Shaking Mr Jones: International Journal of Law in Context (original) (raw)
Related papers
Legal Aesthetics in The Touching Contract: Memory, Exposure and Transformation
Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2021
This paper considers how an artwork might play a role in the political, legal and aesthetical ‘working-through’ of historical injustices. With specific reference to Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones’ participatory performance project, The Touching Contract (2016), we consider how traumatic affects from Ireland’s past continue to shape the present. Drawing primarily on the work of Jacques Rancière and Bracha L. Ettinger, we argue that The Touching Contract has the capacity to transform participants’ relation to legal history in two ways. First, by juxtaposing unspoken histories of female bodily vulnerability in relation to law with legal form during an encounter with participatory performance, this art project generates ‘mystery’, producing a productive ‘interval’ (Rancière) between the common sense of legal history and its potential re-calibration. Second, in its production of a relational ‘affectosphere’ (Kinsella), The Touching Contract provokes participants’ capacity to engage with th...
TOUCH (Law and the Senses Series)
TOUCH (Law and the Senses Series), 2020
Described by Aristotle as the most vital of senses, touch contains both the physical and the metaphysical in its ability to express the determination of being. To manifest itself, touch makes a movement outwards, beyond the body, and relies on a specific physical involvement other senses do not require: to touch is already to be active and to activate. This fundamental ontology makes touch the most essential of all senses. This volume of 'Law and the Senses' attempts to illuminate and reconsider the complex and interflowing relations and contradictions between the tactful intrusion of the law and the untactful movement of touch. Compelling contributors from arts, literature and social science disciplines alongside artist presentations explore touch's boundaries and formal and informal 'laws' of the senses. Each contribution unveils a multi-faceted new dimension to the force of touch, its ability to form, deform and reform what it touches. In unique ways, each of the several contributions to this volume recognises the trans-corporeality of touch to traverse the boundaries on the body and entangle other bodies and spaces, thus challenging the very notion of corporeal integrity and human being.
Lady Vanishes: Gender, Law and the (Virtual) Body, The
Austl. Feminist LJ, 2008
It is an oscillating state of disappearance and appearance, of waxing and waning, which signifies one particular point where we are now at in addressing and questioning the body. Certainly, the preoccupation with extremes of bodily presence and absence can readily be seen in the popular media. Somewhere after the news channels (reporting with increasing concern on the growing problems of obesity and starvation) but before the shopping channels (selling clothes for the extra-large and featuring models that are extra-thin), unhappily sandwiched between 'Dog Borstal' (overweight and mutinous canines) and 48 more music channels, one can find programme after programme on the body. While Dog Borstal is in the ad-break (which features slimming aids and exercise items) 'Half Ton Hospital' is over on the next channel, which shows near-spherical people as they struggle to gain control of their riotous flesh, alarmingly amplified by the effects of widescreen. The widescreen effect spreads over onto other channels, where the viewer can observe a display of fat babies (which I thought were supposed to be fat, but in this case, are clinically overweight), share in High Definition 3 the extreme cosmetic surgeries of minor celebrities as they sculpt and reform, inject and subtract according to fashion (it seems that interior designers are out, designer interiors are in … ), then watch it all disappear in yet more documentaries following the heaving endeavours of those now trying to *Contact: Centre for Law and Society, Lancaster University Law School, Lancaster University Lancaster UK LA1 4YN b.chatterjee@lancaster.ac.uk. Dr Chatterjee is a Lecturer in Law who, when not watching TV, interrogates legal issues from an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing particularly on gender, sexuality, sexual expression and cyberspace. She thanks the anonymous reviewer for their constructive comments and suggestions, and the editors of this special edition, Elena Loizidou and Sara Ramshaw, also Judith Grbich, for their patience, suggestions and support. Thanks to
Social Science Research Network, 1990
The author examines two proposals to expand legal recognition of individual control over physical integrity. Protections for individual autonomy are discussed in relation to the right to die, euthanasia, medical treatment, and consensual and assaultive sexual behaviours. The author argues that at present, the legal doctrine of consent protects only those individual preferences which are seen to be congruent with dominant societal values; social preferences and convenience override all other individual choices. Under these conditions, more freedom to waive rights of physical integrity can only place socially vulnerable persons at great risk of abuse.
