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This paper draws on a four‐year qualitative study that examines changes to legal processes related to the response to domestic violence in Seattle that began before and continued through the COVID‐19 pandemic, to examine a series of crisis temporalities that were exacerbated by the pandemic and associated lockdowns. In reflecting on the crisis temporalities that mark this research project, I underscore how such crises can also create conditions that lead to long overdue social change. In this case, the modernisation of a court system that for too‐long served as an obstacle to survivors' legal protection and facilitated abusers' ability to engage in slow violence during Domestic Violence Protection Order (DVPO) hearings. This paper thus highlights the 'temporal affordances' of longitudinal research that enable analysis to better understand the factors that motivate transition over time, particularly those in traditional institutions like the legal system. This paper draws on a four‐year qualitative study that examines changes to legal processes related to the response to domestic violence in Seattle that began before and continued through the COVID‐19 pandemic, to examine a series of crisis temporalities that were exacerbated by the pandemic and associated lockdowns. In reflecting on the crisis temporalities that mark this research project, I underscore how such crises can also create conditions that lead to long overdue social change. This paper thus highlights the 'temporal affordances' of longitudinal research that enable analysis to better understand the factors that motivate transition over time, particularly those in traditional institutions like the legal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using intimacy-geopolitics as its framework, this paper examines multi-sited violences enabled by digital technologies as interwoven forms of remote warfare. As political geographers have highlighted the ‘trickling down’ of digital weapons technologies from military to police practice, this analysis has tended to stop at the scale of the state. We extend this work by examining technology-enabled coercive control (TECC) within the context of domestic violence through the lens of remote warfare. TECC includes the way abusers use digital technologies to surveil, track, monitor, harass and terrorise their intimate partners. In examining TECC through the lens of remote warfare, this paper contributes to geographic literature by illustrating the common tools and tactics that the military, police and domestic violence abusers use to engage in political violence across sites and scales. We also emphasise the way survivors feel and experience TECC in order to illustrate the intimate emotional dynamics of political violence enabled by digital technologies. We argue that centring intimacy in this way helps to expose how control and domination work within remote warfare – at all scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a community-based participatory action research project located in Seattle - before and during the COVID-19 pandemic - to examine the unanticipated impact that the pandemic has had on reducing barriers for survivors of domestic violence seeking protection through the legal system. We draw on interviews with survivors and victim advocates, along with autoethnographic participant observation during Domestic Violence Protection Order (DVPO) hearings, to trace survivors' experiences navigating the DVPO process before and after its transition from an analogue to digital system. We situate this research at the intersection of legal and digital geographic scholarship to analyze how the law and digital technologies reinforce the spatial operation of power and exclusion, while they simultaneously provide emancipatory potential for women's experiences of security, legal subjectivity and emotional personhood. By focusing on how the courts' transition to a digital system affects the emotional personhood and legal subjectivity of domestic violence survivors, this paper advances feminist calls within legal and digital geographies scholarship that encourage more sustained engagement with feminist thought to understand the varied effects of the law and digital technologies – respectively – on gendered bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of United States history, the police did not intervene in domestic violence. To redress for this history, police departments began implementing mandatory arrest policies in the 1980s. These policies require police to arrest in cases of domestic violence when injuries are present, regardless of victim consent. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research conducted in central Pennsylvania, including participant observation in a domestic violence unit of a police department and interviews with police officers, this paper examines how mandatory arrest policies extend the spatial reach of the state into private space and intimate relationships. Specifically, I argue that the policing of domestic violence positions police officers as neoliberal subjects responsible for mediating abusive relationships on behalf of the state. This paper contributes to geographic research on policing in the private sphere, while also offering a detailed accounting of the mechanics of police practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of United States' history, the state did not intervene in violence perpetrated within the home or intimate relationships. Women experiencing intimate partner violence had little recourse from state institutions for security or legal justice. This article's inquiry centers on two policing practices – preferred arrest and evidence-based prosecution – that emerged in the 1980s to redress the state's long history of ignoring intimate partner violence. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how these two policing practices affect the experience of citizenship for intimate partner violence survivors by showing how the state creates a distinction between 'cooperative' victims who support the arrest and incarceration of their abusers and 'uncooperative' who do not. To develop this argument, I conceptualize the policing and prosecution response to intimate partner violence as a social contract of rights and responsibilities that mediates the relationship between the state and women who experience intimate partner violence. By illustrating how the state discursively constructs 'uncooperative' victims as irrational, this article utilizes a feminist geographic analytic to examine the everyday discursive and material technologies that the state employs to reregulate responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the authors discuss the various articles published within the issue on such topics as feminist legal theory, marriage rights, and right of asylum.

