Sharron Fitzgerald
Biographic Data
| ID | 4250095 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sharron Fitzgerald |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sharron |
| FAMILY NAME | Fitzgerald |
| SIGNATURE | FITZGERALD S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9140-2931 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 67 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
On being a 'passive observer: The corporeal and affective dimensions of power in observational research on trafficked women in criminal proceedings
In this article, I analyse the methodological issues that arise when I accept a judge's invitation to observe her hear women testify in criminal proceedings against their traffickers at the district courthouse in X, Germany. I develop a theoretical framework using Pierre Bourdieu's theory of embodied power and his methods of epistemic reflexivity and participant objectivation, and feminist engagements with affect theory. I use my fieldwork experi…
Problematising the ‘Man Problem’ in the Domestic Abuse Act: Discursive Co-option and The (In)Visibility of Gender
This article offers a discourse analysis of domestic abuse's ‘Man Problem’ by combining and developing Naffine's, Foucault's and Bacchi's work in a new way. Taking the parliamentary debates around the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 in England and Wales as our focus, we critique how MPs problematise gender to justify a gender-neutral definition of domestic violence and abuse (DVA). We illustrate how MPs reframe DVA's ‘man problem’ not as the problem of m…
Gender, Justice and Social Transformation: Grand Challenges and Good Trouble
SPECIALTY GRAND CHALLENGE article Front. Hum. Dyn., 05 July 2021Sec. Gender, Justice and Social Transformation https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2021.714703
Where is the justice in EU anti-trafficking policy? Feminist reflections on European Union policy-making processes
In this article, we reflect on our personal experience of acting as ‘independent academic experts’ in an European Union (EU) policy forum, to reflect on how the EU utilises gender to legitimise certain policy discourses in combating sex trafficking. Starting from our personal experience, we draw on wider feminist research on gender expertise and on Fraser’s new reflexive theory of political injustice, to consider how the EU structures debates in …
Social justice for sex workers as a ‘politics of doing’: Research, policy and practice
The Republic of Ireland is a good case study to highlight the problems associated with uncritical appeals to criminal law as the only appropriate tool to tackle demand and protect sex workers from harm. In 2017, the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act came into force in the Republic of Ireland (hereafter Ireland) making it a criminal offence to purchase sex in the jurisdiction. Ireland’s decision to introduce Swedish-style laws followed a protract…
Trafficked women’s presentation of self before the German courts
The analysis in this article provides an alternative interpretation of trafficked women’s self-presentation before the courts. I use complete observations of German judges deposing women in camera who are witnesses in criminal proceedings against their traffickers. My objective is to develop and inform a different account of the women’s self-presentation by prioritising the narrative accounts of their ‘lived’ experiences of trafficking. Invoking …
The politics of injustice: Sex-working women, feminism and criminalizing sex purchase in Ireland
This article interrogates the discursive framing of recent law and policy debates on criminalizing sex purchase in Ireland and the implications this has for sex workers’ political voice. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s work on the political dimensions of justice, we look at how Irish neo-abolitionists, through their Turn Off the Red Light (TORL) campaign, map and delimit access to political space and consequently misframe, misrecognize and misrepresent…
Vulnerable geographies: Human trafficking, immigration and border control in the UK and beyond
Human trafficking inspires strong responses from feminists and other interested parties. This article takes the UK anti-trafficking measures as a case study to explore the interaction between discourses of trafficked women's vulnerability to sexual harm, and national vulnerability to external threats such as organized crime. Drawing on feminist engagements with human trafficking and commercial sex, my aim is to contribute to these debates. I expl…
Problematizing Prostitution in Law and Policy in the Republic of Ireland: A Case for Reframing
This article attempts to uncover the discursive practices that have framed recent debates on prostitution in the Republic of Ireland. As Ireland prepares to introduce Swedish-style laws, which criminalize the purchase of sexual services, we are particularly interested in interrogating the dominant construction of prostitution in recent policy debates and consultations. Taking these spaces as sites for the reproduction of discursive and material p…
