Suchergebnisse

Foucault's theoretical framework -- Foucault's monsters as genealogy : the abnormal individual -- An English legal history of monsters -- Changing sex : the problem of transsexuality -- Sharing bodies : the problem of conjoined twins -- Admixing embyros : the problem of human/animal hybrids -- Conclusion.

This article offers a history of the English legal category monster, a legal category that entered English law in the mid-thirteenth and survived until the mid-nineteenth century. The aim of the article is to provide a close textual analysis of an otherwise absent legal history and to locate law's monsters, and the anxieties that they suggest, within their appropriate contexts: social, political, religious and legal. However, while the principal aim of the article is to address a lacuna in legal historical scholarship, and perhaps precisely because of this fact, the history to be detailed offers a series of valuable insights for future study, particularly in the areas of legal history, philosophy and feminist theory. While full elaboration of these themes is beyond its ambit, the article will draw attention to four different and specific contexts in relation to which future scholarship might benefit from an historical study of England's legal monsters.

This article will examine the ways in which Australian anti-discrimination laws serve to regulate transgendered persons. It will emerge that the forms of regulation deployed vary significantly across jurisdictions. In order to appreciate the complex relation of transgendered persons to practices of discrimination and to forms of regulation, it is necessary not only to consider the category 'transgender' but to consider also the categories of 'sex' and 'sexuality'. This is not a matter of law's blindness to 'intersectionality', of the abstraction of legal subjects from embodied particularity, but rather a question of the interplay between these categories within specific regulatory regimes. Moreover, the regulation of transgendered persons, and indeed other categories of person protected by anti-discrimination laws, will be seen to occur in ways which call for a re-examination of rights critiques which attempt an interrogative interpretation of rights. The article contends that Australian anti-discrimination laws are marked by a shift from an interrogative to a performative mode of regulation. That is to say, anti-discrimination laws are to be comprehended not by reference to the 'immutability' of some attribute or characteristic but rather in the interplay of performance and gaze. This regulatory shift is one which serves to problematize, rather than ossify, extant legal categories. When you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is 'male' or 'female?' and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating certainty. (Freud, 1964) But it seems we are as we appear. What a nonsense we make of our hatreds when we can only recognise them in the most obvious circumstances. (Winterson, 1996)