Transgressing the Law

Abstract

Of all the discourses that may imbricate with the problematic of disability, the law is the most authoritative, seemingly offering not a speculative model like psychoanalysis that delves into psychic anxiety to explain governing norms, but an exhaustive and literal programmatic statement of the licit and illicit as it relates to bodies and behaviours. That is not to say, however, that the apparent externality of legal dicta is any more immune to the grasp of the socio-cultural imaginary than any other discourse. In this chapter, I shall both step back from the preceding close exploration of disability and sexuality to take up again the question of embodied subjectivity, and situate law firmly within an institutional nexus, which like the individual psyche, is fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. When legal theorist Peter Goodrich marks the necessity of listening to the suppressed, I hear an appeal to the significance of disavowed anomalous bodies. As I have suggested, the issue concerns not so much a conscious silencing of what may be troubling, as a form of repression that underlies any claim to rationality, impartiality, and consistency — precisely those attributes on which the authority of jurisprudence is founded. In incorporating its own imaginary, the law is fully imbricated with all the uncertainties, doubts, and anxieties that mobilise normative thinking in general and that create an unavoidable tension at the heart of what purports to be institutional neutrality.

After Freud, the task of Critical Legal Studies could well be that of listening to the suppressed…. Therein lies the possibility of justice

(Peter Goodrich 1992: 210)