Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Get Over Your (Legal) 'Self': A Brief History of Lesbians, Motherhood and the Law.
AU - Beresford, Sarah
PY - 2008/6
Y1 - 2008/6
N2 - Law and legal judgments tell a story. However, this article is not about the story of the litigants. It is, rather, an exploration of how legal judgments are an act of discourse and thus are about an identity creation of the legal ‘self’. Legal discourse continues to create categories of legal relevance that are used to arrive at essentialist identities which construct the body of the subject. This article argues that this continues to be the case, notwithstanding certain aspects of law reform, recent case law, and resistance to assimilative discourse (Butler 2004). In some small way, the aim of this article is ‘to disrupt what has become settled knowledge and knowable reality’ and to do something ‘other than a simple assimilation into prevailing norms’ (Butler 2004, pp. 27). It asks law to give an account of its ‘self’. I will do this within the context of family law, by examining some of ‘old’ case law from the early 1970s and comparing those judgments with more recent case law. I want to ask: what has changed in the intervening years?
AB - Law and legal judgments tell a story. However, this article is not about the story of the litigants. It is, rather, an exploration of how legal judgments are an act of discourse and thus are about an identity creation of the legal ‘self’. Legal discourse continues to create categories of legal relevance that are used to arrive at essentialist identities which construct the body of the subject. This article argues that this continues to be the case, notwithstanding certain aspects of law reform, recent case law, and resistance to assimilative discourse (Butler 2004). In some small way, the aim of this article is ‘to disrupt what has become settled knowledge and knowable reality’ and to do something ‘other than a simple assimilation into prevailing norms’ (Butler 2004, pp. 27). It asks law to give an account of its ‘self’. I will do this within the context of family law, by examining some of ‘old’ case law from the early 1970s and comparing those judgments with more recent case law. I want to ask: what has changed in the intervening years?
KW - discourse
KW - family
KW - identity
KW - lesbian
KW - gender
U2 - 10.1080/09649060802469785
DO - 10.1080/09649060802469785
M3 - Journal article
VL - 30
SP - 95
EP - 106
JO - Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law
JF - Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law
SN - 0964-9069
IS - 2
ER -