Mediation in the Law Curriculum

Cited by Lord Neuberger in ‘Educating Future Mediators’ at the 4th Civil Mediation Council National Conference, May 201

Polyamory: Intimate practice, identity or sexual orientation?

Polyamory means different things to different people. While some consider polyamory to be nothing more than a convenient label for their current relationship constellations or a handy tool for communicating their willingness to enter more than one relationship at a time, others claim it as one of their core identities. Essentialist identity narratives have sustained recent arguments that polyamory is best understood as a sexual orientation and is as such comparable with homosexuality, heterosexuality or bisexuality. Such a move would render polyamory intelligible within dominant political and legal frameworks of sexual diversity. The article surveys academic and activist discussions on sexual orientation and traces contradictory voices in current debates on polyamory. The author draws on poststructuralist ideas to show the shortcomings of sexual orientation discourses and highlights the losses which are likely to follow from pragmatic definitions of polyamory as sexual orientation

Ethnicity and sexuality

This paper explores the connections between ethnicity and sexuality. Racial, ethnic, and national boundaries are also sexual boundaries. The borderlands dividing racial, ethnic, and national identities and communities constitute ethnosexual frontiers, erotic intersections that are heavily patrolled, policed, and protected, yet regularly are penetrated by individuals forging sexual links with ethnic "others." Normative heterosexuality is a central component of racial, ethnic, and nationalist ideologies; both adherence to and deviation from approved sexual identities and behaviors define and reinforce racial, ethnic, and nationalist regimes. To illustrate the ethnicity/sexuality nexus and to show the utility of revealing this intimate bond for understanding ethnic relations, I review constructionist models of ethnicity and sexuality in the social sciences and humanities, and I discuss ethnosexual boundary processes in several historical and contemporary settings: the sexual policing of nationalism, sexual aspects of US-American Indian relations, and the sexualization of the black-white color line

Transgression and (Sexual) Citizenship: The Political Struggle for Self-determination within BDSM Communities

There has been – and continues to be – a tension within the political strategies of sexual minority communities claiming citizenship. Whilst attempting to forge a political self-determination based on being (dissident) sexual subjects, members of sexually diverse communities have frequently engaged in political practices that normalize their diversity to accord with wider socio-cultural conventions. In this article, we address this issue in relation to the political strategies of one of the most marginalised sexual identities/practices: BDSM. By drawing on the work of Foucault, Rose, Rabinow, and Bahktin, we advance a case for how it may be possible for dissident sexual communities to resist the normalizing effects of citizenship whilst still making claims for legal recognition and wider social acknowledgment. Key to the argument is the theorisation of a position wherein carnival transgression operates within a dialectical integration of ideology and utopia as a mode of citizenship

Surveying deviance, figuring disgust: locating the homocriminal body in time and space

This article is grounded in a critical appraisal of seminal archival documents pertain-ing to criminology’s knowledge of homosexual offences (and offensive behaviour) in Australia – the ‘Male Sex Offences in Public Places ’ Proceedings of the Institute of Criminology (1970). It explores the role the legal gaze and the juridico-cultural imagination play in producing discourse that constructs gay male desirous bodies as flowing through the space of the city, posing the twin threats of corruption and engulfment to other, non-homosexual male bodies. My concern is to explore the theme of mapping (as a product of legal anxiety) and to elucidate how legal vision functions as a stigmatizing gaze that repudiates gay desire as a polluting flow requir-ing vigilance and continual regulation. To that end the article employs cartographic practices of analysis to explore how legal doctrine is mapped onto space. Addition-ally, it is argued that the Proceedings borrow tropes of monstrosity to chart the movement of homosexual bodies through the space of the city as imperilling other men at large. KEY WORDS Australia; criminology; discourse; homosexuality; law; monstrosity; regulation; space Desire streams forth through the channels of imagination. (Theweleit, 1987: xvii) Homosexuality, before having a (very hypothetical) nature, has a history, and, of course, a geography. (Camus, 1981: xii