Decoding Gender

Decoding Gender
Author: Helga Baitenmann
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2007-06-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 081354159X

Gender discrimination pervades nearly all legal institutions and practices in Latin America. The deeper question is how this shapes broader relations of power. By examining the relationship between law and gender as it manifests itself in the Mexican legal system, the thirteen essays in this volume show how law is produced by, but also perpetuates, unequal power relations. At the same time, however, authors show how law is often malleable and can provide spaces for negotiation and redress. The contributors (including political scientists, sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, and economists) explore these issues-not only in courts, police stations, and prisons, but also in rural organizations, indigenous communities, and families. By bringing new interdisciplinary perspectives to issues such as the quality of citizenship and the rule of law in present-day Mexico, this book raises important issues for research on the relationship between law and gender more widely.

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society
Author: Austin Sarat
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2020-05-04
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1839822783

This volume of Studies in Law, Politics and Society brings together an international and interdisciplinary array of scholars to explore issues on the cutting edge of socio-legal research.

Gender Justice and Legal Pluralities

Gender Justice and Legal Pluralities
Author: Rachel Sieder
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1136191577

Gender Justice and Legal Pluralities: Latin American and African Perspectives examines the relationship between legal pluralities and the prospects for greater gender justice in developing countries. Rather than asking whether legal pluralities are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for women, the starting point of this volume is that legal pluralities are a social fact. Adopting a more anthropological approach to the issues of gender justice and women’s rights, it analyzes how gendered rights claims are made and responded to within a range of different cultural, social, economic and political contexts. By examining the different ways in which legal norms, instruments and discourses are being used to challenge or reinforce gendered forms of exclusion, contributing authors generate new knowledge about the dynamics at play between the contemporary contexts of legal pluralities and the struggles for gender justice. Any consideration of this relationship must, it is concluded, be located within a broader, historically informed analysis of regimes of governance.

Routledge Handbook of Law and Society in Latin America

Routledge Handbook of Law and Society in Latin America
Author: Rachel Sieder
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 978
Release: 2019-05-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317291271

An understanding of law and its efficacy in Latin America demands concepts distinct from the hegemonic notions of "rule of law" which have dominated debates on law, politics and society, and that recognize the diversity of situations and contexts characterizing the region. The Routledge Handbook of Law and Society in Latin America presents cutting-edge analysis of the central theoretical and applied areas of enquiry in socio-legal studies in the region by leading figures in the study of law and society from Latin America, North America and Europe. Contributors argue that scholarship about Latin America has made vital contributions to longstanding and emerging theoretical and methodological debates on the relationship between law and society. Key topics examined include: The gap between law-on-the-books and law in action The implications of legal pluralism and legal globalization The legacies of experiences of transitional justice Emerging forms of socio-legal and political mobilization Debates concerning the relationship between the legal and the illegal. The Routledge Handbook of Law and Society in Latin America sets out new research agendas for cross-disciplinary socio-legal studies and will be of interest to those studying law, sociology of law, comparative Latin American politics, legal anthropology and development studies.

Mexico's Human Rights Crisis

Mexico's Human Rights Crisis
Author: Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2019-01-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0812251075

Lawless elements are ascendant in Mexico, as evidenced by the operations of criminal cartels engaged in human and drug trafficking, often with the active support or acquiescence of government actors. The sharp increase in the number of victims of homicide, disappearances and torture over the past decade is unparalleled in the country's recent history. According to editors Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz and Barbara Frey, the "war on drugs" launched in 2006 by President Felipe Calderón and the corrupting influence criminal organizations have on public institutions have empowered both state and nonstate actors to operate with impunity. Impunity, they argue, is the root cause that has enabled a human-rights crisis to flourish, creating a climate of generalized violence that is carried out, condoned, or ignored by the state and precluding any hope for justice. Mexico's Human Rights Crisis offers a broad survey of the current human rights issues that plague Mexico. Essays focus on the human rights consequences that flow directly from the ongoing "war on drugs" in the country, including violence aimed specifically at women, and the impunity that characterizes the government's activities. Contributors address the violation of the human rights of migrants, in both Mexico and the United States, and cover the domestic and transnational elements and processes that shape the current human rights crisis, from the state of Mexico's democracy to the influence of rulings by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the decisions of Mexico's National Supreme Court of Justice. Given the scope, the contemporaneity, and the gravity of Mexico's human rights crisis, the recommendations made in the book by the editors and contributors to curb the violence could not be more urgent. Contributors: Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz, Karina Ansolabehere, Ariadna Estévez, Barbara Frey, Janice Gallagher, Rodrigo Gutiérrez Rivas, Susan Gzesh, Sandra Hincapié, Catalina Pérez Correa, Laura Rubio Díaz-Leal, Natalia Saltalamacchia, Carlos Silva Forné, Regina Tamés, Javier Treviño-Rangel, Daniel Vázquez, Benjamin James Waddell.

