- This article was written in partial fulfilment of the Legal Studies/Women's Studies undergraduate subject ‘Sex, Crime & Punishment’ conducted by Sue Davies at La Trobe University. Publication of this article was enabled by Sue, who provided the space and tools to write, my tutor Sara Knox, and the patience, generosity and encouragement of Andrea Rhodes-Little. I would also like to thank my sister Louisa who managed to make this ordeal a celebration of resistance.
- Michel Foucault, in Colin Gordon (ed.), Michel Foucault Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, London: Harvester Press, 1980, 82.
- I am not claiming to speak from a mythical, singular position of criminalised ‘other’. When I am a student of non-feminist legal studies I am constantly invited to participate in the (re)production of meaning about ‘others' and am assured that, with the right ‘tools’, I can produce objective, authoritative knowledge and secure a relatively high place in this hierarchy. However, if it were known that I am a criminal ‘masquerading’ as an ‘expert’, my knowledge would be represented as corrupted, and positioned as ‘subjective’. My slide down the hierarchical ladder would then be rapid.
- Michel Foucault, ‘About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous' Individual in 19th Century Legal Psychiatry’ in D. N. Weisstub, (ed.), Law and Psychiatry, New York: Pergamon Press, 1978, 9.
- I am not using the term ‘law’ here to represent a monolithic institution that operates only in particular locations (like courts). Rather, I suggest that ‘law’ is a discourse that operates to punish undisciplined bodies even without bringing them to court. The power of law is to have its discourse accepted as truth and thus to operate in everyday life through technologies that ensure bodies discipline themselves and each other.
- Vicky Bell, Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault, and the Law, London: Routledge, 1993, 154.
- Carol Smart, ‘The Woman of Legal Discourse’, (1992) 1 Social and Legal Studies, 34.
- Ibid, 35.
- Jill Matthews, Good and Mad Women, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1984.
- Carol Smart, ‘The Woman of Legal Discourse’, above n.7, 36.
- This is not an exhaustive list of possible subject positions offered to women by the law. Additionally the categories are not static, unchangeable or ahistorical. Moreover, the demonstrations that these categories are in fact historically constituted are important interventions into the technologies of normalisation that present them as ‘natural’.
- Davies and Rhodes-Little use this argument to refer to the representations of the defendants in the ‘Lesbian Vampire Case’. They suggest that one of the defendants (Tracey Waugh) was successfully represented as ‘lacking in moral strength’ while the other three were constructed as ‘born’ criminals’. I suggest that the discursive manoeuvre employed by Waugh's defence—emphasising her ‘youth, gullibility and weakness' and hinting at ‘an essential femininity and innocence’—was similar to the strategy employed by my defence. Susanne Davies & Andrea Rhodes-Little, ‘History, Sexuality and Power: Deconstructing the ‘Lesbian Vampire Case”, (1993) 12 Australian Journal of Cultural History, 20.
- Ibid, 19.
- I suggest that it was important for the court to establish whether I was ‘properly’ connected to a ‘reputable’ man. By establishing my disconnection with the Army man I was instantly re-connected to my father who was represented by my defence as a Christian and a ‘valuable’ member of the community.
- I produced two references that supported the ‘aberrant’ behaviour thesis. One was from a psychologist—a ‘family friend’—who advised that I was from a ‘good’ Christian family, a stable background. The other was from my employer who assured the court that I was economically useful.
- Davies and Rhodes-Little, ‘Deconstructing the’Lesbian Vampire Case”, above n.12, 19.
- Carol Pateman argues that the mind/body, public/private, man/woman dichotomies, presented as ‘natural’ by western metaphysics, operate to ensure the activities of the bodies marked as ‘women’ be confined to the private sphere, making the journey to the public sphere only when required to prove their ‘deviance’. The public sphere is a site of intellectual exchange, of ‘rational’ thinking—a site to be occupied by men. Consequently, when women enter into the public sphere their bodies become a sign of ‘disorder’: ‘they pose a threat to political order and so must be excluded from the public world’. Carol Pateman, The Disorder of Women, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989, 4.
- Carol Smart, ‘Law's Truth/Women's Experience’ in Regina Graycar (ed.), Dissenting Opinions: Feminist Explorations in Law and Society, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990, 6.
- During their own testimonies and during ours, the men attempted to provide knowledge about our reliability and value. One of these ‘interruptions' was an allegation that ‘everyone knew’ what ‘sort’ of girls we were—in fact they had seen my sister in the newspaper. Interestingly, when, during an interval, the police prosecutors asked us about the content of this newspaper article, it appeared that the allegations were throwing into doubt our ‘value’ as witnesses against the men.
- Adrian Howe, Punish and critique: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penality, London: Routledge, 1994, 216.
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin Book, 1991, 78.
- Howe, Punish and Critique, above n.20, 216.
Australian Feminist Law Journal
Volume 8, 1997 - Issue 1