We’re All Infected: Legal Personhood, Bare Life and The Walking Dead

This article argues that greater theoretical attention should be paid to the figure of the zombie in the fields of law, cultural studies and philosophy. Using The Walking Dead as a point of critical departure concepts of legal personhood are interrogated in relation to permanent vegetative states, bare life and the notion of the third person. Ultimately, the paper recommends a rejection of personhood; instead favouring a legal and philosophical engagement with humanity and embodiment. Personhood, it is suggested, creates a barrier in law allowing individuals in certain contexts (and in certain embodied states) to be rendered non-persons and thus outside the scope of legal rights. An approach that rejects personhood in favour of embodiment would allow individuals to enjoy their rights without being subject to such discrimination. It is also suggested that the concept of the human, itself complicated by the figure of the zombie, allows for legal engagement with a greater number of putative rights claimants including admixed embryos, cyborgs and the zombie

Introduction to EJES special journal issue on ‘Feminist Interventions in Intermedial Studies'

Abstract The feminist project has radicalised text/image relationships in myriad ways, disrupting the contours of discipline and medium. The multifaceted recyclings of a transdisciplinary methodology remind us that although in the past decades text/image studies has become an established academic research field in the first decades of the twenty-first century, its subversive potential to challenge cultural hegemonies has not diminished. On the contrary, intermedial fusions remain loaded with political and ethical issues that are in search of sites of resistance for marginalised, othered social subjects and meanings. The introduction explains how this special journal issue emerges from and is addressed to the politically significant network of feminist researchers -- artists, theoreticians, activists -- we believe we share ties with on account of putting the study of intermediality in the service of 'constructing a radically new understanding of our world in all its horror and hope' (Pollock, 1988: 22)

Diffractive Pedagogies- dancing across new materialist imaginaries

This paper outlines the affirmative potential of diffractive pedagogies, presenting learning through dance as its central empirical focus. Drawing on data from the university classroom and new materialist scholarship, we consider the problem of learning through the body for university students. We argue that embodied creative processes within pedagogical contexts can liberate those who learn from reproducing, or being reproduced, as the finite set of reductive yet historically determined and governed images, figures or metaphors assigned to them. Building on a feminist investment in the agency of materiality we think through the problem of the body as a site of learning in the university. Learning in higher education is popularly thought as pertaining to the transfer of abstract knowledge, and this process typically occurs in ways that largely ignore the physicality of learning. A pedagogical system which presents repeated structures and patterns of discourse as more valued vehicles for learning than experimentation and creation recognises only preconceived, representational models of thought and expression. This philosophical imaginary therefore requires reconfiguring, to allow for embodied and creative learning processes that are open-ended, nomadic and affirmative

Making Different Differences: Representation and Rights in Sexuality Activism

This paper argues that current iterations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) rights are limited by an overreliance on particular representations of sexuality, in which homosexuality is defined negatively through a binary of homosexual/heterosexual. The limits of these representations are explored in order to unpick the possibility of engaging in a form of sexuality politics that is grounded in difference rather than in sameness or opposition. The paper seeks to respond to Braidotti’s call for an “affirmative politics” that is open to forms of creative, future-oriented action and that might serve to answer some of the more common criticisms of current LGBTI rights activism

Bionic bodies, posthuman violence and the disembodied criminal subject

This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form through the law of homicide and assault. By analysing how the body is materialised through the criminal law’s enactment of death and injury, this article suggests that the biological positioning of these harms of violence as uncontroversial, natural, and universal conditions of being ‘human’ cannot fully appreciate what makes violence wrongful for us, as embodied entities. Absent a theory of the body, and a consideration of corporeality, the criminal law risks marginalising, or altogether eliding, experiences of violence that do not align with its paradigmatic vision of what bodies can and must do when suffering its effects. Here I consider how the bionic body disrupts the criminal law’s understanding of human violence by being a body that is both organic and inorganic, and capable of experiencing and performing violence in unexpected ways. I propose that a criminal law that is more receptive to the changing, technologically mediated conditions of human existence would be one that takes the corporeal dimensions of violence more seriously and, as an extension of this, adopts an embodied, embedded, and relational understanding of human vulnerability to violence