Gender-Based Violence in Mexico

Gender-Based Violence in Mexico
Author: Ana Luisa Sánchez Hernández
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2023-07-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 100091433X

This book examines the roots of systemic aggression against women in contemporary Mexico, and the connection between social practices and the institutional permissiveness of the Mexican State with regard to gendered violence. Since the democratic transition at the end of the 1990s, Mexico has registered an increase in the intensity and types of violence that have made life in some regions almost unsustainable. The chapters in this volume consider that capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy are interrelated processes that employ the technologies of gender and race as a continuation of the symbolic hegemony that treats feminized and racialized bodies as disposable. Against this background, it becomes necessary to understand from different dimensions the systemic violence against women as well as the processes of articulation between social practices and the permissiveness of the State in the face of aggression. Gender-Based Violence in Mexico mobilizes a dialogue between writings, fields of knowledge, causes and situations as essential tools for the struggle against gender violence. As a situated work that underlines the systematic roots of the violence that keeps women in subaltern positions, the text seeks an insurrection, an uprising of the bodies that invite naming the abject, peripheral and unseen populations of the project of globalized life, woven by the obsession of success and prestige. It presents a counter-conclusion in the manner of a beginning in the desire to elaborate counter-political and counter-pedagogical strategies of non-coercive experiences, where questions and debates are not a sign of belligerence but of vitality and care for the body-territories. Gender-Based Violence in Mexico will appeal to scholars of sociology, criminology, gender and Latin American studies with interests in gendered violence and injustice.

Making a Killing

Making a Killing
Author: Alicia Gaspar de Alba
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 029272277X

Since 1993, more than five hundred women and girls have been murdered in Ciudad Juárez across the border from El Paso, Texas. At least a third have been sexually violated and mutilated as well. Thousands more have been reported missing and remain unaccounted for. The crimes have been poorly investigated and have gone unpunished and unresolved by Mexican authorities, thus creating an epidemic of misogynist violence on an increasingly globalized U.S.-Mexico border. This book, the first anthology to focus exclusively on the Juárez femicides, as the crimes have come to be known, compiles several different scholarly "interventions" from diverse perspectives, including feminism, Marxism, critical race theory, semiotics, and textual analysis. Editor Alicia Gaspar de Alba shapes a multidisciplinary analytical framework for considering the interconnections between gender, violence, and the U.S.-Mexico border. The essays examine the social and cultural conditions that have led to the heinous victimization of women on the border—from globalization, free trade agreements, exploitative maquiladora working conditions, and border politics, to the sexist attitudes that pervade the social discourse about the victims. The book also explores the evolving social movement that has been created by NGOs, mothers' organizing efforts, and other grassroots forms of activism related to the crimes. Contributors include U.S. and Mexican scholars and activists, as well as personal testimonies of two mothers of femicide victims.

Indigenous Women and Violence

Indigenous Women and Violence
Author: Lynn Stephen
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2021-03-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816539456

Indigenous Women and Violence offers an intimate view of how settler colonialism and other structural forms of power and inequality created accumulated violences in the lives of Indigenous women. This volume uncovers how these Indigenous women resist violence in Mexico, Central America, and the United States, centering on the topics of femicide, immigration, human rights violations, the criminal justice system, and Indigenous justice. Taking on the issues of our times, Indigenous Women and Violence calls for the deepening of collaborative ethnographies through community engagement and performing research as an embodied experience. This book brings together settler colonialism, feminist ethnography, collaborative and activist ethnography, emotional communities, and standpoint research to look at the links between structural, extreme, and everyday violences across time and space. Indigenous Women and Violence is built on engaging case studies that highlight the individual and collective struggles that Indigenous women face from the racial and gendered oppression that structures their lives. Gendered violence has always been a part of the genocidal and assimilationist projects of settler colonialism, and it remains so today. These structures—and the forms of violence inherent to them—are driving criminalization and victimization of Indigenous men and women, leading to escalating levels of assassination, incarceration, or transnational displacement of Indigenous people, and especially Indigenous women. This volume brings together the potent ethnographic research of eight scholars who have dedicated their careers to illuminating the ways in which Indigenous women have challenged communities, states, legal systems, and social movements to promote gender justice. The chapters in this book are engaged, feminist, collaborative, and activism focused, conveying powerful messages about the resilience and resistance of Indigenous women in the face of violence and systemic oppression. Contributors: R. Aída Hernández-Castillo, Morna Macleod, Mariana Mora, María Teresa Sierra, Shannon Speed, Lynn Stephen, Margo Tamez, Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj