- Readers seeking a legally orientated introduction to these themes might try M. Minow, ‘Partial Justice: Law and Minorities in A. Sarat and T. Kearns, The Fate of Law), University of Michigan Press, 1991.
- Anna Yeatman, Postmodern Revuionings of the Political, New York: Routledge, 1994, 28.
- Michel Foucault puts the matter this way:
- We must not resolve discourse into a play of pre-existing significations; we must not imagine that the world turns towards us a legible face which we would only have to decipher, the world is not the accomplice of our knowledge; there is no prediscursive providence which disposes the world in our favour. We must conceive discourse as a violence which we do to things, or in any case a practice which we impose on them…
- M. Foucault, “The Order of Discourse” in M. Shapiro (ed.), Language and Politics, 1984, 127. Stanley Fish writes:
- What anyone can see is not independent of their verbal and mental categories but is in fact a product of them…. We are never not in a situation. Because we are never not in a situation, we are never not in the act of interpreting. Because we are never not in the act of interpreting, there is no possibility of reaching a level of meaning beyond or below interpretation.
- A. Fish, Is There a Toa in this Class, Harvard University Press, 1980, 271.
- Yeatman, op. cit., n. 2, 19.
- Ibid., 2.
- Ibid., 29.
- Ibid., 79.
- Ibid., 29.
- Ibid., 31. Catherine MacKinnon's analysis in ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: an Agenda for Theory’ has proved to have an enduring significance. In 1982 she wrote:
- men create the world from their own point of view, which then becomes the truth to be described. This is a closed system, not anyone's confusion. Power to make the world from one's point of view is power in its nude form. The male epistemological stance, which corresponds to the world it creates, is objectivity: the ostensibly noninvolved stance, the view from a distance and from no particular perspective, apparently transparent to its reality. It does not comprehend its own perspectivity, does not recognize what it sees as subject like itself, or that the way that it apprehends its world IS a form of its subjugation and presupposes it… What is objectively known corresponds to the world and can be verified by pointing to it (as science does) because the world itself is controlled from the same point of view
- C. MacKinnon, (1982) 7 Signs 537–38.
- Yeatman, op. cit., n. 2, 31.
- Ibid., 86.
- Ibid., ix.
- Ibid., 86.
- Ibid., 87.
- Ibid., 107.
- Ibid., 107.
- Ibid., 110.
- Ibid., 116.
- Ibid., 89–91.
- Ibid., 87.
- Ibid., 14.
- Jacques Derrida developed the methodology. It is usefully explained in J. Balkin, ‘Deconstructive Practice and Legal Theory’ (1987) 96 Yale Law Journal 743.
- For a demonstration of this, see G. Airo-Farulla, ‘“Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”: Deconstruction, Derrida, Discrimination and Difference/ance in (the High) Court’ (1991) 9 Law in Context 102.
- Yeatman, op.cit., n. 2, 3.
- Ibid., ix.
- Adrian Howe, Punish and Critique Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penality, Routledge: London, 1994, 121.
- Ibid., 57.
- Ibid., 82.
- Ibid., 122.
- Ibid., 130.
- Ibid., 132.
- Ibid., 163.
- Ibid., 166, 139.
- Ibid., 171–7.
- Ibid., 174.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 190, 198.
- Ibid., 199.
- Ibid., 200.
- Ibid., 202–5.
- Ibid., 205, 207.
- Ibid., 217.
- Carol Smart's now classic Women, Crime and Criminology, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976 is widely recognised as the ‘foundational’ text in this field. For an overview of Pat Carlen's work see Adrian Howe, Punish and Critique: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penality, London: Routledge, 1994, 127–133.
- Mary Eaton, Justice for Women? Family, Court and Social Control, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986.
- Mary Eaton, Women After Prison, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993.
- Ibid., 15.
- Ibid., 13.
- Ibid., 16–17.
- Ibid., 18.
- Ibid., 29, 42, 46.
- Ibid., 98.
- Ibid., 99.
- Ibid., 120.
- Ibid., 12.
- Marcia Rice, ‘Challenging orthodoxies in feminist theory: a black feminist critique’ in L Geisthorpe and A. Morris (eds) Feminist Perspectives in Criminology, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990, 58–60.
- Eaton, op. cit., n.3, 22.
- See Howe, op. cit., n. 1, 123–207.
- Eaton, op. cit., n. 3, 127. For a critique of Gilligan, see Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law, London: Routledge, 1989, 72–76.
- Howe, op. cit., n. 1, 157–164.
- Sec the discussion in Ibid., 213–5.
Australian Feminist Law Journal
Volume 4, 1995 - Issue 1