Vulnerable Bodies, Vulnerable Borders: Extraterritoriality and Human Trafficking
Sex Work and the Regulation of Vulnerability(ies): Introduction
Biopolitics and the regulation of vulnerability: The case of the female trafficked migrant
This article interrogates the connections between normativity and geographical space. Specifically it focuses on the biopolitical discourses that operate around the idiom of the vulnerable female trafficked migrant in the United Kingdom. The article’s structure and argument question how state parties frame the notion of female vulnerability as a distinct biopolitical category. I argue that this process produces and sustains the perceived need for…
Invisible Laws, Visible Cities
The connection between law and the city is an increasingly topical area of interdisciplinary research, currently being explored from both applied and theoretical perspectives. This special issue confronts some of the assumed categories, priorities and instrumentalities of visibility with regard to law and the city. Our aim is to circulate materiality between law and urban space so that the material considerations can be both reinforced and demate…
From Space Immaterial: The Invisibility of the Lawscape
This article aims to interrogate law's ambivalent relationship with urban space. It deals with the paradoxical relation between law and the city, visibility and invisibility, materiality and abstraction, and polis and metropolis. It builds on previous work on the lawscape, namely the priority of invitation by law or the city to be conditioned by the other, and expands this line of thought towards a more tangible understanding of visibility and it…
Hybrid identities in Canada's Red River Colony
Scholarship on Canada's Métis women has been informed largely by their central economic and reproductive roles in the British fur trade in North America. This article moves beyond these representations and focuses on Victorian discourses of race, class, gender and sexuality in a re‐conceptualization of women's lives and experiences in territory. The article's primary aim is to evaluate the concept of female agency in Canada's Red River Colony (no…
Negotiating Female Morality: Place, ideology and agency in the Red River Colony
By 1850 British women had settled in the Red River colony, a British outpost in what became the province of Manitoba, Canada, and where the Hudson’s Bay Company established fur trading posts. Through an analysis of documents concerning two unconnected lawsuits involving Countryborn women, it is possible to glean some understanding of how British women became agents of colonialism. Company authorities envisaged that White women would establish hou…
Vulnerable geographies: Human trafficking, immigration and border control in the UK and beyond
Human trafficking inspires strong responses from feminists and other interested parties. This article takes the UK anti-trafficking measures as a case study to explore the interaction between discourses of trafficked women's vulnerability to sexual harm, and national vulnerability to external threats such as organized crime. Drawing on feminist engagements with human trafficking and commercial sex, my aim is to contribute to these debates. I expl…
Vulnerable Bodies, Vulnerable Borders: Extraterritoriality and Human Trafficking
Biopolitics and the regulation of vulnerability: The case of the female trafficked migrant
This article interrogates the connections between normativity and geographical space. Specifically it focuses on the biopolitical discourses that operate around the idiom of the vulnerable female trafficked migrant in the United Kingdom. The article’s structure and argument question how state parties frame the notion of female vulnerability as a distinct biopolitical category. I argue that this process produces and sustains the perceived need for…
Problematizing Prostitution in Law and Policy in the Republic of Ireland: A Case for Reframing
This article attempts to uncover the discursive practices that have framed recent debates on prostitution in the Republic of Ireland. As Ireland prepares to introduce Swedish-style laws, which criminalize the purchase of sexual services, we are particularly interested in interrogating the dominant construction of prostitution in recent policy debates and consultations. Taking these spaces as sites for the reproduction of discursive and material p…
The politics of injustice: Sex-working women, feminism and criminalizing sex purchase in Ireland
This article interrogates the discursive framing of recent law and policy debates on criminalizing sex purchase in Ireland and the implications this has for sex workers’ political voice. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s work on the political dimensions of justice, we look at how Irish neo-abolitionists, through their Turn Off the Red Light (TORL) campaign, map and delimit access to political space and consequently misframe, misrecognize and misrepresent…
