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Judy Grbich, "Taxation Narratives of Economic Gain:
Reading Bodies Transgressively", Feminist Legal Studies V/2
(1997), 131-168.
Interpretation in income tax law can be understood as
structured by a metanarrative in which capital figures as a hero of an adventure
and human practice as the uncertain and changing conditions of terrain over
which the adventurer struggles to find the answer to a quest for true identity,
ultimately a quest for recognition as a form sufficiently productive to
count as a property origin. In this metanarrative the movements of money
can be read as like judicial practices of propertisation - a practice which
involves the use of sexual imagery by a reader and the use of the lgeal
fiction of reading humans as if they were capital. It can also be understood
as a practice of monetization - of reading financial property as if it were
human.
The taxation metanarrative has provided a static, synchronic
structure for the reciprocal effects of economic stories about the productivenss
of financial activities and the taxation law stories about monetary gains
having origins in productive origins of human exertions. The language of
adventure and discovery in economic and taxation law stories about the productive
character of financial and human exertions can also be understood as a grammar,
and activities imagined as adventures can be used to create meanings about
the property lke persona or subject of the action. Recognition of the temporal
and causal aspects of the adventure brings diachronic questions of the sexual
identity of the reader and cultural modes of desire in to any narrative
about the social character of economic gains and the significance of these
in the economy. Cultural formations of the constitution of sexual identity
form an historical context of tax law interpretation, and the literary productions
of this process of reading are products of a kind capable of being understood
as part of the economic conditions of twentieth century economics.
Julia Kristeva's radical semiotics suggests the usefulness
of using semiotic methods of analysis for understanding this process of
reading in which the reader's own mental imaging of heterosexual reproduction
frames the grammatical positioning of the objectified action of the adventure
and the recognition of the identity of the adventurer as both the masculine
hero of the metanarrative and the sexed male progenitor of the monied offspring
of the money form. Freud's methods of dream interpretation are similarly
useful for understanding how the sexual fantasies of a reader structure
the use of conventions of sexual tropes in income tax law texts.
In Irving Fisher's turn of the century theorisation of
the economic nature of interest, capital and income, sexual imagery was
used to frame his interpretation of the active and productive character
of financial property. The effect became a practice of equating the satisfactions
and dissatisfactions of financial working bodies with those of human working
bodies. In Fisher's narrative reading humans as if they were capital was
naturalised. Learning to read the movements of financial propery as signs
of human creativity and consciousness was instantiated as a practice of
an economic kind, and as a practice capable of being retold in different
and transgressive ways by readers who imagine different sexual scenarios.
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