By Kristine M. Chapleau; Debra L. Oswald

The concepts of power and sex are closely associated in our society. A common example is describing sex as a conquest or as a surrender, which suggests that sex is about one person overpowering another. Similarly, describing being taken advantage of in a business trans- action as ‘‘getting screwed’’ sexualizes power transac- tions. The connection between power and sex is most apparent and serious in acts of rape. Indeed, earlier theories of sexual aggression examined if rapists are motivated by either power or sex (e.g., Brownmiller, 1975; Ellis, 1991; Thornhill & Thornhill, 1992). More recent theories, however, have examined how perpetrators are motivated by the combination of power and sex at the implicit (Bargh, Raymond, Pryor, & Strack, 1995; Kamphuis, de Ruiter, Janssen, & Spiering, 2005; Zurbriggen, 2000) and explicit (Malamuth, Linz, Heavey, Barnes, & Acker, 1995) levels of cognitive processing.

Publisher Routledge, 25 January 2010, 14p.

By Esther Eidinow 

At the heart of this book are some trials conducted in Athens in the fourth century BCE. In each case, the charges involved a combination of supernatural activities, including potion-brewing and cult activity; the defendants were all women. Because of the brevity of the ancient sources, and their lack of agreement, the precise charges are unclear; the reasons for taking these women to court, even condemning some of them to die, remain mysterious. This book takes the complexity and confusion of the evidence not as a riddle to be solved, but as revealing multiple social dynamics. It explores the changing factors—material, ideological, and psychological—that may have provoked these events. It focuses in particular on the dual role of envy (phthonos) and gossip as processes by which communities identified people and activities that were dangerous, and examines how and why those local, even individual, dynamics may have come to shape official civic decisions during a time of perceived hardship. At first sight so puzzling, these trials come to provide a vivid glimpse of the sociopolitical environment of Athens during the early to mid-fourth century BCE, including responses to changes in women’s status and behaviour, and attitudes to particular supernatural/religious activities within the city. This study reveals some of the characters, events, and local social processes that shaped an emergent concept of magic: it suggests that the legal boundary of acceptable behaviour was shifting, not only within the legal arena, but also with the active involvement of society beyond the courts.

Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015. 440p.

Edited by Jude Browne and Maeve McKeown

What is Structural Injustice? is the first edited collection to bring together the voices of leading structural injustice scholars from politics, philosophy and law to explore the concept of structural injustice which has now become a central feature of all three disciplines and is considered by many to be a ‘field of study.’ The volume features specially selected original and essential works on structural injustice. The volume provides a range of disciplinary, ontological and epistemological perspectives on what structural injustice is and includes feminist and post-colonial theories to interrogate how structural injustice exacerbates and reproduces existing inequalities and relations of power. This book aims to become a touchstone text for those interested in the different ways we can understand structural injustice, how it manifests, how it relates to other forms of injustice, who is responsible for its redress and the different ways we might go about it. This book will appeal to a wide audience of students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, as well as the general academic population, experts on structural injustice, interested practitioners in politics and members of the public.

Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2024. 305p.