In the article, the author discusses the opinion of Fred Block on capitalism and social sciences as partly presented in his book "Capitalism: The Future of an Illusion." Other topics include property-based essentialism, the relationship of political systems and property relations, as well as the potential effects of platform cooperativism in such areas as food security, peer to peer finance, and production.

Distance—physical, material distance—is an obviously spatial concept, but one rarely engaged by legal or feminist geographers. We take up this oversight in relation to the 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, which adjudicated the constitutionality of a Texas law that imposed new regulations on abortion providers. Because half of the state's abortion providers were unable to meet these regulations and thus closed, the distance that many Texas women had to travel for abortion services increased dramatically. In part because of these increases, the Supreme Court ultimately determined that the Texas laws imposed an unconstitutional "undue burden." Bringing together case law and ethnographic data, this article traces the process by which distance is made legally "legible" in the context of reproductive injustice. In so doing, it confronts more uneasy realities of distance, including the discursive dismissal of social and literal immobility and isolation; contradictory readings of "emptiness"; and the material spatiality of distance through the nonplace-ness of rural areas. Together, these factors illuminate a more significant distance, namely the epistemic and social distance that exists between the legal performance of distance in litigation and the embodied traversal of distance by a woman seeking an abortion in Texas. Prioritizing rural distance as material, legal and gendered, our work engages and augments the nascent field of feminist legal geographies. It likewise challenges legal geographers' insistence on urban space by uncovering the ways in which even the relative "emptiness" of distance is intimately consequential. Finally, this paper makes connections between the exercise of the abortion right and the exercise of other rights that implicate distance, most notably the right to vote. Just as abortion regulations have often had the effect of requiring women to travel farther for abortion services, voter ID laws have the effect of requiring voters to travel to a public agency in order to secure the requisite identity document. Other voting regulations and state and local voting practices may similarly impose spatial burdens on voters. We thus assert that what Whole Woman's Health reveals about making distance legally cognizable finds ready legal application in other contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's rights are often curtailed online due to the pervasive internet atmosphere of cybermisogyny. Extreme examples include 'image-based sexual abuse', a term which encompasses the non-consensual creation and/or distribution of private sexual images. The harms attached to this phenomenon are well documented. In this paper, we explore how copyright logic, despite its male-centric and property oriented worldview, presents one legal solution to this problem. We assert that Digital Millennium Copyright Act Takedown Notices, a copyright mechanism that notifies websites they are hosting infringing content and requires the prompt removal of the content, represents a novel legal mechanism to force websites to remove image-based sexual abuse from women's online spaces. By using critical discourse analysis to review how Digital Millennium Copyright Act Takedown Notices attempt to provide solutions to the socio-spatial problem of image-based sexual abuse, we argue that copyright can subvert its current leanings to return to its original purpose: supporting creativity. Supporting creativity also helps to protect against the reproduction of gendered harms, from the real world to virtual spaces. This theorization represents not just legal geography but a feminist legal geography, in that it recognizes the internet should be a safe and legal space for women. In endorsing a pragmatic legal solution for women to regulate the sexually violent and nonconsensual distribution of their intimate images online, copyright is one mechanism that affirms women's right to cyberspaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban interventions, such as state-led housing provision in India and South Africa, establish new legal landscapes for urban residents (formerly slum/informal dwellers), who become home owners, legal occupiers of spaces, ratespayers and visible citizens although not in ways that are necessarily contingent. These material-legal processes are also acutely gendered underscoring wider calls for a feminist approach to legal geographies. Informed by a comparative empirically driven study, this paper explores how in both contexts, urban interventions work to enhance gender equality through improving women's material shelter in the city, and introduce tenure security, often prioritising very poor women. Yet, their implementation is riddled with slippages as well as operating within a broader poverty–patriarchy nexus. This means that these legally framed benefits have occurred alongside complex and perverse outcomes including unemployment, gendered tensions and acute loss of privacy for some. Housing interventions produce uneven legal geographies, with persisting gendered inequalities and poverty distorting residents' abilities