Feminism, Violence Against Women, and Law Reform: Decolonial Lessons from Ecuador

This book offers a critical analysis of feminist law reform on violence against women from a decolonial perspective,challenging the consensus that penal expansion is primarily associated with the co-option of feminist campaigns. It reveals how colonial narratives underlie dominant legal discourses justifying criminalization,even in countries with leftist and post-neoliberal governments. The book demonstrates how liberal legality,human rights language,and constitutional guarantees are used to conciliate feminist campaigns and criminalization strategies,producing a rights-based penality that reproduces colonial and postcolonial paradigms. It raises new questions about the social and political factors that impact feminist law reform projects and highlights the embedded colonial assumptions about gender,race,class,and the family in liberal criminal law.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 172 pages
Publication date: 29 January 2024
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Offering a significant expansion to existing critiques of governance feminism and carceral expansion, primarily based on experiences from the Global North, this book critically examines feminist law reform on violence against women from a decolonial perspective. Challenging the prevailing consensus that penal expansion is primarily driven by the co-option of feminist campaigns to counter violence against women in the context of neoliberal globalisation, this book reveals that long-standing colonial narratives underpin many of today's dominant legal discourses justifying criminalisation, even in countries whose governments have claimed to be leftist and post-neoliberal. Through a detailed mapping of law reform on violence against women in Ecuador, the book unveils how the conciliation between feminist campaigns and criminalisation strategies unfolds through liberal legality, the language of human rights, and the discourse of constitutional guarantees, spanning across the political spectrum. While human rights render violence against women comprehensible within mainstream legal terms, the book demonstrates that the emergence of a rights-based penality generates a benign, formally innocuous criminal law, which can be presented as progressive, yet in practice reproduces colonial and postcolonial paradigms that limit and reshape feminist demands. The book raises novel questions regarding the intricate social and political factors that influence feminist law reform projects, as it exposes how colonial assumptions about gender, race, class, and the family persist within liberal criminal law. This theoretically and empirically informed analysis makes a groundbreaking contribution to feminist legal theory, post-colonial studies, and criminal law, and will be of interest to activists, scholars, and policymakers engaged in these fields.

Weight: 294g
Dimension: 155 x 234 x 13 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367566500