Module leader: Professor Marie Fox
Module description:
The interface between crime and gender throws up a range of fascinating questions about how the contemporary legal subject is constructed, and why crime is often seen as a male activity. It provides a focus for examining or re-examining issues in the criminal justice system such as regulating sexual behaviour, prostitution and consumption of pornography. It also poses questions about the gendered nature of homicide, violence and punishment, and facilitates an analysis of intersectional approaches which explore how gender consideration are cross-cut by class, race, culture etc.
Rather than assuming that criminal law embodies a set of universal values and principles, this course examines criminal law in its social and cultural context, focusing specifically on its gendered context. It is socio-legal in emphasis. In other words, the course examines legal details less for their own sake than for what they reveal about the role of criminal law, and its operation in practice. Thus, the enforcement of criminal law will be given as much attention as its content. To this end we will consider matters such as how offences (such as rape or FGM) are prosecuted and punished and why certain forms of behaviour (eg routine circumcision of male infants) are not criminalised. In particular, we want students to think critically about central themes which underpin the course such as harm, culpability, agency, responsibility, and violence, and the issue of how the legal subject is constructed.
Throughout the module students are encouraged to examine the relationship between law and politics and law and morality; the difference between the law in the books and how law operates in practice, and how matters of gender and sexuality intersect with race, culture, class etc might impact on the prosecution of criminal law. Overall the course aims to offer a critique of the parameters and territory of the traditional criminal law course in examining how female and male offenders and victims are legally constructed.
Seminar topics:
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Gendered patterns of offending
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The legal construction of women who kill
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The gendered nature of defences
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Infanticide
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The framing and prosecution of sexual offences
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Policing and regulation of sex work
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Feminist perspectives on pornography
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Regulation of body modification and genital cutting
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Feminist analyses of penality
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Punishing and sentencing of offenders
Methods of assessment
Modules on the LLM programmes will be assessed in one of the following ways. As this website is set up in advance, it is not possible to specify which method of assessment will be implemented for each module.
Either:
Or
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One 3-hour written examination
If you'd like to find out how a module will be assessed in the forthcoming academic year please contact the LLM Programmes Administrator at Law-LLM@contacts.bham.ac.uk.