Fucking Law (A New Methodological Movement)

This paper sets the groundwork for a new methodological movement. I claim that methodological strategies must take as their object the laws with found sexual identity, or rather should be ‘fucking with’ law by creatively confronting, occupying and agitating limiting ethical frameworks that control access to the field. The movement is ethnographic, since it finds research ethics and ‘straight’ academic space’ to be where these rules are the most harmful in limiting access to the field, for female researchers in particular. The approach (but also to some extent the target) is Deleuzian and post-Deleuzian philosophy whose theoretical leaps have sought to shift and cause slippage in laws of sexual identity. However, when these laws are tested by researchers proposing to access the field, specifically ethnographically and autoethnographically, it is clear they have not ‘slipped’ at all. This is clear through the questions raised by ethics committees. Fucking law therefore becomes a methodological movement intimately connecting ethical agendas and sex as an encounter in the field. I claim the methodological movement of ‘fucking’ law captures, or at least attempts to capture, the slipperiness of the body, the encounter, the research project and sex itself. The movement that is ‘fucking law’ is essential in agitating and occupying not only philosophy, but limiting institutional research agendas and their ethical frameworks. The implications of ‘Fucking Law’ will be necessarily unpredictable, but the main practical and connected social implication is a questioning as to why more women are not practically questioning arguably one of the biggest questions: the ethics of sexuality. Fucking law argues for the questioning of these laws with bodies, and experimenting with philosophies which underpin and create institutional ethical rules

Under the fucking skin: a whore and her hotel room door

Isserley, the heroine of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin tells a truly intimate story of her body: interspecies flesh, blood, cumbersome breasts, inconvenient sexual drives, stray hairs, skin, disappointment, vulnerability and humour. She tells a story of her sometimes terrifying and perfunctory capture of men, while revealing the failure of her skin to cover the truth of her body. This is an achievement that accounts of sexuality and of the city rarely manage. The figure of the ‘whore’, ‘the mistress’, the sexually ‘promiscuous’ woman is often painted as a cold, non-maternal, sexually free and capable woman, who is adept at containing her ‘affects’, otherwise known as her emotions and vulnerabilities, under her skin, thereby presenting an easily consumable and pristinely fuckable surface. The city is a space that could easily be thought of as her ‘playground’, especially hotels, where their commercial, cold and solid surface are built to conceal the painful and joyous nature of her fucking. Urban hotels are one part of the ‘tiles of the visible’, which are complicit in the production of the surface effect of sexuality, and the painful rationalisation of fucking, yet simultaneously embodying a mine of historical fucking artefacts in the form of women’s experiences. This piece tells a free-flowing story of one self-confessed whore and mistress, her encounter with hotels, and her failure in two respects: to contain her body beneath her skin, and at complicity with the city’s deception

Interrupting the courtroom organism: screaming bodies, material affects and the theatre of cruelty

This article offers a method of reading the courtroom which produces an alternative mapping of the space. My method combines a reading of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty with a Deleuzian theoretical analysis. I suggest that this is a useful method since it allows examination of the spatial praxes of the courtroom which pulsate with a power to organize, terrorize and to judge. This method is also able to conceptualize the presence of ‘‘screaming’’ bodies and living matter which are appropriated to build, as well as feed the presence and functioning of the courtroom space, or organism. By using a method that articulates the cry of these bodies in the shadow of the organism, it becomes clear that this cry is both unwelcome and suppressed by the courtroom. The howl of anxious bodies enduring the process and space of the law can be materialized through interruptions to the courtroom, such as when bodies stand when they should not and when they speak when they should be silent. These vociferous actualizations of the scream serve only to feed the organism they seek to disturb, yet if the scream is listened to before it disrupts, the interruption becomes-imperceptible to the courtroom. Through my Artaudian/Deleuzian reading, I give a voice to the corporeal gasp that lingers before the cry, which is embedded within the embodied multiplicity from which it is possible to draw a creative line of flight. The creative momentum of this line of flight produces a sustainable interruption to the courtroom process, which instead of being consumed by the system, has the potential to produce new courtroom alignments. My text therefore offers an alternative reading of the courtroom, and in doing so also offers a refined understanding of how to productively ‘‘interrupt’’ the courtroom process

Ethical awareness and socio-legal research in the UK

Before carrying out work in the socio-legal field, it is necessary to consider the ethical implications of the work and to go through the required ethical approval processes. Often, depending on the project, this will be straightforward, as the work will not give rise to significant ethical dilemmas. Sometimes though, in projects that will involve human subjects and sensitive issues such as mental health and sexuality, investigated either through quantitative or qualitative methods, further ethical enquiry will be necessary. This further enquiry will usually entail consideration of the project by a research ethics committee, who will be checking the application to ensure that there is no danger to the researcher or to the institution. The kind of risk considered is usually physical, financial, legal, and/or reputational. This chapter considers the likely ethical questions that will be asked of socio-legal work and how to navigate the process of dealing with these questions. I also look at an example of how a ‘risky’ participatory sexuality project can produce particular challenges to ethical regimes. These challenges are both to the underlying prejudices in the decision-making processes of ethics committees and to academia as a conventional and ‘straight’ space. I consider how we, as socio-legal scholars, might navigate these prejudices, the types of prejudice that might be encountered, the potential effects on research, and the necessity of confronting and challenging these prejudices through ethical awareness in socio-legal research

