2013 | 20 Years Later: The Changes in Gender & Sexual Orientation Law
Event Title
Reauthorizing VAWA: Examining Legal Theories Shaping Domestic Violence Law
Location
Duke Law School, Room 4055
Start Date
28-2-2013 12:15 PM
End Date
28-2-2013 1:15 PM
Description
Abstract
This article uses the occasion of the 2013 Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) to review the circumstances by which legal theory and social movement discourse have circumscribed the scope of VAWA and the dominant approach to domestic violence. This article seeks to explore the relationship between domestic violence advocacy and feminist theory, which has functioned as “the ideological reflection of one’s own place in society” with insufficient attention to superstructures. Additionally, it argues for a reexamination of the current domestic violence/criminal justice paradigm and calls for the consideration of economic uncertainty and inequality as a context for gender-based violence. As an epistemology, domestic violence scholarship has fallen behind other fields of study due to its failure to address the structural context of gender-based violence. This article proposes a redefinition of the parameters of domestic violence law and presents new (and provocative) ways to think about law-related interventions to ameliorate gender violence.
Related Paper
Deborah M. Weissman, Law, Social Movements, and the Political Economy of Domestic Violence, 20 Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy 221-254 (Spring 2013)
Available at: http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/djglp/vol20/iss2/1
Reauthorizing VAWA: Examining Legal Theories Shaping Domestic Violence Law
Duke Law School, Room 4055
Abstract
This article uses the occasion of the 2013 Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) to review the circumstances by which legal theory and social movement discourse have circumscribed the scope of VAWA and the dominant approach to domestic violence. This article seeks to explore the relationship between domestic violence advocacy and feminist theory, which has functioned as “the ideological reflection of one’s own place in society” with insufficient attention to superstructures. Additionally, it argues for a reexamination of the current domestic violence/criminal justice paradigm and calls for the consideration of economic uncertainty and inequality as a context for gender-based violence. As an epistemology, domestic violence scholarship has fallen behind other fields of study due to its failure to address the structural context of gender-based violence. This article proposes a redefinition of the parameters of domestic violence law and presents new (and provocative) ways to think about law-related interventions to ameliorate gender violence.