<p> Gender-linked language penalizes women by both systematically devaluing women&rsquo;s speech and limiting its form and content. In 1975, Robin Lakoff claimed that gender-linked language was a key diagnostic for gender equality within society. Forty years later, this interdisciplinary analysis brings together feminist, legal justice, sociological, and linguistic perspectives to examine the courtroom testimony of female domestic violence victims for compliance with gender-linked language norms and subsequent success in obtaining protective orders. Testimony was evaluated for compliance with Mulac&rsquo;s Gender-Linked Language Effect (GLLE) as well as additional variables uncovered through research and experience. Results showed that all petitioners used female-linked variables at a consistent rate but that those who used more male-linked variables received fewer protective orders. The results of this analysis will serve to inform judges and legal professionals in their evaluation of women&rsquo;s narratives without bias, fill a gap in research on the effects gender-linked language in courtroom testimony, and uncover the presence of the GLLE in everyday life. Most importantly, this analysis provides a rationale for eliminating gender-linked language as an extralegal barrier to protection helping to ensure that all citizens receive equal protection from the Court regardless of gender.</p>

In the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, one of the critical elements of the ethnic cleansing regimes was rape and impregnation of women. When the international justice system was created to criminally try the perpetrators of the atrocities, including the rape victims was a new development. Looking at the tribunals and court system from a gendered perspective reveals that the efforts to include rape victims have not taken into account their specific needs, stemming from their trauma. A critical look the ICTY and other criminal courts are presented, as well as recommendations for improving inclusivity and reconciliation.

Females are becoming a prominent population within America’s correctional facilities, which has led to incarcerated females increasingly becoming the popular subjects of more recent research. Along with the growing population of female inmates, the rates of sexual and physical victimization reported by incarcerated females is rapidly growing. The purpose of this project is to evaluate the pre-established correlation between mental health diagnoses, and the prior physical and/or sexual abuse of female inmates within the custody of correctional institutions, outline the current treatment process, and devise a revision of the treatment process in order to improve the future of mental health care for incarcerated females. First, a brief description of the increasing female inmate population, their significant mental health care needs, and the lack of effective mental health care they are actually receiving, followed by the issues that this poses to rehabilitation and the community will be provided. Second, an examination of the commonality of childhood physical and/or sexual abuse among the female offenders that have been diagnosed with mental illnesses will be conducted. Next, a discussion of the most common mental health diagnoses of incarcerated women, what they are said to be caused by, and how they are being treated behind bars will be directed. Finally, a conclusion covering the established relationship between physical and sexual abuse and adult mental illnesses, the issues that the lack of adequate mental health care for incarcerated females poses, and what can be done to change and improve the future will be presented.

This examination of the southern suffrage campaign focuses the movement through the eyes of three prominent southern women within the political movement: Kate Gordon, Sue Shelton White, and Josephine Pearson. The merged National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) planned and organized a focus on the South during the second half of the suffrage campaign, which presented new challenges. The Nineteenth Amendment passed through Congress in 1918 and consequently set the stage for a raging political battle between suffragists and anti-suffragists. The suffrage campaign prompted women to question how the political platform of suffrage should be addressed. Women argued over the issue of suffrage and its application; a universal amendment, state legislation, or no suffrage rights at all. The question over appropriate political tactics often revealed the social and cultural prejudices of the campaign leaders. The cornerstone of my research focuses on the history of the southern campaign and incorporates three southern women who shared distinct political views of woman suffrage. The bulk of my research focused on the primary documents from the Josephine Pearson Collection at the Tennessee State Library and Archives and the loaned papers of Sue Shelton White from Knoxville, Tennessee. I also used the Louisiana newspaper, the Daily Picayune, for information about Kate Gordon as well as her correspondence with Laura Clay. Through this examination, a more direct focus is applied to the southern suffrage movement, which further complicates separate accounts of racial prejudice and exclusion in southern women’s politics. Furthermore, my thesis will create a framework of southern culture by incorporating the national issue of suffrage from a regional perspective to expose commonalities and themes that muddles southern women’s history and patriarchal loyalty in the South. Carefully analyzing the suffrage and anti-suffrage leadership in the South, particularly Tennessee, helps develop a well-defined understanding of the cultural and political factors influencing southern politics as well as assist in constructing a scholarly historiographic perspective on social and cultural influences of the southern campaign within the separate groups of suffragists and anti-suffragists.

