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Andrea Rhodes-Little[*]
Some of my students have told me that their survival is in question every day, and that generally speaking, university courses have done nothing to address these issues of life and death. They speak, like Frantz Fanon, of murder of the soul, madness and marginality. I am also reminded of Gary Foley,[2] Aboriginal activist, telling a group of university people that he fears for his son’s life every day. Every day, he watches his son leave the house and thinks he might not return home alive. Let there be no misunderstanding here; some students speak not only of their tenuous economic survival. They speak (if it’s safe enough to do so) of the banality — the usual-ness of everyday soul murder, and of their lives being at risk. They are talking about living with the possibility of being killed, and with the knowledge that if they, or those they love are killed, their deaths won’t matter the same way as other deaths matter.
Right now, I don’t know what to say about this possibility of death, and this knowledge. Words fail me. I appeal for help in beginning a conversation about these intimations of murder, and what we can do about them. This article is a call for such a conversation. The article has another (related) purpose: here, I want to talk about teaching in a university and what this may have to do with the way that seeing or hearing representations which try to attach the meaning of ‘valueless’ to oneself can wound or even deal death blows to the soul. I will call this soul murder.[3]
How do we live with this information about the lives and deaths of others? What can or should this knowledge mean to a university lecturer, particularly a lecturer in a school of law and legal studies? Can a well-meaning teacher perpetrate soul murder? I think the answer is undoubtedly: Yes. Here, I want to talk about the smallest obligations that this knowledge imposes on us as teachers. The smallest.
As there always have been, there are life and death struggles going on in and around places where what is knowledge (and history, and justice) is being contested. It is becoming easier to forget this in the university. Year long courses, in which lecturers got to know students, and actually had conversations, actually learned about the ethical issues in students’ lives, have been cut. Classes where you could actually get to know a bit about other people’s perspectives, have become much bigger, and the rooms are crowded. For many students, learning the ‘main game’ is financially and emotionally expensive enough, without spending time listening to those who can’t do it. For many teachers, ‘talking’ (writing) with the few of your peers who research in your ‘area’ counts for more than listening to your students, and getting out of your comfort zone counts for nothing. Listening to students doesn’t get you promoted; making them listen to you might.
But what if not listening makes us parties to the deaths of others, or to the soul murders which are their daily intimations of the possibility of harm or death? Even more worryingly, what if the representations of people suffering injustice which we use in our teaching (videos of police beating a person or descriptions of the bodies of women alleging rape, or descriptions of how white people have harmed Aboriginal people, for example) actually reiterate the meanings made by the perpetrators and actually promote the possibility of further harm? What if the law we teach reiterates the meanings made by the perpetrators of harm, and (thus) increases the possibility of further harm? How do we represent injustice (and justice) if representation as a practice is never ‘mere’?
What if common representations, made or chosen by experts, of people who have suffered injustice actually make life more dangerous and opportunities less equal? (Ditto for our representations of justice.) What if all our good intentions actually achieve the opposite of what we intend? What if the very act of choosing not to listen to, or look at, other representations of justice and injustice made by the survivors themselves, of changing the subject and focusing on something else, is actually a reiteration of the very practices or offences we say we abhor? What if this leaves some people more likely to have to fight off soul murder? If people are left in this position, the smallest obligation must surely be to teach ourselves to learn from those of our students who are generous, strong and brave enough to teach us about the meanings our teaching makes in their lives, and the different meanings the students make in their lives.
My teaching includes a large first-year course on critical perspectives on crime and criminology.[4] In this course, students who are confronted with alternative stories about law and order for the first time, stories about the lives and deaths of ‘minorities’ and the official actions, reactions to and complicities in these lives and deaths, often say: ‘Why has it taken until now to get these stories?’
Exposed so late to stories coming directly, unmediated, from the survivors of the criminal justice system, for example, students feel as though they have been deprived of the opportunity to understand the limitations of the identifications and sympathies to which they are called by ‘expert’ knowledges or representations.[5] Having repeatedly been invited to take sides by mainstream representations of criminals, for example, the different invitations extended to students by people whose experiences of the criminal justice system are represented by themselves come as life-changing experiences to our students. The ground moves under their feet. Over the years, the evidence has been incontrovertible: students have said over and over again that the scales have fallen from their eyes. ‘Why’, they ask, ‘weren’t we exposed to this in the last 18 or more years? Why have we been taught as though there is only one story? Why haven’t we heard before this from the people who really know?’
Representations of what happens to them, from people with different experience, who are talking for themselves, are always there if anyone wants to see, or hear them. In many disciplines, as more teachers and students do open themselves to these representations, there has been panic in the ranks of professionals and scholars who want to maintain their visions of themselves as the best and most caring and unbiased representers of what happens, what law ‘is’ and who ‘the underprivileged’ ‘are’. As more really different representations come out and into the spaces previously taken up by representations of ‘experts’, allegations of trickery and bias coming from other places, from different sources and unusual locations have become more persistent over the last few years.[6] The people making these allegations often lump these different accounts together, querulously complaining that ‘the other side’ is being neglected when space is accorded these ‘strange’ knowledges. But what is happening here? Where do these ideas of ‘one (more important, more reliable) side’ and only one ‘story’ come from? What hangs on the teacher’s engagement with these questions? I will argue that the mental wellbeing and daily safety of many people hang on her willingness to engage and on the space provided in the academy to do so.
I think that if we succumb to the pressure to focus only or mainly on representations of what happens which come from ‘officials’ and on a black letter approach to law, then we are keeping quiet about things which must be broadcast. I think that if more black letter law, and less critical thinking about law and order is taught, then more people will be put in fear of their lives, and more people will die, and more people will think it doesn’t matter. I think the smallest obligation we have is to listen keenly to many strange voices from different places. To achieve balance, the smallest obligation must be to privilege the edge-knowledges rather than merely adding a few references (to … Aborigines, women, migrants …).
Justice (as distinct from law) is everyone’s business. Possibilities for justice are made in everyday life, in the representations of ourselves and others that we all make, assent to or resist. These representations take many forms. They appear, for example, in everyday and specialist language, in the media, in ‘high’ (and not-so-high) art, and in the High (and not-so-high) Courts. They can be verbal, textual, photographic, visual, architectural. And there are millions of them. Everyone makes representations, and/or contests them. We make representations of femaleness every day, for example. The idea of proper femaleness doesn’t depend only on what geneticists, or doctors, or psychiatrists say. It depends on what we all say or ‘represent’. Many, many ‘small’ representations give the illusion of substance to the fantasy of what a real woman ‘is’, for example. Every small representation matters.
It is a mistake to say that extreme injustice and abuse arise only occasionally, only in unusual circumstances, and/or in ‘other’ countries, other places, other families, other social systems. The Holocaust should have taught us that discrimination is incremental, and that genocide is not necessarily or fundamentally different from or unconnected with racial discrimination (for example), except in degree. The history of the Holocaust shows us that the conditions that normalise genocide are made up of a million small acts of representation. Some people, Jews, or black people, or gay people, for example, are represented not only as ‘different’ but also as less worthy. These acts of representation of the meaning of others have taken, and take place in a wide variety of places including: in various disciplines in universities,[7] in the arts,[8] in literature,[9] and in popular entertainment.[10] Theorists of this range of writing which has come to be called cultural studies have shown, for example, that large colonisation projects of the 18th and 19th centuries were aided by the representation of colonised people as ‘primitive’ and their lands as ‘unoccupied’ or ‘ungoverned’.[11] This fantasy has been sustained by many small acts of representation, and many choices to fail to publicise counter-representations (or ‘other’ stories).
