Transnational Legal Feminism:
Surrogacy in India and the United States
Sital
Kalantry, Cornell Law School
In today’s
world, academic and popular feminist perspectives travel from one country to
another. Policies that are aimed at promoting women’s equality in one country
sometimes influence approaches in other countries. People increasingly engage
in private transactions across borders that raise feminist concerns. Cursory
information about women’s rights problems in one country freely crosses borders
to other countries. Feminists increasingly work transnationally addressing
women’s equality in multiple countries.
I describe
the challenges feminists encounter in a transnational world and propose
suggestions for richer global feminist engagement. Feminists, policymakers,
judges and others operating transnationally sometimes fail to appreciate that
practices deemed to be problematic for women’s equality in one country context,
may have different meanings in another country context. Drawing from
comparative law methodologies, those working transnationally and sometimes even
those working only within one jurisdiction would benefit from undertaking a
comparative examination of practices in the contexts in which they
emerge.
Feminist
theories, framing surrogacy as problematic for women’s equality developed in
the mid-1980s travel the world to frame understandings of surrogacy practices
in other countries today. Legal regulatory models developed in the United
States are imported to the Indian context. I contextualize surrogacy in the
United States and India from a transnational feminist perspective.
Pursuing Accountability
for the Perpetrators of Intimate Partner Violence: The Peril of Shame
Rachel A. Camp, Georgetown University Law Center
This article
explores the use of shame as an accountability intervention for perpetrators of
intimate partner abuse. Though the last fifty years have seen swift and
expansive efforts designed to increase perpetrator accountability primarily
through the legal system, intimate partner violence (IPV) continues at epidemic
rates. In light of the seeming intractability of IPV, shaming interventions –
those designed to publicly humiliate, denigrate, or embarrass wrongdoers – are
increasingly being used as legitimized formal and informal interventions.
Within the context of IPV specifically, judges have ordered perpetrators to
hold signs reading, “This is the face of domestic violence,” among other
shaming sentences. Culturally, the Internet and social media are being utilized
to inflict public shame on wrongdoers, with the potential for profound social
and economic consequences. In part, these interventions are easy to justify:
perpetrators as a group are assigned a dominant narrative about their
motivations and traits as controlling, violent, and beyond reform. As a result,
they are easily cast into a category of individuals for whom traditional forms
of rehabilitation are identified as ineffective and for whom shame is seemingly
“deserved.” However, shame as a tool for accountability within the context of
IPV is misguided and counterproductive. Using shame to punish an act that is
itself built on shame both blurs clarity of appropriate behaviors and, perhaps
more importantly, can have dangerous outcomes. Shame is strongly correlat