Victim No More
  • Paperback ISBN: 9781552662953
  • Paperback Price: $34.95 CAD
  • Publication Date: Mar 2009
  • Rights: World
  • Terms: Short Discount Only
  • Pages: 224

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Victim No More

Women’s Resistance to Law, Culture and Power

Edited by Ellen Faulkner, Gayle MacDonald

This book challenges the idea that women are simply victims. It celebrates women’s resistance. It explores the moments beyond victimization. It argues that women do not stay crushed and broken, but move on, build and grow. The contributors to this edited edition celebrate the various forms of resistance: political resistance at both the collective and individual levels, legal resistance and resistance to cultural forms and labels. The editors argue that “Women-as-victim is not an emancipatory cry that encourages all women to join efforts in combating patriarchy. It is, at its core, highly analogous to the right-wing, conservative agendas that keep women politically passive, smiling stewards of male futures, still adhering to ‘men’s way’ in the boardroom and the bedroom.”

Contents

  • Section I: Theory and Praxis
  • Introduction (Ellen Faulkner and Gayle MacDonald)
  • Chapter 1: Rethinking the Critique of ‘Victim Feminism’ (Rebecca Stringer)
  • Section II: Legal Challenge/Reform and Resistance
  • Chapter 2: Flight: Women Abuse and Children’s Habitual Resistance in The Hague Convention on International Child Abduction (Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich)
  • Chapter 3: Bad Girls like Good Contracts: Ontario Erotic Dancers Collective Resistance (Suzanne Bouclin)
  • Chapter 4: ‘Be Active, Be Emancipated’ (BABE)–Women’s Response to Violence and War (Doris Goedl)
  • Section III: The Politics of Resistance
  • Chapter 5: The Raging Grannies: Outrageous Hats, Satirical Songs and Civil Disobedience (Carole Roy)
  • Chapter 6: “Not a Tough Enough Skin?”: Resisting Paternalist Relations in Academe (Norma Jean Profit)
  • Chapter 7: Representing Victims of Sexualized Assault (Linda Coates and Penny Ridley)
  • Section IV: Resilience/Identity Formation
  • Chapter 8: Queer Dispositions: A Case Study in Trans-gressing the Limits of Law (Lisa Passante)
  • Chapter 9: In Defiance of Compulsory Mothering: Voluntarily Childfree Women’s Resistance (Debra Mollen)
  • Chapter 10: Playing Games With the Law: Legal Advocacy and Resistance (Karen Rosenberg)
  • Chapter 11: Resistance and Recovery: Three Women’s Testimony on Addiction and Collective Sites of Recovery (Jean Toner)
  • Section V: Historical Forms of Resistance
  • Chapter 12: Milk Enough for All: Breast-giving, Fugitivity and the Limits of Resistance (Lynn Makau)
  • Chapter 13: Insane But Not an Ideological Convert: Nakamoto Takoto’s Claim to Political Dissidence in Prewar Japan (Janice Matsumura)
  • Bibliography.

About the Authors

Ellen Faulkner received her PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto after graduating from Queen’s University with a BA (Honours) in Women’s Studies and a MA in Sociology.

For the past few years she has been studying hate crimes committed against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender/transexual persons in Canada. Ellen was recently awarded $47,498 over three years from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to research and understand what impedes or supports hate crime reporting, documentation and case processing.

Her research, entitled “Making Hate Crime: A Study of Police Work,” will seek to understand victim experience of hate crime and police and detective discretion in terms of their use of hate crime policy.

Faulkner’s areas of research and teaching include anti-gay/lesbian violence, violence against women and children, same-sex partner abuse, reproductive technologies, surrogacy contracts, critical criminological and feminist theories, and qualitative/quantitative research methodologies.

 

 

 Gayle MacDonald is a professor of sociology at St. Thomas University. Her areas of research are sex work, social legal studies, social contrl and deviance. Her publications include Sex Workers in the maritimes Talk Back (with Leslie Jeffery), Feminism, Law, Inclusion: Intersectionality in Action (ed. with Rachel Osborne and Charles Smith), and Social Context and Social Location in the Sociology of Law.

 

Excerpt

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Reviews

Review in Herizons Magazine, Winter 2011

 The title of this book says it all. Victim No More: Women’s Resistance to law, Culture and Power is a much-awaited alternative to a large body of feminist literature that treats women as passive victims, rather than as active agents of resistance against patriarchal forms of oppression.

Its two editors and 16 authors–mostly academics, a few lawyers and a couple of social workers–make the strong point that the concept of woman-as-victim plays into the neo-liberal agenda by encouraging passivity and hopelessness. The authors propose, instead, a movement towards a more encompassing framework of resistance at an individual, collective, local, national and even international level. The book is divided into five sections. Section one invites readers to think critically about the damaging effects that neo-liberal policies have on violence against women and children. It also makes a distinction between equity feminism and what the editors refer to as “victim feminism.” 

Section two analyzes current legal practices and resistance strategies. It advocates emancipatory laws for which it asks the general public’s active participation. Section three traces collective resistance strategies that go beyond the law. An example is the Raging Grannies, who use humour and civil disobedience to promote radical change. Section four highlights the importance of resilience in questions related to identity and issues such as gender, culture, motherhood and drug abuse.

Finally, section five provides dramatic examples of how literary criticism has been a historical form of women’s resistance. The tragic example of Sethe (the protagonist in Toni Morrison’s Beloved) who murders her child in a bid to escape the continued enslavement of her family is analyzed.

Victim No More reminds us that justice for women is an integral part of social justice. This book deserves to be read mindfully.

- Review by Maya Khankhoje

 

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