Sex Work and the Regulation of Vulnerability(ies): Introduction
Trafficked women’s presentation of self before the German courts
The analysis in this article provides an alternative interpretation of trafficked women’s self-presentation before the courts. I use complete observations of German judges deposing women in camera who are witnesses in criminal proceedings against their traffickers. My objective is to develop and inform a different account of the women’s self-presentation by prioritising the narrative accounts of their ‘lived’ experiences of trafficking. Invoking …
Where is the justice in EU anti-trafficking policy? Feminist reflections on European Union policy-making processes
In this article, we reflect on our personal experience of acting as ‘independent academic experts’ in an European Union (EU) policy forum, to reflect on how the EU utilises gender to legitimise certain policy discourses in combating sex trafficking. Starting from our personal experience, we draw on wider feminist research on gender expertise and on Fraser’s new reflexive theory of political injustice, to consider how the EU structures debates in …
Hybrid identities in Canada's Red River Colony
Scholarship on Canada's Métis women has been informed largely by their central economic and reproductive roles in the British fur trade in North America. This article moves beyond these representations and focuses on Victorian discourses of race, class, gender and sexuality in a re‐conceptualization of women's lives and experiences in territory. The article's primary aim is to evaluate the concept of female agency in Canada's Red River Colony (no…
Problematising the ‘Man Problem’ in the Domestic Abuse Act: Discursive Co-option and The (In)Visibility of Gender
This article offers a discourse analysis of domestic abuse's ‘Man Problem’ by combining and developing Naffine's, Foucault's and Bacchi's work in a new way. Taking the parliamentary debates around the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 in England and Wales as our focus, we critique how MPs problematise gender to justify a gender-neutral definition of domestic violence and abuse (DVA). We illustrate how MPs reframe DVA's ‘man problem’ not as the problem of m…
Hybrid identities in Canada's Red River Colony
Scholarship on Canada's Métis women has been informed largely by their central economic and reproductive roles in the British fur trade in North America. This article moves beyond these representations and focuses on Victorian discourses of race, class, gender and sexuality in a re‐conceptualization of women's lives and experiences in territory. The article's primary aim is to evaluate the concept of female agency in Canada's Red River Colony (no…
Negotiating Female Morality: Place, ideology and agency in the Red River Colony
By 1850 British women had settled in the Red River colony, a British outpost in what became the province of Manitoba, Canada, and where the Hudson’s Bay Company established fur trading posts. Through an analysis of documents concerning two unconnected lawsuits involving Countryborn women, it is possible to glean some understanding of how British women became agents of colonialism. Company authorities envisaged that White women would establish hou…
Invisible Laws, Visible Cities
The connection between law and the city is an increasingly topical area of interdisciplinary research, currently being explored from both applied and theoretical perspectives. This special issue confronts some of the assumed categories, priorities and instrumentalities of visibility with regard to law and the city. Our aim is to circulate materiality between law and urban space so that the material considerations can be both reinforced and demate…
From Space Immaterial: The Invisibility of the Lawscape
This article aims to interrogate law's ambivalent relationship with urban space. It deals with the paradoxical relation between law and the city, visibility and invisibility, materiality and abstraction, and polis and metropolis. It builds on previous work on the lawscape, namely the priority of invitation by law or the city to be conditioned by the other, and expands this line of thought towards a more tangible understanding of visibility and it…
Biopolitics and the regulation of vulnerability: The case of the female trafficked migrant
This article interrogates the connections between normativity and geographical space. Specifically it focuses on the biopolitical discourses that operate around the idiom of the vulnerable female trafficked migrant in the United Kingdom. The article’s structure and argument question how state parties frame the notion of female vulnerability as a distinct biopolitical category. I argue that this process produces and sustains the perceived need for…
Vulnerable Bodies, Vulnerable Borders: Extraterritoriality and Human Trafficking