to benefit from material-legal interventions aimed at improving their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we outline the case for feminist geolegality, a project that integrates legal geography and feminist geopolitics. The approach captures the myriad ways that law intermeshes with intimate corollaries of geopolitics and geoeconomics. It includes yet surpasses scholarship on international lawfare and military conflict to examine intimate wars that law mediates in the more mundane battlefields of everyday life. The body and home act as heuristic sites to review existing work and future trajectories of feminist geolegality. Its significance is marked further by the era of Trumpism, the gendered spatial and temporal legal implications of which are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in the 'safe space' of an exchange and visitation center, this article examines center staffs' experiences of vicarious abuse. Vicarious abuse refers to the emotional effects that occur when someone – other than the victim in the relationship – experiences or witnesses the coercively controlling tactics of a domestic violence abuser. This article examines the limitations of safe space that fails to consider the physical and emotional security needs of all who utilize the space. By tracing the fears of staff who interact with abusers, this article also frames domestic violence as a public safety concern with implications beyond the intimate. With recognition that staff experiences of vicarious abuse differ from the embodied experiences of victims in abusive relationships, this article applies a feminist geographic analytic to examine how the 'safe space' of an exchange and visitation center enables fear and normalizes vicarious abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past 20 years, feminist geographers have gone to great lengths to complicate notions of ‘the field’ and make clear that the field is not an easily bounded space. This body of work has demonstrated the complexity of field spaces, explored ways to destabilize boundaries, and traced the power relations between researchers and participants. Ultimately, this work takes the breaking down of boundaries as an inherent good in field research, and, subsequently, little work has focused explicitly on the utility of physical and emotional boundaries that develop in field research. Our experiences as feminist geographers who reside in our fields show there is much left to understand and subsequently disrupt regarding the boundaries of ‘the field.’ In this article, we build on the concept of ‘intimate insiders’ to discuss the complex negotiation of doing research in the places where we have created personal lives and our sense of community. We often found ourselves struggling to define the physical and emotional boundaries of ‘the field’ on the outside for the sake of our participants and ourselves. In this article, we reflect on boundary-making as a specific feminist methodological practice for addressing the complexity of fieldwork. We discuss the techniques and strategies we used for conducting research in the communities in which we are long-term community residents. In the tradition of feminist methodology, we draw from our research experiences in State College and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to reconsider how producing distance through boundary-making has the potential to benefit our participants, our projects, and ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this Viewpoint is to suggest a feminist intervention into the Sandusky scandal at Penn State University as a radical alternative to rethinking institutional violence at places of higher learning. Jerry Sandusky, former Penn State assistant football coach, was found guilty on 45 charges related to child sexual abuse. The horrific nature of the crimes shocked the community, but the unanswered questions surrounding the involvement of Penn State's most prominent administrators in a cover-up have implications for the pervasiveness of institutional violence within higher education. We contend if places of higher learning strive to be the embodiment of intellectual transformation, a feminist ethics of care and responsibility is necessary to negate the day-to-day feelings of fear and vulnerability that institutional violence supports. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper builds upon feminist critiques of security interventions in the name of ‘protecting women’ to link United States municipal policing practices for intimate partner violence with global security interventions. Policing intervention into intimate partner violence emerged in the last twenty-five years; however as I argue, these policing practices are situated within narrow conceptions of masculinist security that often fail to address victims' multiple security needs. While not dismissing the importance of arresting intimate partner violence abusers, this paper examines the ways that policing can create additional and different embodied fears and insecurities for victims. Using the tools of emotional geopolitics, this paper traces victims’ fears following the arrest of their abuser to understand the temporal and spatial moments of fear in relation to security interventions. This methodological approach examines the limitations of masculinist protection while reimagining security to consider the emotional security needs and fears of those being protected. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]