During the information sessions that the Scripps Mock Trial Team hosts at the beginning of the school year for those interested in mock trial, it's customary for all the returning team members to talk about why we decided to join mock trial in college. We had no team at my high school, but at the end of my senior year, my AP American Government teacher decided that having a mock trial in class would give us valuable insight into the American legal system. I was chosen to give the closing statement for the defense, and I found my calling. My competitive spirit had found an outlet where it was not hampered by the unathletic body that housed it: competitive arguing. I have not been able to find any scholarly text that examines the ways in which mock trial teams themselves adhere to gender-normative patterns. I believe that this thesiswill be invaluable to an understanding of how gender roles are performed in the legal profession

Research related to profiling and the outcome of traffic stops has generally focused on the race of the individuals involved. Little research has examined other characteristics, such as age and socioeconomic status, that may also play a role in traffic stop outcomes. The current study sought to address this limitation in two ways: (1) determine whether the characteristics of age, sex, race, social class, and demeanor are profiled during traffic stops and (2) whether these characteristics influenced the outcome of the traffic stops with regard to tickets and vehicle searches. Secondary data were utilized from the 2015 Police-Public Contact Survey. Findings revealed that not only race, but age, sex, social class, and demeanor of both the officer and the driver had an affect on the outcome of a traffic stops.

A study of Imāmī Islamic law, gender and soteriology; marriage and divorce as technologies of the self. / This dissertation explores marriage in Muslim Imāmī juristic law as an embodiment of a set of practices that are aimed at cultivating the pious and virtuous self. As a ritual practice for mainstream Imāmī jurists, marriage (and its corollary activities, e.g. sex) was a mode of pietistic self-fashioning and hence a technology of the self. When faced with the strong possibility or inevitability of marital breakdown, and the sexual sins that may have come about as a result of this breakdown, Imāmī jurists opted for creating a space for women’s prerogative to divorce in which the marriage could end whilst still upholding Islam as a program for the circumvention of sin and the production of īmān. Divorce, in this sense, can be thought of as a safety mechanism and extension of marriage’s program for the nurturing of a pietistic psychology in men and women. The textual and gendered discourse of juristic law was therefore aimed at creating a legal program for individuals so as to maintain the normative Muslim’s ontological bond with God through a series of regulations, disciplines, bodily practices and juristically permitted gendered power inversions that promoted soteriological success. This study argues that the primary concern of Imāmī jurists was not to maintain a gendered hierarchy as the current dominant scholarship holds, but to prevent sin, especially zinā, the corruption of the qalb (metaphysical heart) and ultimately avoid damnation in the Hereafter. For Imāmī jurists, marriage was not just a procedural practice of rights and duties, but a mode of self-development and a platform through which an eschatological battle against sexual sin and the Devil took place in. When patriarchy, or more specifically, asymmetrical power relations between (actual/potential) wives and husbands (or guardians) conflicted with the soteriological aims of juristic discourse, the former was inverted. The study concludes that maintaining gender hierarchy was not integral to the cosmology of juristic practice (even in its premodern discourse); it was maintaining the normative believer’s ontological bond with God and saving him/her, as well as the believing community, from damnation. Theological concerns for salvation - and the cultivation of the pious self that made salvation possible – is what animated Imāmī juristic discourse and not patriarchy whether it was obtained from the source-texts (Qur’an, ḥadīth) or social custom (ʿurf). This study undertakes this task by observing six key areas in the Imāmī tradition where notions of salvation and spiritual ontology in marriage/divorce figure the most prominently: juristic preliminaries on marriage and zinā, interfaith marriage, prepubescent marriage, temporary marriage with zānīyahs, nushūz and khulʿ divorce. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Jill Jackson was one of the first female sports journalists and a pioneer voice for women in athletics. Although heretofore overlooked in the history of American sports journalism, the story of her career is an addition not only to the historiography of female sports journalists but also to the broader study of women in the mid-twentieth century. Jackson was admired, a hard worker, from a prominent New Orleans family, and well educated, yet she still was treated unequally in her primary workspace—the press box. Jackson left well-documented story to the Nadine Vorhoff Library and Special Collections at Newcomb College Institute in New Orleans. The collection, comprised of scrapbooks, photographs, letters, and newspaper articles, reveal the struggles and rewards of her impressive career.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role and status of women in Alachua County, Florida, from 1821 through 1860. The secondary literature suggests that women throughout America had virtually no public role to play in antebellum society except in limited circumstances in some mature urban, commercial settings. The study reviewed U.S. Census materials, slave ownership records, and land ownership records as a means to examine the family structures, the mobility and persistence of persons and households, and the economic status of women, particularly including woman headed households. The study also examined laws adopted by the Florida legislative bodies and court decisions of the local trial court and the state Supreme Court, church records of a local congregation, and the correspondence of women who lived in the county for portions of the antebellum period to focus on the relationships between men and women, particularly in household relationships. The principal conclusion of the study was that the most likely route to success for an antebellum frontier woman was through marriage to one who valued the many economic and personal contributions to household life she made. This was so despite the wealth that a very few widows built or maintained and even though Florida jurists differed in their approach on the extent to which married women should be treated as strictly subordinate to their husbands.