Thinking through the body of the law
1996
Thinking Through the Body of the Law (1996) is a pathbreaking book which should presage further works of its kind. While the essays are more diverse than coherent, there is a general attempt to supplement Critical Legal Studies, Feminist Jurisprudence and Critical Race Theories' re-conceptualisation of the Law as something other than an isolated practice of objective and impartial rules. The authors question our understanding of ethics, embodiment, the social and law/justice. In doing so they present us with an inspiring range of trajectories which call for further research. In this respect, the title of the book sets an overly ambitious agenda. The title performatively asserts that the 'thinking' that is done in this book accomplishes a 'thinking through the body of the law.' This presumes a movement involving destination and arrival; parameters which seem both an impossibility and an undesirability given the subject. To reconceptualise ethics, embodiment and law-justice, as Patton attests in the book, requires us to find 'new fonns' (p.59) that will not be known in advance of the process nor be final in their 'specific detenninations.' (p.59
Atmospheres of Law: Senses, Affects, Lawscapes
Emotion, Space and Society 6(2), 2013, 2013
In this article, I deal with airs and sounds and scents, while keeping an eye on the law. My field of enquiry is the interstitial area between sensory and affective occurrences, namely sensory experiences that are traditionally thought to be a causal result of external stimuli, and affective experiences that are mostly associated with emotional changes and generally allude to something internal. I am arguing that there is no constructive difference between internal and external origin of occurrences. In its stead, I suggest the concept of atmosphere, namely an attempt at understanding affective occurrences as excessive, collective, spatial and elemental. However, it quickly becomes apparent that an atmosphere is legally determined. The law controls affective occurrences by regulating property of sensory stimulation. At the same time, the law guides bodies into corridors of sensory compulsion e an aspect of which is consumerism in capitalist societies. The law achieves this by allowing certain sensory options to come forth while suppressing others, something which is particularly obvious in cases of intellectual property protection that capture the sensorial. I deal with the law in its material, spatial manifestation and in particular through what I have called the ‘lawscape’, namely the fusion of space and normativity. I employ a broadly Deleuzian methodology with insights from radical geography, affective studies, urban and critical legal theory in order to develop and link the various parts of the text.
Law, Gender and Sexuality: The Making of a Field
Feminist Legal Studies, 2009
The papers in the following section arose from a roundtable discussion organised by the AHRC Research Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality, titled 'Law, Gender and Sexuality: The Making of a Field'. Participants in the roundtable were asked to reflect on the challenges confronting law, gender and sexuality (LGS) as an area of research and scholarship, and to ask what benefits, possibilities, risks and dangers accompany the establishment of a research terrain. The papers address such questions as 'what is a field and how is it made?'; 'has LGS attained the status of a field?'; 'what does it mean to locate oneself within the field of LGS?'; and 'what is the relationship between feminism and LGS?'. They also consider possible future directions for the field of LGS. Together, the papers provide a variety of differing, and sometimes conflicting, perspectives on the developing body of intellectual and political activity that might be labelled 'law, gender and sexuality'. Keywords Embodiment Á Feminist legal scholarship Á Feminist activism Á Field Á Interdisciplinarity Á Law, gender and sexuality The following papers are the product of a roundtable discussion organised by the AHRC Research Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality (CentreLGS) held at the University of Westminster in March 2009. CentreLGS was a joint venture between the Universities of Kent, Keele and Westminster, established to stimulate critical, interdisciplinary research in law, gender and sexuality (LGS), and was funded by R. Hunter (&)
Law and the Sexual Subaltern: A Comparative Perspective
Cleveland State Law Review, 2000
Globalization through Coca-colonization and MTV demands that we learn to have a conversation with one another. A conversation that is not conducted along the binaries of the West and the Rest, the colonizer and the colonies, the powerful and the impoverished, the here and the there. We need to begin a conversation that happens in the unexplored spaces in between these dichotomies. And in the arena of sex these binaries are particularly acute, where pleasure, desire and agency are assumed to be associated with the West while the third world subject is constructed almost exclusively through the lens of violence, victimization and impoverishment. We need to challenge the monochromatic lens through which sex is being viewed along such rigid boundaries. Even as far back as 1942, this stereotype was challenged through the story of the Quilt written by Ismat Chugtai, a Muslim woman and fiction writer from Pakistan. 2 The story is told from the eyes of a young child who witnesses her aunt, a middleaged sequestered housewife engaged in tempestuous relations of erotic pleasure with her female maid-servant in an upper-class Muslim household. The tempest is played out beneath a billowing quilt whose motions are compared by the child to that of a convulsing elephant. Ismat Chugtai's short story was charged with obscenity, a trial that lasted for two years and triggered a major social and political controversy. The charge was ultimately dismissed. But, as is the effect of most obscenity trials, it left the stain of immorality and stigma on both the sexual speech as well as the sexual conduct that were impeached. The panels at the Reorienting Law and Sexuality Conference, will share thoughts about alternative families, sex workers, and gay and lesbian legal identity. Each of these panels on the surface appears to be about status, rights and the law. But scratch beneath the surface, and each oozes sex, a stigmatized sex, a sex that is found to be so repugnant and visceral to some, that they would advocate its annihilation, its elimination, the extermination of the families, lovers and rights that are associated with it.