Equality with a vengeance: Men’s rights groups, battered women, and antifeminist backlash

The School of Social Sciences and Psychology (UWS), and the Centre for Gender-Related Violence (UNSW) presents 'Equality with a vengeance: Men’s rights groups, battered women, and antifeminist backlash'.

The Colloquium will be presented by Associate Professor Molly Dragiewicz.

ABSTRACT:

In the United States, organisations identifying as fathers’ rights groups have been among the most vocal critics of laws and policies designed to protect battered women and their children. While fathers’ rights groups are often identified with fringe backlash perspectives and activities, their rhetoric overlaps considerably with that of mainstream individuals and organizations seeking to reverse changes wrought by feminism.

This seminar will discuss Booth v. Hvass, the first lawsuit in the United States to attack state funding for battered women’s shelters using an “equal protection” argument. Equal protection law is based in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

It was intended to address persistent racism during the Reconstruction era in the United States. The legal interpretation of equal protection has been debated since its implementation in 1868. While it has proved a useful tool in advocating for civil rights, the application of equal protection around race and gender continues to be a site of struggle. The plaintiffs in Booth v. Hvass used an equal protection claim as the basis of a demand for formal equality, strategically deploying selected criminological research to argue that violence is not a gendered phenomenon and, accordingly, the provision of state funding for battered women’s shelters constitutes invidious discrimination.

This seminar will invite conversation on the politics of knowledge production across popular culture, scholarship, and law within the context of contemporary negotiations over men’s violence against women and state responses to it.

RSVP: Vicki Fox (v.fox@uws.edu.au) by 9/10/12