Greer's 'bad sex' and the future of consent

Germaine Greer’s polemic, ‘On Rape’, has proved controversial and has served to further divide feminist opinion on the way to move forward from #MeToo in consent reform. Greer’s work, along with other second wave feminists has been rejected by third wave feminist scholarship for simultaneously minimising the harm caused to victims of sexual violence, and claiming that rape is not ‘catastrophic’, with Naomi Wolf being Greer’s most vocal and powerful opponent. Yet, I claim that in maintaining this position in opposition to Greer we are missing the real transformative power of Greer’s revival of second-wave arguments in relation to reforming our laws on consent post #MeToo. The consent framework and the definition of consent under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 has been readily criticised for its vague definition of ‘freedom’ and ‘capacity’ in that such a definition misses the subtler, yet powerful, ways in which victims are coerced and abused – those which are most insidious, since they are embedded within the fabric of our society, and within the ‘tissue’ of heterosex. Greer’s position that rape is ‘bad sex’, may well hold some truth – since bad sex for women, has long been accepted as part of life albeit reduced to sufferance and duty. Inevitably, this leads us to the conclusion that there are many more instances of rape than we thought, and many more women suffering, than we thought. This article examines this position and argues for urgent research on women’s sexuality, and radical intervention in the law and academia, in the quest for consent law reform

A Recipe for Shocking the Urban Body

This is not a recipe for heterosex, nor making love, nor a recipe for heteronorms to be consumed at a table set for two with neatly folded napkins. This is a recipe that does not include a vintage Beaujolais nor a pricey Champagne; there will be no smoked salmon (unless it is smoked too much) and no steak, unless it is of an animal you have not yet heard of. There will be no butternut squash, nor precisely laid out vegetables upon your plate. In fact, there may be no plate. It is unlikely that there will be courses of any kind, and items will be needed you consider disgusting (but they might grow on you) or that may be in short supply. Traversing offal, extraordinary almost rotten-tasting cloudy natural wines, bodily fluids, urban grime, streets, tube stations, smells, sounds, movements and urban bodies of all kinds. This is a recipe like no other, which tries to capture how the consumption of food and wine is the consumption of far more than what appears before us on the table, and far more than what takes place in our mouths. This recipe is a list, a journey, and a memory and record of the confluence of unexpected ingredients that can join human and nonhuman bodies in an unforgettable orgy of urban de-categorisation: the best fucking you ever tasted

Selective flow-induced vesicle rupture to sort by membrane mechanical properties

International audienceVesicle and cell rupture caused by large viscous stresses in ultrasonication is central to biomedical and bioprocessing applications. The flow-induced opening of lipid membranes can be exploited to deliver drugs into cells, or to recover products from cells, provided that it can be obtained in a controlled fashion. Here we demonstrate that differences in lipid membrane and vesicle properties can enable selective flow-induced vesicle break-up. We obtained vesicle populations with different membrane properties by using different lipids (SOPC, DOPC, or POPC) and lipid:cholesterol mixtures (SOPC:chol and DOPC:chol). We subjected vesicles to large deformations in the acoustic microstreaming flow generated by ultrasound-driven microbubbles. By simultaneously deforming vesicles with different properties in the same flow, we determined the conditions in which rupture is selective with respect to the membrane stretching elasticity. We also investigated the effect of vesicle radius and excess area on the threshold for rupture, and identified conditions for robust selectivity based solely on the mechanical properties of the membrane. Our work should enable new sorting mechanisms based on the difference in membrane composition and mechanical properties between different vesicles, capsules, or cells

The rocks from space initiative and the space safari

This paper reports the successes of a new initiative in the UK using electronic resources, such as virtual learning environments and e-classrooms, for planetary and space science public engagement activities

The Role of Self-Compassion as a Moderator in the Relationship Between Burnout and Psychological Wellbeing in Staff Working with People with Learning Disabilities

Objective. Research demonstrates that self-compassion is linked to burnout and other psychological wellbeing outcome measures such as quality of life, stress, depression, and wellbeing. It is known that care occupations, and specifically those who work with individuals with learning disabilities, suffer with burnout and other psychological symptoms such as anxiety and depression. Several studies have examined these relationships in care staff. However, they have not been examined in a UK healthcare context, nor in a sample of learning disabilities staff for whom burnout is prevalent and relevant. With self-compassion as a moderator, this study investigated burnout’s relationship to depression and psychological wellbeing respectively, in a UK learning disabilities staff sample. Methods. 120 adult staff members (97 females and 23 males) aged between 18 and 64 years who work with adults with learning disabilities participated in the study. Participants completed an anonymised online questionnaire comprising the Self-Compassion Scale; the Maslow Burnout Inventory; the Beck Depression Inventory; and the Ryff Scale of Psychological Wellbeing. Results. Self-compassion was at an average level for this sample and depression scores were low. Moderation analyses illustrated that self-compassion significantly moderated the relationship between burnout (personal accomplishment) and psychological wellbeing (positive relationships with others); and burnout (both emotional exhaustion and personal accomplishment) and depression

Dude Looks Like a Lady: Gender Deception, Consent and Ethics

Finding the answer to whether consent is present within a sexual encounter has become increasingly difficult for the courts. We argue that this is due to the focus placed on entrenching gender binaries, a conservative sexual ethic and clear offender/victim roles. It should be the case that the court’s task is to find the truth of the encounter in coming to a judgment as to the ethical balance, rather than judging the parties’ conformity to cisnormative and heteronormative roles. This endeavour is obscured by the court’s need to exclude ‘sex talk’, or otherwise testimony as to the messy reality of the encounter, in favour of asserting gender identity and a procreative understanding of sex. We are, therefore, left in the position where the required information necessary for valid consent is obscured by the courts. We draw on an analysis of cases involving issues relating to consent to sex in order to argue for a judicial approach that is informed by a more flexible understanding of sexual autonomy