Another example: laws made to control the lives of Aboriginal people could not have been made unless they had been preceded by many small representations of non-European people as (for example) unintelligent, undifferentiated, childlike, unpredictable and dependent. There are millions of examples of representations of Aboriginality which illustrate the cumulative illusion of ‘reality’ thus produced. These include cartoons, photographs published by anthropologists without the informed consent of Aboriginal people, paintings of Aborigines’ (‘lost’) lifestyles of ‘nobility and innocence’, the museum trade in human remains, stolen (murdered?) as though they were animal, the parts imagined and written for Aborigines in novels and movies,[12] and the fantasies propagated in psychology and medicine about their ‘low’ intelligence and ‘high’ lust. Aboriginal representations of Aboriginal intelligence, strength, inventiveness, generosity, respect for women and strangers, outstanding child-rearing capacities and ethical sense, and systems of law and knowledge have been suppressed by white people who have been insecure about their own imagined superiority for a long time. (What if, after all, white ‘superiority’ is based only on greater force, the control of representation and many more murders? Who is civilised and who is uncivilised then?)
Patterns of representation of different groups defy disciplinary boundaries and change across time.[13] For many people in Australia, being highly educated has meant acquiring the ability to reproduce the prevailing representation of particular species, or classes, or groups and acquiring the delusion that we are more ‘fortunate’ (read ‘better’) than those we represent. We educated Australians are consequently in an excellent position to know and ‘help’ those others if they are human, and to get to know and improve them if they are not.[14]
That the common representations of Aboriginal people, or migrants, or women, for example, are fiercely contested by the people they purport to represent is rarely spoken about among those who have contributed most to the densely woven and referential stories of ‘our’ superiority and ‘their’ inferiority. In Australian university libraries, Edward Said’s famous thesis is amply illustrated by the easily provable fact that of all representations of oriental people in libraries, the vast majority have been made by non-oriental people. Said’s critique of the occidental person’s fantasy of the Orient as his negatively valued ‘other’ (and Said’s idea that westerners’ representations of oriental people are actually the fantastic and fanciful means of imagining their own superiority) joins many other critiques of post-Enlightenment knowledge practices which highlight the power relations made by representation. Thus, just as the oriental person allegedly cannot adequately represent him or her self (let alone represent the occidental person!) neither can the Aboriginal person, or a woman, let alone an animal. In courses ‘on Aborigines’ or ‘about law’, for example, both teachers and scholarly commentators have been overwhelmingly white, and male, and, not uncoincidentally, considerably more free from the daily fear of a death which would not matter. Which is not to say, however, more free from the fear of soul murder.
In my teaching in the Crime and Criminology course, if occasionally a student hearing an ‘unofficial’ account of what happens, asks the question: ‘What about the other side of the story?’, her question, although suggesting multiple sides, remains a variation of the colonial and patriarchal assertion found in modern libraries — there is only one true story or representation and only one kind of person fit to produce it.
We owe these insights into the connections between power relations and practices of representation to the broad area now known as cultural studies. All kinds of people who share the experience of having been represented as lacking some supposedly desirable attribute have begun to compare notes, and are talking to each other and to anyone else who can bear to listen. They have found patterns and similarities in their experiences of having been represented. There are comparable effects, one of which is to fear being harmed on the basis of some negatively represented attribute of theirs. They note that their representers know each other, share interests, and protect each other’s interests. The effect of these findings about the relationship between representation and power relations in the modern world has been momentous. As different people have articulated the ways in which their forms of humanness have been represented as (made) strange, the similarities between the strange-makers, their strangeness-making techniques (of representation) and their goals, have become clear. People who have been hailed as those who should rehearse their own deaths every day have begun to see that the stories commonly told about their meaning are not isolated representations of a particular individual’s death-deserving deficiency and worthlessness. There is a pattern. People represented this way have common experiences, and representers-in-common.
Everywhere, people who have been represented as ‘different’ (and therefore deficient) are seizing back their own making, and making their own meaning. They are noticing that the despair they have felt, and the harm they have been told to expect on the basis of their negatively represented attribute (skin colour, for example), is a function of the skin colour of the representer (and of what the representer imagines his own skin colour means), not of the represented person’s skin. This difference matters because it saves people from despair, and noticing how it is made, and talking and writing about it rearranges the usual power arrangements. This difference matters.
