Law as/of property, judgment as dissension: Feminist and postcolonial interventions in the networks

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

Volumn 12, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 369-396

  Threadgold, Terry ^a,b,c  

^a MONASH UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

^b CARDIFF UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

^c CARDIFF UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 52849094616     PISSN: 09528059     EISSN: 15728722     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1008925626189     Document Type: Article

References (116)

1. Lowe, Lisa, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Denham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 74-75.
2. Gatens, Moira, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 149.
3. Davies, Margaret, Delimiting the Law: 'Postmodernism' and the Politics of Law (London: Pluto Press, 1996), 17-19.
4. Naffine, Ngaire, Law and the Sexes: Explorations in Feminist Jurisprudence (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990);
5. Thornton, Margaret, Dissonance and Distrust: Women in the Legal Profession (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996);
6. Carrington, Kerry, Who Killed Leigh Leigh? A Story of Shame and Mateship in an Australian Town (Sydney: Random House, 1998) ;
7. Easteal, Patricia, Balancing the Scales: Rape, Law Reform and Australian Culture (Sydney: The Federation Press, 1998);
8. Perrin, Colin, ed. "In The Wake of Terra Nullius", Law. Text. Culture 4/1 (1988).
9. The Journal Social Semiotics emerged from some of these conjunctions.
10. See Threadgold, Terry, "Semiotic Practice: What is it and why are 'they' still doing it?", in Leftwright: Pieces Concerned with Radical Theory and Writing. Intervention 20 (1986), 13-23;
11. "Its Great Music - But Can you Dance to It? ISISSS '85 in Review" Semiotica 61/1-2 (1986), 107-122;
12. "The Semiotics of Halliday, Voloshinov and Eco", American Journal of Semiotics 4/3 (1987), 107-42;
13. "Semiotics in Australia", in Jean Umiker Sebeok and T.A. Sebeok, eds. The Semiotic Web: A Yearbook of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 231-72;
14. Feminist Poetics; Poiesis, Performance, Histories (London and New York: Routiedge, 1997).
15. The work of this field in Australia is perhaps best characterised most recently by the journals: Australian Journal of Law and Society, Australian Feminist Law Journal, Law, Text, Culture. If I were to point to a single book as suggesting the perameters of the field I would choose D. Frazer, Cheah Peng and Judith Grbich, eds. Thinking Through the Body of the Law (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996).
16. The forthcoming Gate Poynton and Alison Lee, eds. Cultural and Text (Sydney: Allen & Unwin) is an up to date representation of current Australian methodology in what is known there as 'critical discourse analysis' or 'postlinguistics'.
17. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 98.
18. Davies, Margaret, Asking the Law Question (Sydney: The Law Book Company, 1994).
19. Bourdieu, Pierre, "The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field", The Hastings Law Journal 38 (1987), 814-853.
20. Davies The Hastings Law Journal op. cit., 16.
21. Mason, Sir Anthony, Foreword, in Patrick Parkinson, ed. The Principles of Equity (Sydney: LBC Information Services, 1996).
22. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
23. Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
24. Davies, Margaret, "Feminist Appropriations: Law, Property and Personality", Social and Legal Studies 3 (1994), 376-378.
25. Davies Social and Legal Studies ibid., 378.
26. I7 Pateman, Carol, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
27. Davies 1996, The Sexual Contract (op. cit., 94;
28. Foucault, Michel, Histoire de La Folie a L'Age Classique (Paris, Gallimard, 1972), 57.
29. Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1978) at 38.
30. Davies Writing and Difference (op. cit., 95.
31. That which exceeds it and cannot be included within it.
32. Davies op. cit., 99.
33. Formally (although not necessarily) the difference between the ratio decidendi and the obiter dicta - between 'the reasons for decision' and 'incidental remarks'.
34. Davies ibid., 104.
35. Davies ibid., 105.
36. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is not One (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 74.
37. Derrida 1997, This Sex Which is not One (op. cit., 162, 190.
38. Davies 1996, This Sex Which is not One (op. cit., 114. The notion of iterability has also been influential in prominent US feminist accounts of potential legal change: Cornell 1991; Butler 1993.
39. My use of the masculine pronoun here is deliberate.
