Transgender Freedom and the Law: A Liberal-Poststructural Discussion on McNally

In R v McNally, gender deception is found capable of leading to the vitiation of consent to sexual intercourse and, in so doing, places restriction on the freedom of transgendered individuals in favour of cisgendered freedom. This paper seeks to challenge the standing of this decision by adopting a combined methodological approach between Deleuzian post-structuralism and Gewirthian legal idealism. In so doing, we attempt to show that the combination offers a novel and productive approach to contentious decisions, such as that in McNally. Our approach brings together post-structuralist corporeality which conceives of the body as material and productive, and Gewirth’s ‘agent’ to conceptualise the legal body as an entity which can, and should, shape judicial reasoning. It does this by employing the criterion of categorically necessary freedom on institutionalised practical reasoning. These ‘bodies of agents’ can be conceived as the underpinning and justificatory basis for the authority of the law subject to the morally rational Principle of Generic Consistency. This egalitarian condition precedent requires individualisation and the ability to accept self-differentiation in order to return to a status, which can be validly described as “law”. Ultimately, we argue that this theoretical combination responds to a call to problematise the connection made between gender discourse and judicial reasoning, whilst offering the opportunity to further our conceptions of law and broaden the theoretical armoury with which to challenge judicial reasoning in McNally. That is, a ‘good faith’ attempt to further and guarantee transgender freedoms.

Interrupting the courtroom organism: screaming bodies, material affects and the theatre of cruelty

This article offers a method of reading the courtroom which produces an alternative mapping of the space. My method combines a reading of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty with a Deleuzian theoretical analysis. I suggest that this is a useful method since it allows examination of the spatial praxes of the courtroom which pulsate with a power to organize, terrorize and to judge. This method is also able to conceptualize the presence of ‘‘screaming’’ bodies and living matter which are appropriated to build, as well as feed the presence and functioning of the courtroom space, or organism. By using a method that articulates the cry of these bodies in the shadow of the organism, it becomes clear that this cry is both unwelcome and suppressed by the courtroom. The howl of anxious bodies enduring the process and space of the law can be materialized through interruptions to the courtroom, such as when bodies stand when they should not and when they speak when they should be silent. These vociferous actualizations of the scream serve only to feed the organism they seek to disturb, yet if the scream is listened to before it disrupts, the interruption becomes-imperceptible to the courtroom. Through my Artaudian/Deleuzian reading, I give a voice to the corporeal gasp that lingers before the cry, which is embedded within the embodied multiplicity from which it is possible to draw a creative line of flight. The creative momentum of this line of flight produces a sustainable interruption to the courtroom process, which instead of being consumed by the system, has the potential to produce new courtroom alignments. My text therefore offers an alternative reading of the courtroom, and in doing so also offers a refined understanding of how to productively ‘‘interrupt’’ the courtroom process.

Confronting law affectively: encounters of a Patpong sex tourist

When considering spaces of sex-work such as Patpong in Bangkok, Thailand, the inclination is to be drawn into habitual debates concerning the legitimacy of sex-work and the clear objectification of sex-workers. While these concerns are valid and real, there are significant absences in terms of the theoretical mapping of the space, such as the affect of the presence of law, bodies, space and the sexual encounter itself. Law emerges as the most significant presence, since it both forms the transactional surface of Patpong and produces the confusion and revilement that results from the confluence of cold legal exchange with the tactile intimacy of the sexual encounter. This text explores the ethnographic space of Patpong in order to understand ways in which law’s transactional, effective surface is both embodied through subjectivication and spatially emplaced, yet also disrupted through the affective agency of the bodies and spaces it enfolds in order to produce this surface. This exploration will point to the limitations of law’s effective surface and suggest ways in which law might be located within a regime of affect, which returns the law to the body it subjectivises.

Symposium: Editing Political Diaries

The witness seminar was held in December 1991 at the Institute of Historical Research in London. It examined some of the key issues surrounding the editing of political diaries, including what to edit, the motivation of the diarist and the value of diaries to historians. Peter Catterall of the ICBH was in the chair. The three principal speakers were Ruth Winstone, editor of Tony Benn's diaries, David Brooks, editor of the diary of Sir Edward Hamilton, and John Barnes, co‐editor with David Nicholson, of the diary of Leo Amery. Other contributors included Jad Adams (biographer of Tony Benn), Kathleen Burk (co‐author of a study of the 1976 IMF crisis), Philip Williamson (editor of the diary of William Bridgeman), M.R.D. Foot (an editor of the Gladstone diaries), and Stuart Ball (editor of the diary of Sir Cuthbert Headlam).