Papers by Juliet B Rogers
Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community, 2017
Current Sexual Health Reports, 2019
In 2019, the highest court in Australia is deliberating on the question of what constitutes mutil... more In 2019, the highest court in Australia is deliberating on the question of what constitutes mutilation. This paper examines the arguments in the first case prosecuted using Female Genital Mutilation law in Australia and considers how the arguments have drawn on ideas of function and desire of women’s genitals as well as of women themselves. The brief writings on this case and on FGM law in Australia are discussed, particularly the work of Kennedy, Sullivan, Seuffert and Iribanes, and Gans. The paper finds that the ideas of genital function in the deliberations and judgments of this case rely on a problematic idea of the natural function of a woman and a presumption of the harm of female genital mutilation irrespective of alternative research, and rely on a singular document published in Australia in 1994 that did not include any engagement or opinions of people from the communities who practice circumcision or genital cutting in Australia. The partial information relied on in Australian law about the practices of female genital cutting and the immediate presumption of harm in respect to any form of the practices means that future research and indeed legal opinion already presume that the practices are a mutilation.
Political Psychology, 2017
We thank Jeremy Arkes for helpful comments. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommenda... more We thank Jeremy Arkes for helpful comments. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Departments of the Navy or Defense, or the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 2016
Trauma demands a melancholic orientation to the past, a wish to recover what is lost. In conflict... more Trauma demands a melancholic orientation to the past, a wish to recover what is lost. In conflicts located in long histories of political difference, a focus on the traumas acquired through the violences of the past is crucial, but this focus may do more than inform the politics of the present. The risk is that the symptoms of the trauma become the symptoms of policy. The political environment that emerges lacks the maturity to understand the ordinary emotions of politics and this further limits the possibility of creative political horizons. In short, in the interests of placating trauma survivors and sometimes in the interests of ensuring no issue gets left behind, politics can be trumped by trauma. Here, we discuss how this has occurred in Northern Ireland and how the ‘trauma’ of non-indigenous Australians has trumped the possibility of addressing the ‘unfinished business of justice’ for Indigenous Australians.
Political Psychology, 2017
Psychoanalysis has long been used as a tool to analyze the symptomology of individuals and nation... more Psychoanalysis has long been used as a tool to analyze the symptomology of individuals and nation states. But can it universally be applied to all? This article argues that psychoanalysis was born in the wake of the French Revolution as the subject of rights came to understand that it could make choices, but that these choices would not always be the right ones. In Douzinas’ (2002) terms “every desire is a potential right” (p. 8), and this idea links desire to rights in a way that psychoanalytic theory and practice must contend. But it also offers the possibility that it is rights-bearing subjects who are specifically desiring in the manner that psychoanalysis proposes. In this article, I examine the symptoms of rights-bearing subjects as they have emerged in a particular politico-legal history. I argue that the symptoms of subjects must be understood in the context of their politico-legal history, including its formation, and I examine how the neglect of this account of history—particularly in the context of Australia—can miss the colonial violences that are inherent in law (as a symptom) but also in psychoanalysis as itself a symptom of a particular historical scene.
Journal of Human Rights Practice, 2016
Video archives often have a stated purpose of displaying ‘understanding’ for the viewer. Understa... more Video archives often have a stated purpose of displaying ‘understanding’ for the viewer. Understanding, when applied to perpetrators, often means displaying—in the words of one victim at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission— ‘what kind of man?’ they are to live in the post-conflict society. This question, I suggest in this article, haunts the testimonies of people described as ‘perpetrators’ who speak in video archives. This article examines video archives which document the testimonials of participants in military and political conflicts, with a specific focus on that of the Prisons Memory Archive from Northern Ireland, the Fortunoff Archives of Holocaust survivor testimonies, and their similarities and departures from archives such as Breaking the Silence from Israel/Palestine. Together with more ‘popular’ forms of archiving testimonies of perpetrators and victims, such as Facing the Truth, these archives document many of the incidents and the uncertainties of people involved in the Troubles and those in the Israel Defense Forces. They are not designed as confessionals and yet sometimes they have that quality. The article employs psychoanalytic trauma theories, and their emphasis on the confusions associated with accusation and with confession, to discuss the quality of the confessional in its role as a display of remorse. It then considers both the expectations of confession that arise from any testimonials from participants in conflict, as well as the effect of these expectations in shaping the archive. The article draws on interviews previously undertaken with ‘perpetrators’ subject to the demands of remorse in Northern Ireland, and considers how these demands shape the speech of perpetrators in some video archives.