40. Such work would depend on understanding how exactly the habitus is constructed through the disciplinary processes of 'education and training' in Law Schools. Work like that of Maclean, Rod and Kamler, Barbara, "'You Can't Just go to Court and Move your Body': First year Students Learn to Write and Speak Law", Law. Text. Culture 3 (1997), 176-209.
41. See the Australian Government DEET (Department of Education, Employment and Training) funded project: Chief Investigators: Professors Regina Graycar and Jenny Morgan 'Including Gender Issues in the Core Law Curriculum in Law Schools'; and Professors Sandra Berns, and Marcia Neave, and Paula Baron "Citizenship and Law", the second part of the above project. Both projects have been online in Australia as resources for Law Schools. The web site, Uniserve, is funded by CAUT (Committee for Advances in University Teaching).
42. Derrida would almost certainly say that he never intended to intervene in that way anyway.
43. Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routiedge, 1990).
44. Fraser, Nancy, in ed. Nancy J. Holland, Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1997), 159, 160, 163.
45. Loughran, Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida (op. cit., 24.
46. Kirby, Vicki, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (New York and London: Routiedge).
47. Kirby, Vicki, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (Ibid, 90.
48. Kirby, Vicki, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (Ibid, 91.
49. Kirby Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (op. cit., 95.
50. Kirby Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (ibid.
51. Gatens Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (op. cit., 141.
52. Cheah, Peng, "Sexual Difference, Cultural Difference: Body and History in Gallop", in ed. Jill Julius Matthews, Jane Gallop Seminar Papers, Humanities Research Centre Monograph 7 (Canberra: The Australian National University), 27.
53. Chow, Rey, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993), 50.
54. Chow, Rey, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Op. cit., 51.
55. Chow, Rey, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (51. Ibid.
56. Bourdieu Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (op. cit., 852.
57. Quoted from the title of Judith Butler's book, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London and New York: Routiedge, 1993).
58. Gibson, Ross, "A History of Quiet Suspicion", in eds. Klaus Neumann, Nicholas Thomas, Hilary Ericksen, Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999), 39-40.
59. Gibson, Ross, "Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Op. cit., 41.
60. Gibson, Ross, "Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Op. cit., 42.
61. Gibson, Ross, "Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Op. cit., 43.
62. Reynolds, Henry, The Whispering in our Hearts (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998). Reynolds aim here is to recover from the archives all the traces that he can of continued historical resistance to the violent treatment of the Aboriginal people. He is much less concerned than Gibson is with the effect the witnessing of violence may have had on white settlers.
63. Reynolds, Henry, The Whispering in our Hearts (Op. cit., 46.
64. Reynolds, Henry, The Whispering in our Hearts (Ibid, 51.
65. Reynolds, Henry, The Whispering in our Hearts (Ibid, 54-55.
66. Reynolds, Henry, The Whispering in our Hearts (Ibid, 40 and 52.
67. This was linked to Australia's international obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination.
68. Chesterman, John and Gilligan, Brian, Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
69. Reynolds, Henry, The Law of the Land (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1987).
70. Kerruish, Valeris and Jeannine Purdy, "He 'look' Honest - Big White Thief," ed. Perrin The Law of the Land (op. cit., 157.
71. Kerruish, Valeris and Jeannine Purdy, "The Law of the Land (157. Ibid.
72. Pether, Penelope, "Principles or Skeletons? Mabo and the Discursive Constitution of the Australian Nation", in ed. Perrin, The Law of the Land (op. cit., 115-143.
73. Rush, Peter, "Deathbound Doctrine: Scenes of Murder and its Inheritance", Studies in Law, Politics and Society 16 (1997), 71-100.
74. Reynolds, Henry, "After Mabo, What about Sovereignty?", AHR, 1998.
75. Mabo & Athens v Greenland [No. 2] (1992) 175 CLR at 43.
76. Priestley, L.J., "The Mabo Case: Miracle or Monster?", James Madison Memorial Lecture, 1993.
77. Gibson The Mabo Case: Miracle or Monster?", op. cit., 47.
78. Reynolds, Henry, "Native Title and Historical Tradition: Past and Present", in In the Age of Mabo: History, Aborigines and Australia, ed. Bain Attwood (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996), 17-34.
79. Markus, Andrew, "Between Mabo and a Hard Place: race and the contradictions of conservatism", in Bain Attwood ed., In the Age of Mabo: History, Aborigines and Australia, op. cit., 88-99.
80. The Wk People v Queensland, The Thayorre People and Queensland, 7IALJR 173 [1996].
