Nancy Whittier
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190235994
- eISBN:
- 9780190236038
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190235994.003.0004
- Subject:
- Sociology, Politics, Social Movements and Social Change, Gender and Sexuality
Chapter 4 examines the Violence Against Women Act and the ambivalent alliance that led to it. The chapter shows the influence of feminist organizations on the legislation and traces how support from ...
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Chapter 4 examines the Violence Against Women Act and the ambivalent alliance that led to it. The chapter shows the influence of feminist organizations on the legislation and traces how support from conservative elected officials formed alongside opposition from conservative activists outside the state. Conservatives and many liberals in Congress sought to be tough on crime and protect women from domestic violence and rape, while feminists sought to reduce the systematic victimization of women and improve the response from law enforcement and others. Congressional testimony promulgated a frame about violence against women as a gendered crime that could be understood in different ways by different sides. The chapter shows how this frame promoted VAWA’s success but feminist advocates’ intersectional goals for immigrants, women of color, and LGBT people were marginalized. The chapter shows how, by 2011, conservative activists’ influence on Congress through the Tea Party movement and feminists’ ongoing push to strengthen VAWA’s intersectional dimensions destabilized agreement on VAWA. The chapter addresses feminist criticism of VAWA as a case of carceral feminism, showing how VAWA’s discourse and legislation promoted both carceral, non-carceral, and intersectional frames and outcomes. VAWA reflects both unprecedented feminist legislative influence countervailing conservative influence.Less
Chapter 4 examines the Violence Against Women Act and the ambivalent alliance that led to it. The chapter shows the influence of feminist organizations on the legislation and traces how support from conservative elected officials formed alongside opposition from conservative activists outside the state. Conservatives and many liberals in Congress sought to be tough on crime and protect women from domestic violence and rape, while feminists sought to reduce the systematic victimization of women and improve the response from law enforcement and others. Congressional testimony promulgated a frame about violence against women as a gendered crime that could be understood in different ways by different sides. The chapter shows how this frame promoted VAWA’s success but feminist advocates’ intersectional goals for immigrants, women of color, and LGBT people were marginalized. The chapter shows how, by 2011, conservative activists’ influence on Congress through the Tea Party movement and feminists’ ongoing push to strengthen VAWA’s intersectional dimensions destabilized agreement on VAWA. The chapter addresses feminist criticism of VAWA as a case of carceral feminism, showing how VAWA’s discourse and legislation promoted both carceral, non-carceral, and intersectional frames and outcomes. VAWA reflects both unprecedented feminist legislative influence countervailing conservative influence.
Becky Thompson
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252041167
- eISBN:
- 9780252099731
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041167.001.0001
- Subject:
- Education, Educational Policy and Politics
Teaching with Tenderness follows in the tradition of bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, inviting us to draw upon contemplative practices (yoga, ...
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Teaching with Tenderness follows in the tradition of bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, inviting us to draw upon contemplative practices (yoga, meditation, free writing, mindfulness, ritual) to keep our hearts open as we reckon with multiple injustices. Teaching with Tenderness makes room for emotion, offers a witness for experiences people have buried, welcomes silence, breath, and movement, and sees justice as key to our survival. It allows us to rethink our relationship to grading, office hours, desks, and faculty meetings, sees paradox as a constant companion, moves us beyond binaries, and praises self and community care.
Teaching with Tenderness identifies a range of stresses that students and faculty bring to the classroom—as young people worried about the state of the world, veterans, trauma survivors, people with disabilities, and social justice activists—and ways of teaching that remind us that we belong to each other. It identifies why people take flight from their own bodies and strategies that enable people to stay fully present for each other. The book draws upon the author’s teaching at a range of universities in the United States as well as in China, Greece, and Thailand. Thompson writes as a professor, poet, yoga teacher, and humanitarian worker seeking spontaneous, planned, and found rituals of inclusion that lean us toward justice, rest on rigorous study, and treat the classroom as a sacred space.
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Teaching with Tenderness follows in the tradition of bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, inviting us to draw upon contemplative practices (yoga, meditation, free writing, mindfulness, ritual) to keep our hearts open as we reckon with multiple injustices. Teaching with Tenderness makes room for emotion, offers a witness for experiences people have buried, welcomes silence, breath, and movement, and sees justice as key to our survival. It allows us to rethink our relationship to grading, office hours, desks, and faculty meetings, sees paradox as a constant companion, moves us beyond binaries, and praises self and community care.
Teaching with Tenderness identifies a range of stresses that students and faculty bring to the classroom—as young people worried about the state of the world, veterans, trauma survivors, people with disabilities, and social justice activists—and ways of teaching that remind us that we belong to each other. It identifies why people take flight from their own bodies and strategies that enable people to stay fully present for each other. The book draws upon the author’s teaching at a range of universities in the United States as well as in China, Greece, and Thailand. Thompson writes as a professor, poet, yoga teacher, and humanitarian worker seeking spontaneous, planned, and found rituals of inclusion that lean us toward justice, rest on rigorous study, and treat the classroom as a sacred space.
Lynn Mie Itagaki
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780816699209
- eISBN:
- 9781452954257
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816699209.003.0005
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
I argue that, in reading Twilight through a “tragic framework,” Smith models an ethical commitment to transracial dialogue. Anti-racist feminists have identified this interracial tragedy of the 1992 ...
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I argue that, in reading Twilight through a “tragic framework,” Smith models an ethical commitment to transracial dialogue. Anti-racist feminists have identified this interracial tragedy of the 1992 violence as both the failure of and the need for intersectional feminism; Smith’s “documentary dramas” theatricalize and innovate feminist practices of relation.Less
I argue that, in reading Twilight through a “tragic framework,” Smith models an ethical commitment to transracial dialogue. Anti-racist feminists have identified this interracial tragedy of the 1992 violence as both the failure of and the need for intersectional feminism; Smith’s “documentary dramas” theatricalize and innovate feminist practices of relation.