Similar differences made in similar ways matter as well. The story that has represented itself as ‘the (only) one’ for several centuries, about who is a proprietor and who is property, who can kill, and who can be killed, who is worthy, and who is less worthy, is being confronted with a million other stories. It’s happening everywhere, even in law schools, which have been very careful to keep entrants as similar (not ‘different’) as possible. Gay legal scholars are comparing notes with black film theorists. Unaligned anthropologists are comparing notes with non-phallic tax lawyers. Legless legal historians are comparing notes with penniless critical psychoanalysts and disarming international lawyers. Stand-under social workers are comparing notes with underbearing police officers, who in turn talk with male feminists and Aborigines. Hale queers are talking to whale peers who are comparing notes with episto-seers. Teachers are relaying the conversations to students. Students are enlightening teachers.
Everywhere, the possibility increasingly exists that ‘others’ will share information, compare experiences, and discover and change how their worth and safety is produced and managed. Everywhere, the makers of the negative meanings which have put others in danger are having their bodies brought into the analysis. Everywhere, the person who represents others, however ‘lovingly’, is coming to know that s/he cannot hide his or her face, body or skin. Everywhere, the contingency of the meanings made in representation is being discussed. Everywhere the representers are being asked for the basis of their authority. The stake-holders are everywhere, and they are every body. This news makes those who have managed sameness very nervy. What are we coming to? Who is running this show? Where will it all end? Maybe ‘the’ (‘real’) world really is coming to an end. (It is.)
These possibilities are very unnerving for conservatives in a law school, for whom representation used to mean having a lawyer, and for whom teaching law used to mean teaching respect for hierarchy, and teaching a kind of pity for those ‘at the bottom’. What will happen if these many small acts of counter-representation multiply and spread? What if the analytical skills for deconstructing representation are taught on a wide scale? Will the old order be possible? No, it already isn’t. Will its love for ‘others’ be respectfully received? No, those days are gone.
All representations display power relationships, and all invite the viewer to take a position commensurate with the power arrangements made by the particular reading.[15] For more than a decade now, students in law and legal studies at La Trobe have seen how representations made in the Enlightenment tradition say everything about the representer’s fantasy about himself and his wished-for relation with his object of representation.[16] Now, students who take courses which study the act of representation and its consequences cannot avoid knowing that in the performance of the act of representation (in speech, in essay writing, in pronouncing a judgment, in writing a file note, in bodily performance) particular possibilities for selfhood are being made. All of this rich and diverse scholarship on the relationship between representation, power and fantasy, underscores the idea that knowledge is never neutral, never divorced from the person who produces it, nor from the broader structures which the representer produces or contests as they produce her/him.
Above all, this scholarship challenges the idea of ‘mere’ representation. The issues that follow for students of law and legal studies are not easy ones to resolve. The questions facing a student who had expected to (merely) ‘represent’ so-called clients (whether as a lawyer, or as a human sciences professional) are perhaps particularly challenging.
Above all, the lesson is that representation is never ‘mere’. All representation is a ‘reading’ by a person, of the thing, or of a person. Representing a thing or person always involves the imposition of an arbitrarily chosen ‘frame’, which deletes, substitutes or arbitrarily narrows the context in which the ‘object’ of representation is placed by and in the representer’s imagination. All representation invites identification with the reading given by the representer. A postcard representing a bikini-clad girl sent to a male mate by a male schoolie, a self-portrait commissioned by landowners in the 18th century, landscapes, still lives, portraits of servants, horses, nudes, scientific representations of different species, the murderer’s view of the woman he is about to kill, as it is offered to a movie audience or a courtroom, a mark given by a teacher for a law exam, or essay: all these representations display power relationships, and all invite the viewer to take a position commensurate with the power arrangements made by the particular reading.