81. Threadgold, Terry, "Legal Witchcraft and the Craft of Fiction: Wik and its Literary Precedents." Chris Lee et al. eds., Australian Literature and the Public Sphere (Queensland, University of Toowoomba Press, 1999).
82. Brenmn CJ Wik, 180.
83. Deputy Prime Minister, Tim Fischer quoted in The Australian, 21 July 1993;
84. see also Markus The Australian, op. cit., 99.
85. Rose, Deborah Bird, "Hard Times: An Australian Study", in eds. Klaus Neumann et al., The Australian, op. cit., 15.
86. Markus, The Australian, op. cit., 92-93.
87. Gray, Geoffrey and Christine Winter eds., The Resurgence of Racism: Howard, Hanson and the Race Debate (Victoria: Monash Publications in History: 24, 1998).
88. He was restrained not by 'political correctness' but by fear of electoral backlash. Howard once lead a party with a name remarkably like Hanson's and had lost his position in parliament and the Liberal Party once before over his statements on Asian immigration. During the election campaign which made him Prime Minister, he had been forced to repudiate these early anti-Asian comments in a context of increasing Australian dependency on Asia for trade.
89. It was impossible to travel to Asia at this time without being asked about her, without reading front page media stories of her latest racist remarks. Australian University Vice Chancellors, at graduations in Asia, were forced to include repudiations in their addresses to parents. Tourism and trade suffered.
90. The Australian, May 30-31, 1998, 16;
91. The Sunday Age, Sunday 31 May, 1998, Agenda, 15.
92. The story of the proposed advertisement showing an Aboriginal humpy superimposed on the map of Australia and the focus groups which would not accept it would make another paper.
93. Sydney Morning Herald, November, 1997.
94. Margot Kingston, "Cabinet Abandons S3m Wik press ads." The Sydney Morning Herald, Thursday, Feb. 26, 1998. The campaign came to light when a member of a focus group complained to a community group, Defenders of Native Title.
95. Such an election would have been disastrous. It is Howard's sudden anti-racism that is out of character. "Wik Poll Warning: 'Blood on the streets'", The Sydney Morning Herald, Feb. 20, 1998, was the kind of headline that regularly accompanied the debates.
96. Margot Kingston, "Labor Joins Urgent Talks to Break Wik Deadlock", The Sydney Morning Herald, Thursday, March 26, 1998.
97. Margot Kingston, "Howard: Wik Compromise is surrender", The Sydney Morning Herald, Monday, March 16, 1998.
98. Media references.
99. Luke, Allan, "The Material Effects of the Word: apologies, 'Stolen Children' and public discourse," Discourse in the Cultural Politics of Education 118/3 (1997), 343-368.
100. The public outcry about the gendered and monocultural 'whiteness' of the suggested wording, about as relevant to multicultural Australia, women, and the people of North Queensland, as the constitutional debates and Federation were in 1900, continues to this day.
101. Manne, Robert, The Age, Monday 30 August, 1999.
102. Gatens, Moira, "Corporeal representation in/and the Body Politic", The Age, op. cit., 21-28.
103. Gordon, Avery, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 39.
104. Australian Humanities Review, www.Lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/issue- April-1996/Reynolds.html; www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/issue-March-1998/ Lake.html.
105. McGrath, Anne and Winona Stevenson, "Gender, Race and Policy: Aboriginal Women and the State in Canada and Australia." Special Joint Issue of Labour/Le Travail 38 and Labour History 71 (1996), 37-53.
106. Rowell, Meredith, "Women and land claims in the Northern Territory", in Aborigines, Land and Land Rights, eds. Nicolas Peterson and Marcia Langton (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1983), 256-267.
107. Rowell Aborigines, Land and Land Rights, ibid, 256.
108. Rowell Aborigines, Land and Land Rights, Ibid, 258.
109. Toohey, J., Report to the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs on the land claim by the Anmatjirra and Alyawarra to the Utopia Pastoral Lease (Canberra 1980), 27.
110. Toohey J. quoted in Bell, D., and Ditton, P., Law: The Old & the New. Aboriginal Women in Central Australia Speak Out. Canberra, Aboriginal History, for the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal AID Service. 1980, 1.
111. Brandi, Maria and Michael Walsh, "Roots and Branches or the Far-Flung Net of Aboriginal Relationships", in eds. Peterson and Langten, 149-159.
112. Rose, Deborah Bird Roots and Branches or the Far-Flung Net of Aboriginal Relationships", in op. cit.
113. Reynolds, Henry, The Other Side of the Frontier (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1984), 80-81.
114. Reynolds, Henry, The Other Side of the Frontier (Ibid., 50.
115. Reynolds, Henry, The Other Side of the Frontier (50. Ibid.
116. Reynolds, Henry, The Other Side of the Frontier (50. Ibid.