Sex @ the end of the twentieth century: Some re-marks on a minor jurisprudence

Law and Critique

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 71-86

  Loizidou, Elena ^a  

^a LANCASTER UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Culture; Goodrich; Justice; Law; Privacy; Sexuality; Sexuated rights

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247288205     PISSN: 09578536     EISSN: 15728617     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1008942629557     Document Type: Review

References (51)

1. P. Goodrich, Law in the Courts of Love: Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences (London: Routledge, 1996), 29-72.
2. See Donna J. Haraway, Modest Witness @ Second Millenium: FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3-4.
3. The term "technoscientific" for Haraway is a term that, if anything, shows how the time-space modalities, modalities that have been differentiated by the discourses of modernity, are overcome. In other words, the term goes beyond the existing distinctions of science and nature, subject and object and "...the natural and the artifactual that structured the imaginary time called modernity." I will be using the term in this way, as a signifier that can show us how the distinctions between private and public are overcome. See also F. Guattari, "Regimes, Pathways, Subjects", in J. Crary and S. Kwinter, eds., Incorporations (New York: Zone, 1992).
4. L. Berlant and M. Warner, "Public Sex", Critical Inquiry (Winter 1998), 547-566.
5. Supra n. 1, at 96.
6. See J. Derrida, "Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority" in D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld and D.G. Carlson, eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (London: Routledge, 1992), 42-44. I am using the word conserve to point out that the images that found law are founded through violence and that any form of "policing" these images (form of conservation of the images) also implicates a form of violence.
7. See, for example, the following books and articles by Goodrich, Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990);
8. Oedipus Lex (Berkeley Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995);
9. Law in the Courts of Love: Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences (London: Routledge, 1996);
10. "We Orators", Modern Law Review 53 (1990), 546;
11. "Specula Laws: Image, Aesthetic and Common Law", Law and Critique 2 (1992), 233;
12. "The Continuance of the Antirrhetic", Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 4 (1992), 207;
13. "Writing Legal Difference", Women: A Cultural Journal 6 (1993), 173.
14. Goodrich suggests that one of the methods by which Common law establishes itself as a subject is through memory: in other words, through techniques or processes of repetition, inscription and representation. See P. Goodrich, Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), 2.
15. Supra n. 1.
16. Supra n. 1, at vii.
17. P. Goodrich, Oedipus Lex (Berkeley Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995), x.
18. M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge, 1989), xi-xiv. Foucault, in Madness and Civilization, sets out to write a history of madness as a way of giving a voice to that which has been set aside from the realm of sanity. His project is one of bringing back that which has already been in, but which has been discursively set aside.
19. P. Goodrich, "Justice and the Trauma of Law: A Response to George Pavlich", Studies in Law, Politics and Society 18 (1998), 278.
20. Ibid.
21. F. Guattari, "Regimes, Pathways, Subjects", in J. Crary and S. Kwinter, eds., Incorporations (New York: Zone, 1992), 19.
22. F. Guattari, Incorporations 1992), Ibid, at 21.
23. F. Guattari, Incorporations 1992), Ibid, at 21.
24. F. Guattari, Incorporations 1992), Ibid, at 16. See also n. 3.
25. See Shoshana Felman, "Forms of Judicial Blindness, or the Evidence of What Cannot Be Seen: Traumatic Narratives and Legal Representations in the O. J. Simpson Case and in Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata", Critical Inquiry (Summer 1997), 738-789. Amongst other things, Felman observes that in spite of the magnified visual evidence that was produced in the court room during the O. J. Simpson trial, the jury failed to see the brutally beaten face of Nicole Simpson and the signification of that brutality. The implication of her argument is that law, by failing to see the trauma of a battered wife, failed to deliver justice.
26. Guattari points out that the "age of planetary computerisation" is one in which the subject puts the machine under its control. He also points out some characteristics of this "new" era: (a) mass media and telecomunications; (b) chemically produced materials; (c) microprocessors; (d) biological engineering.
27. Supra n. 5, at 23.
28. Supra n. 1, at 31-32.
29. Supra n. 5.
30. For a re-freshing reading of Law and embodiment, see "Rights" in S. Ahmed, Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
31. Supra n. 1.
32. For insight into Goodrich's use of trauma as therapy, as re-construction and justice, see P. Goodrich, "History becomes the Law: Mourning, Genealogy, and Legal Historiography" in P. Goodrich, Oedipus Lex (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995), 16-40.
33. In spite of the fact that he is trying to disassociate the meaning of gender from property, Goodrich seems to fall into the trap that he is avoiding. By associating woman to the feminine, Goodrich constructs woman as a property and therefore gender as something that we possess. Although I am not going to talk about this in this article, I would like to point out that the Court of Love would not be representative of feminine justice just because women are the judges, because the judgments are about relationships and the ethics of interpersonal practices. As Donna Haraway notes (see supra n. 3, at 23-39), gender is relational. In her chapter, "Modest Witness", she comments on the exclusion of women as witnesses of scientific changes, of the public. She notes that when authors such as Shapin and Shaffer say that the scientific world is a gendered world, they understand gender as a property and not as a relation, and in so doing they avoid answering an important question: to what extent is the process of science gendered? Goodrich, in saying that the justice that the Court of Love produced was feminine, associates woman or gender to property and not relationship. In so doing he does not look into the processes by which justice was produced in this Court and the extent to which they were different from a masculine justice. He does not question the emphasis on formality that seems to be ingrained in these Courts of Love, where the decisions of the Courts are based like any other Court on formal regulations.
34. Supra n. 1, at 54.
35. N. Machiavelli, The Prince (London: Penguin, 1981).
36. N. Machiavelli, The Prince 1981). Ibid, at 102.
37. I contrast the "age of planetary computerisation" with the "age of Christianity" here (although it is not a European Christianity) because the Bill Clinton affair has been compared to the witchcraft hysteria in Salem 300 years ago. For a comparison, see A. Miller, "Behind the Lewinsky Affair, Some May Discern the Work of the Devil", The Guardian, Friday 16th October 1998, 20.
38. Supra n. 28, at 102.
39. L. Berlant, "Intimacy: A Special Issue", Critical Inquiry (Winter 1998), 282.
40. Supra n. 3 at 548, n. 2.
41. Ibid., at 553.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Queer counterpublic culture refers to those practices, whether heterosexual or homosexual, that put sex in the public, or that make sex be mediated through publics. Queer culture becomes for Berlant and Warner "...a space of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies." (Ibid, at 558) It becomes that which unsettles the artificial boundaries between private and public, sex and work. This unsettling, this mobility or "trick" is also part of the writing of Berlant and Warner. The reader always feels that s/he is suspended between a literal and a metaphorical definition of queer, while one finds her/himself being "tricked" into both or neither. The significance of the writing lies in the fact that it dilutes the imaginary boundaries. For a metaphorical reading of the queer, see E. Loizidou, "Intimate Celluloid queer", in L. Moran, D. Monk and S. Beresford, eds., Legal Queeries (London: Cassell, 1998).
45. Supra n. 3 at 556.
46. Supra n. 24 at 32.
47. Supra n. 3 at 565.
48. Ibid, at 565-566.
49. Supra n. 2 at 3. Donna Haraway notes that modifiers such as @ become narratives of our times. The @ specifies where I am as an addressee of an e-mail.
50. Supra n. 1 at 68.
51. Supra n. 32 at 23-39.