A presente pesquisa tem como objetivo analisar as construções jurídicas realizadas sobre os direitos sexuais e reprodutivos das mulheres, especialmente no tocante às esterilizações realizadas sem consentimento e ao aborto realizado pelas mulheres ou com o seu consentimento. Para isso, utilizamos o conceito amplo do direito, entendido como a legislação formal (componente formal normativo), as decisões judiciais (componente estrutural) e as construções doutrinárias e o uso cotidiano dos instrumentos jurídicos (componente políticocultural). Nossa hipótese era a de que tanto a legislação quanto as decisões judiciais representavam um controle dos corpos das mulheres e, consequentemente, significavam a expropriação de sua autonomia sexual e reprodutiva. Sob uma perspectiva legal feminista, foram reunidas teorias de Direito e Gênero que indicam o papel que o direito possui na proteção e emancipação das mulheres e as transformações necessárias no campo jurídico para que ele se transforme em espaço de luta feminista. Além disso, buscamos compreender as razões que levam o Estado a controlar os corpos das mulheres e o papel que esse controle representa atualmente. A partir dessas teorias, analisamos a legislação formal e as decisões judiciais do Tribunal de Justiça de São Paulo (TJSP) relacionadas especificamente à esterilização praticada sem o consentimento da mulher e ao aborto realizado pela gestante ou com o seu consentimento. Para a coleta, sistematização e análise dos dados, utilizamos as técnicas metodológicas da análise de conteúdo. Como resultado, concluímos que os direitos sexuais e reprodutivos das mulheres ainda são tematizados pelas leis e decisões judiciais sob uma perspectiva que se apresenta como neutra, mas que reproduz o controle social dos corpos e da autonomia sexual e reprodutiva das mulheres. Além disso, observamos que o controle dos corpos promovido pelo Estado permanece nos discursos legislativos e judiciais que limitam e criminalizam a autonomia reprodutiva das mulheres ou que expropriam as decisões relativas aos corpos das mulheres quando elas não atendem às características esperadas ao exercício da maternidade. / The objective of the present research is to analyze the juridical constructions about the sexual and reproductive rights of women, especially regarding compulsory sterilization and abortion practiced by women or with their consent. For this, we use the broad concept of law, known as formal legislation (formal normative component), judicial decisions (structural component) and doctrinal constructions and daily use of legal instruments (political-cultural component). Our hypothesis was that both legislation and judicial decisions represented a control of women\'s bodies and, consequently, meant the expropriation of their sexual and reproductive autonomy. From a feminist legal perspective, Law and Gender theories have been gathered which indicate the role that law has in the protection and emancipation of women and the necessary transformations in the legal field, so that it becomes a space for feminist struggle. In addition, we seek to understand the reasons that lead the State to control the bodies of women and the role that this control currently represents. Based on these theories, we analyze the formal legislation and judicial decisions of the Court of Justice of São Paulo (TJSP) related specifically to the sterilization practiced without the woman\'s consent and the abortion practiced by the pregnant woman or with her consent. For data collection, systematization and analysis, we use the methodological techniques of content analysis. As a result, we conclude that women\'s sexual and reproductive rights are still thematized by laws and court decisions from a perspective that is neutral but reproduces the social control of women\'s bodies and sexual and reproductive autonomy. In addition, we observe that State control of bodies remains in legislative and judicial discourses that limit and criminalize the reproductive autonomy of women or expropriate decisions about the bodies of women when they do not meet the characteristics expected to the exercise of motherhood.