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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]

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.

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 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]