Law and legal studies students can now know that judges’ fantasies about power and desire are as transparent in their judgments as are the fantasies of painters, novelists, film makers and photographers, in their work. Some students choose not to know. Many students choose to know. In choosing to learn to look for and document suppressed stories and other representations of different desires and different powers, other representations of humanness, they call a halt to the everyday billions of soul murders perpetrated by the ‘one story, one reality’ fantasists. They learn to listen to what’s unbearable for some people who continue to survive the unbearable. They become stronger and more responsible for intervening in and documenting the danger-making fantasies that make others’ lives unsafe. They make others’ lives safer. They apply ethical principles to their research, learning, professionalisation and relationships. It’s the smallest thing one could expect of oneself, they say.
Those many students who choose to know also struggle with the consequences of their choice; these consequences include having their intellectual skills and critical inquiries and findings labelled ‘insubstantial, emotional, biased, unreliable … irrelevant to the real world’ (does this sound familiar?). They are labelled ‘politically correct’, and their values labelled ‘nihilistic’ or ‘infinitely relativistic’. Other consequences include losing friends or partners who don’t want their sexist or racist practices noticed, particularly if ‘everyone’ thinks they’re OK, and alienating family members, who often can’t understand why the student seems to want to do ‘Mickey Mouse’ study ‘leading nowhere’, instead of being a real ‘winner’ (a lawyer, practising a ‘real’ profession). Anyway, where’s the money in it? Still, in spite of all this, many students want to think.
The students who choose to document the narrowness of the range of fantasies about real humanness and desire produced by mainstream lawyers and judges, criminologists and human scientists are putting equal opportunity principles into practice. Showing how some lives are truncated, and some desires are punished, they have become adept at asking the questions that reveal the art and artifice involved in practising modern representation in any field and especially in law. They face their own makings, knowing that there is no innocence to be claimed, or had. They understand how the common representations move promiscuously between very diverse ‘places’: the language of judgments, novels, and the scripts of movies, for example. The sorts of questions they ask of any site of representation, be it a judgment, an advertisement, a painting, a movie, a psychiatric report, newspaper coverage of a trial, or an academic article, for example, are these:
• What is the site of the representation?
• What story is being told there?
• What is the evidence, and the source of the evidence, for the story?
• What other stories could have been told there, but have been suppressed?
• What other evidence could have been used, from what source/s?
• What is the effect of privileging the first story over the suppressed stories?
• How is desire deployed?
Treating the government files covering the life of Malcolm Smith, a young Aboriginal man who died in custody, as a site of representation, the answers are as follows:
• The site/s are the documents making up the files.
• The story told there is that the child, Malcolm, was uncontrollable and neglected, and should be sent away to a home for delinquents.
• There was no evidence of this. Malcolm had stolen a bicycle.
• The source of the story was the fantasy of the report writer (a still-common fantasy about young Aboriginal people).
• The suppressed stories were that Malcolm Smith’s family was very close, and that he was well loved and cared for.
• The sources of these stories are his relatives (father and brothers and sisters: Malcolm’s mother had died), community members, and a series of photographs of the family taken over the years. None of this evidence was fantasy.
• The effects of privileging the first story over the suppressed stories are that Malcolm Smith spent all but 17 months of his life between 11 and 27 in prison or institutions, and that he died of despair.
Another effect on his family and the Aboriginal people who had known him: fear that more children would be taken, longing for him, self-blame, soul murder.[17]
In the trial of Peter Keogh for the murder of Vicki Cleary the site is the judgment. The story told there is that Vicki provoked her killer by leaving him and taking a car. The evidence came from her killer, and was based on his (commonly reproduced) fantasy of entitlement to her company and to what had been their car (this is not a fantasy available to women who kill). The suppressed stories were that Keogh had been violent in other relationships, that Vicki had worked hard to make the relationship work, that Keogh had waited for her, armed with a knife, outside the kindergarten where she worked. The evidence of previous violence was based on the experience of people who had known Peter Keogh. It was not fantasy. The effect of privileging the first story over the suppressed stories is that Keogh’s charge was reduced to manslaughter, and that women were (are) sent the message that their desires for independence are not legitimate as the desire of a man to retain his reluctant partner. Murder. And soul murder.[18]
Another example: the fantasies of the Security Council about non-‘Western’ people.[19] Real murder and soul murder.
