This book is a study of global feminist activism that opposes neoliberal regimes across several sites including Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Latin America and the United States. The feminist performative acts featured in the book contest the aggressive unravelling of collectively won gains in gender, sexual and racial equality, the appearance of new planes of discrimination, and the social consequences of political economies based on free market ideology. The investigations of affect theory follow the circulation of intensities – of political impingements on bodies, subjective and symbolic violence, and the shock of dispossession – within and beyond individuals to the social and political sphere.
Does gender make a difference to the way the judiciary works and should work? Or, is gender blindness a built-in prerequisite of judicial objectivity? If gender does make a difference, how might this be defined? These are the key questions posed in this collection of essays. The book's pressing topicality is underlined by the fact that male opposition to women's admission to, and progress within, the judicial profession has been largely based on the argument that, because of their gender, women are naturally programmed to show empathy, partiality, and gendered prejudice - in short, essential qualities running directly counter to the need for judicial bjectivity. There remains a more or less pronounced glass ceiling to women's judicial careers.