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Adam Gearey, "'Mad and Delirious Words': Feminist
Theory and Critical Legal Studies in the work of Peter Goodrich", Feminist
Legal Studies VI/1 (1998), 121-133: This paper attempts to locate Oedipus
Lex and The Courts of Love within Goodrich's oeuvre to date,
and to argue that feminist critical theory is essential to Goodrich's attempt
to create a genealogy of the common law. This genealogy is both backward
and forward looking: it recovers a memory of a different understanding of
law, and invents a different fate for the legal subject and the future of
the institution. It draws on a form of psychoanalysis that is influenced
by continental thought, in particular that of Luce Irigaray and Pierre Legendre,
and concentrates on a nexus of concerns that focus on the image and the
figure of the female as opening a critical space in law's history and traditions.
This is a scholarship that reveals what was lost or buried deep in the constitution
of legal modernity; the 'minor jurisdictions' exemplified by the Courts
of Love. At stake is an alternative form of legal discourse that recognises
that human relationships have to be founded on an ethics of difference that
recornises the eroticised, gendered body as much as the immortal soul. e-mail:
A.D.Gearey@ukc.ac.uk
Andrea Loux, "Idols and Icons: Catharine MacKinnon
and Freedom of Expression in North America", Feminist Legal Studies
VI/1 (1998), 85-104: This article re-situates Catharine MacKinnon and her
work on pornography in the particular and peculiar social, cultural and
legal context from which it emerged--the United States. The article asks
why MacKinnon's controversial work is so popular amongst a segment of US
women law students, seeking an explanation in the culture, politics and
educational practices of the self-proclaimed "elite" law schools
of the U.S. academy. The article goes on to examine the Canadian experience
of incorporating MacKinnon's pornography theory into constitutional law
and the recent case brought by the gay and lesbian bookstore, Little Sisters.
The article concludes with a discussion of the lessons that can be learned
by British feminists from the North American experience as we prepare to
create a uniquely British culture of rights with the incorporation of the
ECHR.
Madhu Mehra, "Exploring the Boundaries of Law, Gender
and Social Reform", Feminist Legal Studies VI/1 (1998), 59-83:
This article explores the relationship between law, gender and social reform
through the legal discourse on dowry and domestic violence in India. Its
principal sources are statutory and case law (from the High Court and the
Supreme Court) on the criminal side between 1983 to 1996. The article argues
for re-examining the centrality of law in the feminist struggle for social
reform, in view of the inherent limitations and character of law. It examines
the ways in which legal discourse reproduces traditional socialised constructions
of both dowry and domestic violence, thereby legitimising a degree of the
problem that was sought to be corrected through legal intervention in the
first place. The process of intervening has also led to the construction
of the socialised gendered woman in law. Upon this seemingly universal category
of the gendered woman, the legal discourse has created different types of
women based upon aspects of their identity in addition to gender. While
some types of women are extolled as embodying the natural and ideal qualities
of womanhood, thereby deserving of legal redress, there are other types
who emerge as flawed when measured against the ideal woman, and therefore
deprecated for abusing the process of the law. Feminist engagement with
the law needs to be aware of the inherent power of law to appropriate to
itself the authority of constructing the problem, in a way that largely
parallels the socialised understanding and displaces the feminist and sociological
versions of the problem; further, it must be aware that even progressive
law cannot be uniformly liberatory for all women, as it treats different
types of women differentially.
Janice Richardson, "Beyond Equality and Difference:
Sexual Difference in the Work of Adriana Cavarero", Feminist Legal
Studies VI/1 (1998), 105-120: This paper discusses the work of the contemporary
feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero who has illustrated how, from
Parmenides and Plato onwards, Western metaphysics has devalued birth and
focused upon death. I consider the way in which she refigures conceptions
of self by considering the influence of Hannah Arendt upon her work
and then her criticisms of Judith Butler. Cavarero is clearly committed
to political activism and it is this influence which motivates her to reclaim
the images of women from classical (male) texts. In her most recent work
she proposes a conception of self which draws upon the work of Arendt
to emphasize her/his unique, embodied, already sexed nature, whose life
story is told by others. She wishes to avoid what she views as two pitfalls:
that of positing the classical subject, which is "monstrous"
in being both male and universal; and the "postmodern subject"
which she characterises as fragmented. I consider the extent to which she
avoids the public/private divide which infects Arendt's work. Whilst
sympathetic to her political commitment, I also point to a tension in her
work between the openness of the question of "who" we are, compared
to her assumption that sexual difference is always an important difference.
Ralph Sandland, "The Mirror and the Veil: Reading
The Imaginary Domain", Feminist Legal Studies VI/1 (1998),
33-58: This article analyses critically Drucilla Cornell's attempted integration
of Rawls' distinction between practical and theoretical reason with Lacanian
psychoanalysis into a feminist theory of law and legal rights. It is argued
that Lacan cannot supplement Rawlsian liberalism other than dangerously,
in that Lacan demonstrates that the "practical" in the Rawlsian
sense is dependent on the "theoretical" for its coherence, and
that as a result Cornell's attempted synthesis must ultimately be counted
unsuccessful.
Melanie Williams, "Medico-Legal Stories of Female
Insanity - Three Nullity Suits", Feminist Legal Studies VI/1
(1998), 3-31: This paper explores three Victorian actions claiming nullity
of marriage. The three share a common theme in that all were cases of
husbands pleading nullity on the ground of insanity in their respective
wives, so vitiating the ability to consent. Yet the cases yield some evidence
of alternative explanations of each woman's behaviour - the respective metanarratives
of enforced modesty, autonomy denied, and prohibited love - which disrupt
the dominant master-narrative of organic insanity embraced
by the medical profession. The realisation that nervous or unbalanced
mental states can be 'reactive' - a response to social or environmental
conditions - rather than organic, was (as Elaine Showalter, in The Female
Malady demonstrates) prompted by the overwhelming numbers of men returning
from the Front during the First World War with 'shellshock'. Clearly, the
social conditions of marriage in Victorian England were less susceptible
to identification as the cause of a reactive condition, since they were
embedded within the normative ideological structures of society.
Nevertheless, the three cases provide evidence of the complex interaction
between two such structures - medicine and law - in sustaining this normativity.
e-mail: miw@aber.ac.uk
S. Rahman, Review of R.Kapoor and B. Cossman, Subversive
Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law in India [click here
for advance text]
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