Sex Work and the Regulation of Vulnerability(ies): Introduction
Vulnerable geographies: Human trafficking, immigration and border control in the UK and beyond
Human trafficking inspires strong responses from feminists and other interested parties. This article takes the UK anti-trafficking measures as a case study to explore the interaction between discourses of trafficked women's vulnerability to sexual harm, and national vulnerability to external threats such as organized crime. Drawing on feminist engagements with human trafficking and commercial sex, my aim is to contribute to these debates. I expl…
Problematizing Prostitution in Law and Policy in the Republic of Ireland: A Case for Reframing
This article attempts to uncover the discursive practices that have framed recent debates on prostitution in the Republic of Ireland. As Ireland prepares to introduce Swedish-style laws, which criminalize the purchase of sexual services, we are particularly interested in interrogating the dominant construction of prostitution in recent policy debates and consultations. Taking these spaces as sites for the reproduction of discursive and material p…
The politics of injustice: Sex-working women, feminism and criminalizing sex purchase in Ireland
This article interrogates the discursive framing of recent law and policy debates on criminalizing sex purchase in Ireland and the implications this has for sex workers’ political voice. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s work on the political dimensions of justice, we look at how Irish neo-abolitionists, through their Turn Off the Red Light (TORL) campaign, map and delimit access to political space and consequently misframe, misrecognize and misrepresent…
Trafficked women’s presentation of self before the German courts
The analysis in this article provides an alternative interpretation of trafficked women’s self-presentation before the courts. I use complete observations of German judges deposing women in camera who are witnesses in criminal proceedings against their traffickers. My objective is to develop and inform a different account of the women’s self-presentation by prioritising the narrative accounts of their ‘lived’ experiences of trafficking. Invoking …
Social justice for sex workers as a ‘politics of doing’: Research, policy and practice
The Republic of Ireland is a good case study to highlight the problems associated with uncritical appeals to criminal law as the only appropriate tool to tackle demand and protect sex workers from harm. In 2017, the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act came into force in the Republic of Ireland (hereafter Ireland) making it a criminal offence to purchase sex in the jurisdiction. Ireland’s decision to introduce Swedish-style laws followed a protract…
Gender, Justice and Social Transformation: Grand Challenges and Good Trouble
SPECIALTY GRAND CHALLENGE article Front. Hum. Dyn., 05 July 2021Sec. Gender, Justice and Social Transformation https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2021.714703
Where is the justice in EU anti-trafficking policy? Feminist reflections on European Union policy-making processes
In this article, we reflect on our personal experience of acting as ‘independent academic experts’ in an European Union (EU) policy forum, to reflect on how the EU utilises gender to legitimise certain policy discourses in combating sex trafficking. Starting from our personal experience, we draw on wider feminist research on gender expertise and on Fraser’s new reflexive theory of political injustice, to consider how the EU structures debates in …
Problematising the ‘Man Problem’ in the Domestic Abuse Act: Discursive Co-option and The (In)Visibility of Gender
This article offers a discourse analysis of domestic abuse's ‘Man Problem’ by combining and developing Naffine's, Foucault's and Bacchi's work in a new way. Taking the parliamentary debates around the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 in England and Wales as our focus, we critique how MPs problematise gender to justify a gender-neutral definition of domestic violence and abuse (DVA). We illustrate how MPs reframe DVA's ‘man problem’ not as the problem of m…
On being a 'passive observer: The corporeal and affective dimensions of power in observational research on trafficked women in criminal proceedings
In this article, I analyse the methodological issues that arise when I accept a judge's invitation to observe her hear women testify in criminal proceedings against their traffickers at the district courthouse in X, Germany. I develop a theoretical framework using Pierre Bourdieu's theory of embodied power and his methods of epistemic reflexivity and participant objectivation, and feminist engagements with affect theory. I use my fieldwork experi…
Sociology (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Sex work and related issues (12 works) · Criminology (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Gender, Security, and Conflict (5 works)