested rape kits in the United States through a character–driven narrative, bringing much needed attention to the disturbing pattern of how the criminal justice system has historically treated sexual assault survivors. 

Why is there a rape kit backlog? What can we do to fix the problem? This film explores these questions through survivors’ experiences as they trace the fates of their kits and re-engage in the criminal justice process. I AM EVIDENCE illuminates how the system has impeded justice while also highlighting those who are leading the charge to work through the backlog and pursue long-awaited justice in these cases. 

In this film, we seek to send a clear message to survivors that they matter, that we as a nation will do everything possible to bring them a path to healing and justice, and that their perpetrators will be held accountable for their crimes.  

Denying Copyright Protection to Pornography to help Gender Inequality

Kayla Louis, Pornography and Gender Inequality: Using Copyright Law as a Step Forward, 24 William & Mary J. L. 267 (2018)

Introduction:

The pornography industry generates billions of dollars of revenue annually. The industry relies heavily on protection from copyright law in order to distribute its materials without them being freely taken by others. In other words, copyright law currently operates as an economic incentive to pornographers. Unfortunately, this lucrative industry has negative effects on gender equality. Pornography promotes harmful gender roles for both women and men. Women are portrayed as merely sexual objects who enjoy any type of penetration imaginable, even if it is rape. They are objectified and dehumanized. Men are shown as animalistic, performance-based, and without morals. As a whole, pornography can lead to behavioral, psychological, and social problems. Beyond the social harms to both men and women, the performers themselves suffer physical harms. As a form of prostitution, filmed pornography contributes to the demand for trafficking, and many women are coerced into the industry.

The government’s denial of copyright protection to speech based on content would potentially violate the First Amendment. However, the Supreme Court has made clear that not all content deserves free speech protections. Rather, “obscene” materials, as described in Miller v. California, are not protected under the First Amendment.

This Article argues that pornography is an actual problem that warrants denial of copyright protection as a method to disincentivize pornographers.

Hollywood's Contractual Inclusion Rider Created by Communications Professor and Civil Rights Lawyer

Oscar-winner McDormand Wants an "Inclusion Rider"

 Few people watching Sunday night’s Oscar awards knew what Frances McDormand was talking about as she ended her Best Actress acceptance speech with an obscure bit of legalese: “inclusion rider.”

 

One exception was Kalpana Kotagal, a civil rights lawyer in Washington who has spent the last year or so crafting the concept with colleagues, but had no idea the novel method for increasing diversity in Hollywood would get such a high-profile shout-out.

 

The gist is this: powerful actors and film makers could use their star power to get a studio to hire more women, gay people, disabled people and people from racial minorities to the cast and crew by stipulating it as a rider in their contract.***

 

“I just found out about this last week,” McDormand, who won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of a mother searching for her daughter’s killer in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” told reporters backstage during a ceremony notable for its activism.

 

Kotagal said she worked on creating model language for the rider with Stacy Smith, a communications professor at the University of Southern California who mentioned the “inclusion rider” idea in a 2016 talk on the lack of diversity in the film industry.

 

“The objective is to have the films that we see every day be a better reflection of the world that we live in,” Kotagal said, suggesting that casting directors look at a more diverse array of people when filling smaller speaking roles and background parts. “That means, for example, 50 percent women.

What's An Inclusion Rider? Here's the Story Behind Frances McDormand's Closing Words

"I have two words to leave with you tonight, ladies and gentlemen: inclusion rider."

 

Two simple words they may be, but when Frances McDormand closed her acceptance speech with them at the Academy Awards, not a whole lot of people had heard those terms paired that way. The big spike in Google searches for the phrase Sunday night reflects the frantic clatter of people across the world summoning those key words.

 

So, what is an inclusion rider, exactly?

 

Simply put: It's a stipulation that actors and actresses can ask (or demand) to have inserted into their contracts, which would require a certain level of diversity among a film's cast and crew.

 

For instance, an A-list actor negotiating to join a film could use the inclusion rider to insist that "tertiary speaking characters should match the gender distribution of the setting for the film, as long as it's sensible for the plot," Stacy L. Smith explained in a 2014 column that introduced the idea in The Hollywood Reporter.

 

Smith, who directs the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California, told NPR's Mary Louise Kelly she had "absolutely no idea" McDormand would bring up the concept at the Oscars. "But," Smith added, "talk about being elated and thrilled to hear those two words broadcast around the world."

 

Smith has pushed for years for more diverse representation in film — delivering a TED Talk on the topic while she was at it — and the inclusion rider has been a crucial arrow in her quiver.

 

"The goal really is to figure out: How do we move from all the lip service in Hollywood to actually see the numbers that we study every year move?" Smith said.