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A talk by Dr Sharron FitzGerald, hosted by the ISS21 Genders, Sexualities and Families Research Cluster and UCC Futures-Collective Social Futures.

Abstract

In this presentation, I will interrogate and challenge the forms of contestation that are currently taking place around the concept of ‘gender-neutrality’ in law and policy that deals with domestic violence and abuse (DVA). I will offer a critical feminist discourse analysis of DVAs ‘man problem’. In order to analyse the dynamics that I wish to critique, I will introduce a unique theoretical framework that combines and develops Ngaire Naffine’s, Michel Foucault’s and Carol Bacchi’s work in a new way. Allied to this, I will introduce two new theoretical innovations to advance my critique: discursive co-option and two gender paradoxes.

Specifically, I will take the parliamentary debates around the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 in England and Wales as a case study. Like other European jurisdictions–Denmark, the Netherland and the Republic of Ireland–England and Wales has adopted a gender-neutral statutory definition of DVA. During my presentation, I will illustrate how Members of Parliament (MPs) reframe DVAs ‘man problem’ not as the problem of men as perpetrators of VAW. But rather, they represent the law and policy ‘problem’ as men’s invisibility as victims of DVA. I will argue that MPs instrumentalise gender equality discourses to advance masculinist politics and patriarchal logics (discursive co-option), while simultaneously insisting that gender is an irrelevant category of meaning in this area (gender paradoxes). I will argue that this occurs in ways that have detrimental effects for the less powerful, and which elide the reality of women’s experiences of men’s violences.

I offer this presentation as a cautionary word to feminism and the Sisterhood. It is my contention that feminists must not stand by and permit our discourse and praxis around gender and equality as well as women’s hard-won rights and protections from men’s violences to become, in the words of Professor Audre Lorde, yet another one of ‘the master's tools’.

About the Speaker

Dr Sharron FitzGerald is a senior research academic at CRESSPA-GTM, Paris 8. She is the founder and Executive Director of the International Law, Gender and Sexuality Research Network She is the founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the feminist social scientific journal Gender and Justice

Dr FitzGerald earned an honours Bachelor’s degree in Geography and French and a Master’s degree in geography from University College, Cork. She holds a Doctor in Philosophy (summa cum laude) from Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. She has taught in a range of universities in Canada, the UK, Germany and France. Her main areas of teaching and research expertise are gender, sexuality, migration, human trafficking, violence against women, feminist/gender theory and socio-legal approaches. She has published her research findings on these topics in a wider range of top-tier international peer-reviewed academic journals and books. She is currently writing a co-authored book with Professor Anna Carline titled: Gendered Anxieties: Exploring State and Legal Responses to Violence Against Women and Girls in the UK and the EU (Emerald Press 2026). Her future research will examine the links between violence against women and artificial intelligence.

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