As thousands of legal studies students rise to the difficult challenges raised by their status as subjects and objects in the production of the meaning of the world, is the conservative teacher in a law school, or the administrator wishing for more ‘core’ law showing any similar signs of being capable of the same tremendous struggle in the face of radical uncertainty?
In mainstream legal studies, until recently, what has counted as an alternative perspective has been pretend- Marxist. Liberal academics, masquerading as lefties, have perpetrated the decidedly un-Marxist view that the people who have somehow missed out on law’s protection, are really wannabe liberals, whose shortcomings (if stoicly borne) call for pity, repair, supplementation, cheap lawyers or more law. More particularly, mainstream criminology’s endlessly reiterated fantasy has been of the normal criminal who (like every ‘one’) needs to be a winner to feel good about himself. This fantastic model of man (sic!) as ‘naturally’ desiring to acquire, master, care for, and oversee the universe and the natives (women, children and lesser men who don’t know their betters when they see them, in pathetic imitation, one is invited to suppose, of earlier colonial would-be masters) and as driven to self-assertion if he can’t, has been monotonously paraded as real in areas of legal study ranging from masculinist criminology to international law.[20] But this old fantasy of ‘real’ desire and ‘real’ humanness is getting harder and harder to sell.
By contrast, those students paying respect to the myriad ways of being human made obvious through cultural studies listen to and converse with those people new to universities: the women and men who know in their very flesh the underside of the fantastic will to mastery and oversight. This is what’s new, this vastly inclusive conversation with vast multitudes of strangers.[21] These endlessly ‘new’ people bring other fantasies of different relationships to the conversations in universities. Now, (again, always, already) the (in-the-dream) masters of the universe and their mistresses are feeling alien, alone, and lost in space. Oh, to feel at home! Perhaps that is why they fantasise about the possibility of ‘pure’ law, and point deferentially to others, who, they say, set ‘the’ agenda. ‘It’s out of my hands’, they say.
Or, perhaps, the referentiality of the ‘core law’ texts creates a hall of mirrors, an endless feeling of being in good, uncritical company. You don’t have to watch what you say, because, after all you are talking to … the self you have most often been invited to know. But is it really your self?
Well, the old home days must go. Listening to others who don’t resemble you, and watching yourself to make sure you take nothing for granted, and refusing to project your fantasies on to others, are matters of life and death. You can’t pretend you didn’t know because now everybody knows it, or has chosen not to know. That’s what’s new. And what will you be able to say you were doing when the small murders were happening?
References
[*] Andrea Rhodes-Little teaches in the School of Law and Legal Studies, La Trobe University.email: A.Rhodes-Little@latrobe.edu.au
[1] The ideas in this article owe a great deal to my unpaid teachers, the students in law and legal studies at La Trobe University. I wish particularly to thank Charander Singh and Luan Danaan, whose generously shared expert knowledges continue to push my thinking much further in directions it might otherwise not go. To critical colleagues, Helen Brown, Brendan Cassidy, Sandy Cook, Sue Davies, Ian Duncanson, Judith Grbich, Adrian Howe, Kate Lappin, Rob McQueen and Margaret Thornton, I owe thanks, for their intelligence and willingness to promote equality in every aspect of their professional practice, for the example of their intellectual and personal risk-taking and for their lessons about the costs of not taking these risks. I am (again) indebted to Judith Grbich, Ian Duncanson and Anne Orford for their insightful comments and their encouragement; I hasten to emphasise that I have taken a tack of my own here.
[2] < <http://husky.arts.unimelb.edu.au./iaasqq/Gary%20Foley/> >
[3] I borrow the idea from Maurice Schatzman and from Patricia Williams: Williams, P.J., The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Harvard University Press, 1991.
