This article investigates the critical potential of a contemporary dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale (Miller 2017-), a U.S. television series adapted from a popular novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood (1985). The text is widely understood as a feminist intervention that speaks to ongoing struggles against gender oppression, but in this article I consider the invitations that the show offers its viewers in treating race the way that it does, and consider what it means to refuse these invitations in pursuit of (...) a critical feminist understanding of authority, legal subjectivity, and violence. Drawing on the recent turn to genre, my reading focuses on how whiteness is reproduced through this cinematic text and its inculcation of particular ways of seeing, modes of identification and attachment. The Handmaid’s Tale’s post-racial aesthetic means that its thematic engagement with gender, sexuality and resistance actively disavows national and international histories of racist state violence and white supremacy. Its problematic feminism is thus uniquely instructive for understanding how whiteness is reproduced in contemporary (neo)liberal configurations of legal subjectivity and state authority. (shrink)

Critical legal scholarship has recently turned to consider the form, mode and role of law in neoliberal governance. A central theme guiding much of this literature is the importance of understanding neoliberalism as not only a political or economic phenomenon, but also an inherently juridical one. This article builds on these conceptualisations of neoliberalism in turning to explore the wider historical, cultural and sociological contexts which inform the production of neoliberal authority. The papers in this collection were first presented at (...) the symposium ‘Forms of authority beyond the neoliberal state’, held at the Griffith Law School in December 2017. They consider the role of the corporation, the site of the university, the politics of debt, the genre of prestige television, and the archic sources of state violence, in order to imagine forms of authority which lie beyond neoliberalism as an ideology and a set of practices, and the ensemble of institutions which constitute the neoliberal state. The contributions draw on social theory, philosophy, cultural studies, legal geography and political theology in exploring new possibilities for cultivating judgement through and beyond the sovereign, political and aesthetic terrains of neoliberal governance. (shrink)

This paper explores spectatorial encounters with criminal trials. Particularly focusing on the 2018 work of Australian contemporary visual artist Julie Fragar that followed her watching murder trials in the Supreme Court of Queensland, it is argued that the artist as a legal outsider grapples with the inhumanity of the trial. This grappling can go in two directions. For some there is a need to bring the human back, to see the person beneath the mask of the role that they are (...) performing, to connect the gothic horror of the trial back to a redeeming humanism. For others, and this is evident in Fragar, the horror of the inhumanity is visceral and overpowering, and the grotesque masque of judgment needs to be witnessed. Both perform a corrective and critique to the business as usual of processing, judging and stamping onto human lives that is legal insider’s performance in the criminal trial. (shrink)