Contesting Femicide: Feminism and the Power of Law Revisited ed. by Adrian Howe and Daniela Alaattinoğlu (review)

Contesting Femicide: Feminism and the Power of Law Revisited, edited by Adrian Howe and Daniela Alaattinoğlu, explores the globally prescient issue of intimate partner femicide,¹ drawing on Carol Smart’s paradigm-shifting work Feminism and the Power of Law.² The authors embrace Smart’s critical approach to law as a discursive site of contestation rather than as an ultimate tool to address gendered power relations. They demonstrate that criminal reforms inspired by feminist agendas and feminist legal interventions are necessary and successful (to a certain extent) in challenging legal approaches to intimate partner femicide—specifically, the provocation defences. However, they do so keeping in mind that feminist reform agendas may be disregarded or co-opted. Thanks to its ability to account for the complexities of the current femicidal context of the globe, this collection of essays is a timely contribution to the literature on femicide as well as feminist legal scholarship.

Contesting Femicide—whose chapters are authored by feminist legal scholars, practitioners, and lawyers—is a refreshing example of feminist praxis that challenges the hierarchy of different knowledges. It starts with Carol Smart’s preface where she reiterates both her scepticism of law as a major means to change and her conviction that it is still a critical site for feminist intervention.³ It consists of two parts focusing on two critical areas about which Smart advises caution: legal reform and feminist legal activism. Part 1 has three essays, each of which investigates the consequences of criminal law reforms in England and Wales, Australia, and Latin America, respectively. Part 2, consists of seven essays and shifts the focus to feminist legal interventions in England and Wales, Turkey, Canada, Australia, Italy, and Finland. Together, the contributors demonstrate that feminist-inspired reforms and feminist interventions to the use of provocation defences have transformed the legal discourse as well as sentencing practices in femicide trials. Yet they also acknowledge that this success has been limited and sometimes restrictive, as Smart warned.

Chapter 1, authored by Adrian Howe, analyzes the impact of the legal reform that replaced the provocation defence with a “loss of control defense” in the prosecution of intimate partner femicides in England and Wales.⁴ Howe maintains that the reform, which disallowed using sexual infidelity as grounds for losing control, left the defendants “discursively depleted” and allowed some judges to decry justifications of femicide.⁵ Howe acknowledges that the reform did not completely eliminate victim-blaming defences. However, she contends that it reduced the credibility of such defence strategies.

Danielle Tyson, Bronwyn Naylor, and Patsilí Toledo, who respectively investigate the efficiency of criminal law reforms in the Australian state of Victoria and Latin America, take a more sceptical view towards the effectiveness of legal reform. Tyson and Naylor contend that the reform, which abolished the provocation defence, recoded self-defence, and introduced defensive homicide to accommodate women who killed their abusive partners, was informed by decades of feminist criticism in Australia.⁶ However, it was not necessarily a feminist victory since it led to new defence strategies that capitalize on victims’ actions, effectively nullifying the reform. Toledo elucidates that numerous pieces of legislation in various Latin American countries that have criminalized femicide/feminicide have had negative side effects beyond courtrooms.⁷ In many countries, acts of legislation have been utilized to justify and sustain state power. Despite feminists’ demands, these pieces of legislation did not mention state institutions’ roles in allowing femicide. On the contrary, they were used to frame the political actors as champions of women’s rights and obscured other areas in which women’s fundamental rights are violated by the state (for example, criminalizing abortion).

The chapters in the Part 2 investigate the different forms that critical feminist engagement with the law might take. For example, Howe’s chapter inquires into the potential of theatre in addressing and challenging the “excusatory purchase” of the diminished responsibility plea.⁸ She investigates...