Mindie Lazarus-Black

Vanishing Complainants: The Place of Violence in Family, Gender, Work, and Law

Why is it that wherever and whenever scholars have looked in the English speaking Caribbean, domestic violence complainants vanish from the courts? In pursuit of the answer to this question, I marshal two types of evidence. First, I review interdisciplinary research by scholars who have written about family, gender, and work in this region. I find that there is a place for violence in each of these categories. Next, I turn to a case history involving domestic violence from Trinidad. I examine the complex interactions between a victim and family members, neighbors, and legal officials, identifying their mutual participation in a culture of reconciliation. Cultures of reconciliation illuminate ideas about family, gender, work, and law that keep victims from pursuing legal remedies and buttress instead accommodation to everyday violence. I suggest that the concept of cultures of reconciliation is useful both: 1) as an analytical framework to capture how local ideas and practices coalesce into structural patterns that operate against the institutionalized forces of law; and 2) as a research tool for cross-cultural investigation and analysis. Identifying cultures of reconciliation can thus help us explain why domestic violence victims vanish from the courts.

Bastardy, Gender Hierarchy, and the State: The Politics of Family Law Reform in Antigua and Barbuda

ment of class, kinship, and gender relations and investigates ethnographically the repeal in 1986 of illegitimacy as a legal category in Antigua and Barbuda. In contrast to the colonial era, working-class ideas about gender and family and actions by married women played a pivotal role in banishing bastardy and reconstituting the relationship between families and the state. This struggle reveals lawmaking as a deeply contextualized and gendered practice.

After Empire: Training Lawyers as a Postcolonial Enterprise

The early history of legal education in the English-speaking Caribbean reflects a struggle for local identity and authenticity, while serving multiple states. Because schools are key locales for the making of docile bodies, West Indian lawyers experienced “subjection,” a process that names new categories of persons but also subjects them to an articulation of disciplinary powers not of their own making.