[4] Crime and Criminology has been team taught by a number of critical teachers over the last eight or so years. This course, once a full unit, has recently been cut, without consultation with the lecturers, to a half unit. The course has arguably provided the grounding for the outstanding feminist poststructuralist research done by the majority of the School’s high achieving and Honours and postgraduate students over this time.
[5] I am talking about the radical difference between the representations students get from mainstream human science workers, criminal justice personnel, or academics writing from a liberal perspective, and representations made by people who are at liberty to control the content and form of the representations of their own experience of the criminal justice system. Performances by ex-prisoners from Somebody’s Daughter theatre company, and writing by Aboriginal activists and scholars are examples of the latter.
[6] Duncanson, I., ‘Review Essay: Sexual Harassment and the Politics of Culture: Incident(ally) at Ormond College’, (1998) 10 Australian Feminist Law Journal, pp.149–60; Scott, J., ‘The Campaign Against Political Correctness: What’s Really at Stake’, in Williams, J. (ed.), PC Wars: Politics and Theory in the Academy, Routledge, 1995, pp.22–43.
[7] See, for example, Muller-Hill, B., Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies and Others, Germany, 1933–1945, Oxford University Press, 1988.
[8] Berger, J., Ways of Seeing, BBC and Penguin, 1979; Theweleit, K., Male Fantasies Vol I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (trans. Stephen Conway with Erica Carter and Chris Turner), University of Minnesota Press, 1987; Theweleit, K., Male Fantasies Vol II: Male Bodies, Psychoanalysis and the White Terror, (trans. Chris Turner and Erica Carter), Polity, 1989.
[9] Said, E., Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, 1994.
[10] hooks, bell, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, Henry Holt, 1995.
[11] A path-breaking work is Said, E., Orientalism, Vintage, 1979; the literature is now vast. See the Australian Feminist Law Journal for cultural studies perspectives on law.
[12] A good introduction to the representation of Aboriginal people in Australia is Langton, M., ‘Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television …’, Australian Film Commission, 1993.
[13] Foucault, M., The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Tavistock, 1986.
[14] Rhodes-Little, A., ‘Confidentiality (con fides: to keep faith) Keeping Faith? With Whom? A Poststructural Analysis of the Issue of Confidentiality for Violent Men’, Just Policy (forthcoming); Donzelot, J., The Policing of Families, Hutchinson, 1979.
[15] hooks, bell, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation, Routledge, 1994; Young, A., ‘In the Eyes of the Law: The Look of Violence’, (1997) 8 Australian Feminist Law Journal 9–26; Berger, J., About Looking, Writers and Readers, 1980; Berger, J., Ways of Seeing, BBC and Penguin, 1979; Kappeler, S., The Pornography of Representation, Polity Press, 1986; de Lauretis, T., ‘The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and Gender’, in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (eds), The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, Routledge, 1989, pp. 239–59.
[16] Early, path-breaking courses have been Judith Grbich’s Gender, Law and Society, Adrian Howe’s Sex, Violence and Criminality, Ian Duncanson’s Legal History, Anne Orford’s Public International Law, Greta Bird’s Aborigines and the Law, Chris Tomlins’ Critical Legal Studies, Kelvin Jones’ Law and Economics and Gary Coventry’s Deviance and the Law.
[17] Who Killed Malcolm Smith? Videorecording, Linfield, NSW, Film Australia; Report of the Inquiry into the Death of Malcolm Smith by Commissioner J.H. Wootton, 1989. Canberra, Australian Government Publishing Service.
[18] Cleary, P., Cleary Independent, HarperCollins, 1998.
[19] Orford, A., ‘The Politics of Collective Security’, (1996) 17 Michigan Journal of International Law, 373.
[20] Rhodes-Little, A., Sovereign/Body: Towards a Theory of Deviant Writing as a Domain of Constraint on Civil Subjects, Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, 1996; Orford, A., ‘The Uses of Sovereignty in the New Imperial Order’, (1996) 6 Australian Feminist Law Journal 63–86.
[21] Duncanson, I., ‘The Ends of Legal Studies’, < <http://spades3.ncl.ac.uk> >
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