Lighting a Spark, Playing with Fire: Feminism, Emotions, and the Legal Imagination of Campus Sexual Violence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Feminist law and policymakers have been inspired by collectively generated experiences of emotion that help to shape what counts as justice and injustice in campus sexual violence cases. Focusing on events surrounding the Dalhousie University Faculty of Dentistry in 2014–2015, this article explains how emotional incitements in the case contributed to an infrastructure that supported formal and specifically carceral responses to campus sexual violence. Correspondingly, this article explains why alternative modes of legal and political formation that challenged the premises of the formal law, including restorative justice, were misread by some commentators as a form of “weak justice” and therefore outside the bounds of feminist action. The central claim of the article is not that particular emotional reactions are right or wrong, but that feminist law and policymakers should reflect on and assess their political force. Considering the ways that emotions are mobilized reveals the benefits and drawbacks of engaging with law in ways that feel emotionally gratifying and therefore politically necessary, but which can lead to harmful consequences that contradict feminist goals.\nLes législateurs et les décideurs politiques féministes ont été collectivement inspirés par les expériences émotives qui contribuent à façonner ce qui compte comme justice et injustice dans les cas de violence sexuelle sur les campus universitaires. En se concentrant sur les événements entourant la faculté de médecine dentaire de l’Université Dalhousie en 2014–2015, nous expliquons dans cet article comment les incitations émotionnelles dans l’affaire ont contribué à une infrastructure qui a soutenu des réponses formelles et spécifiquement carcérales à la violence sexuelle sur le campus. Corrélativement, nous expliquons pourquoi les modes alternatifs de formation juridique et politique qui remettent en cause les prémisses du droit formel, y compris la justice réparatrice, ont été interprétés à tort par certains commentateurs comme une forme de « justice faible » et donc en dehors des limites de l’action féministe. L’affirmation au cœur de notre article n’est pas que des réactions émotionnelles particulières sont bonnes ou mauvaises, mais que les législateurs et les décideurs politiques féministes devraient réfléchir à leur force politique et l’évaluer. L’examen des façons dont les émotions sont mobilisées révèle les avantages et les inconvénients de s’engager dans le droit d’une manière qui semble émotionnellement gratifiante et donc politiquement nécessaire, mais qui peut conduire à des conséquences néfastes qui contredisent les objectifs féministes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".