We must see right away how crude it is to accept the idea that, in the ethical order itself, ever... more We must see right away how crude it is to accept the idea that, in the ethical order itself, everything can be reduced to social constraint as if the fashion in which that constraint develops doesn't in itself raise a question... (Lacan, 1992 [1960], 225) We must see right away that the desire to institute social constraint, and the fashion in which this is initiated and legitimated, raises a question as to the desire of the advocate of such constraint. In the text that is female genital mutilation, any call to the institution of law betrays itself as not so self evident in its altruism, but raises a question as to the desire of the anti-female genital mutilation (fgm) advocate. In this article I discuss the fantasising that accompanies anti-female genital mutilation advocacy and the passions that inspire the calls to law. I argue that the aggressive fantasising of female genital mutilation as a 'barbaric' and 'sadistic' practice, and the accompanying refusal to engage with the commentary of women who are circumcised and with the research which counters much anti-fgm rhetoric, betrays a horror of castration in the 'non-mutilated' subject. This horror is played out in discussions of the animation of the flesh of the 'mutilated woman' and in a liberal politico-legal terrain in which the sovereign comes to function as an Other who can restore the lost fresh to the horrified advocate. Advocating for anti-fgm law in this light becomes an alignment with the sovereign's law and the sovereign's language; in this form such 'social constraint' functions as the salve to castration.
The love of the law is flighty. Indeed, it represents itself as ‘without desire’. It is a love im... more The love of the law is flighty. Indeed, it represents itself as ‘without desire’. It is a love imagined emanating from a sovereign that does, and has, and may again, exercise its whimsical decision and render the subject, as Giorgio Agamben (1998) has described abandoned and as Jacques Lacan has offered: castrated. Consequently this love is experienced, on some level, as precarious. It is a love that can be withdrawn, or directed to an-other, at any time. What evokes the law’s desire is neither obvious nor apparent. It is hidden from the ordinary subject.
Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2014
Abstract When we imagine a body we imagine it whole, but, in fact, it is always in pieces. Pieces... more Abstract When we imagine a body we imagine it whole, but, in fact, it is always in pieces. Pieces that are imagined held together in the image of a person before the law, or pieces that break apart in the image of the person who is outside this law. The person who recognises themselves before liberal law, we contend in this paper, references the images of those who are to become before law: savages, barbarians, children, animals. These categories frame the images of the body in pieces, waiting in the wings of a liberal imagination of the subject, recruited for the purposes of holding forth a difference; one which suggests pending prohibition which will in turn result in pending pieces. Here, we analyse several images of mutilated children and veiled women, and consider how they form a new colonial imagination as spectacle and, understood through the theories of Jacques Lacan, as specular. These images, we suggest, present an imagination of not only The Body that could ‘be’ beneath the veil, or beyond the knife, but of another's body which could be, and we suggest is represented as what should be broken into pieces to the point of disintegration in a post-9/11 world.
Griffith Law Review, 2009
Anti-terrorism initiatives are encroaching further into the freedoms of the liberal subject. The ... more Anti-terrorism initiatives are encroaching further into the freedoms of the liberal subject. The loss of these freedoms, whether real or imagined, need be mourned. This mourning is laborious, painful and sometimes reduced to the condition of melancholia. In the states concerned, protesting against this loss appears both as an effort to get those freedoms back and as an attempt to reckon with the loss. In this article I discuss three scenes of loss; two are protest gestures from the demonstration against the G20 in Melbourne in 2006 and one is from a case study conducted by Freud. These scenes indicate different textures of possibility for protesting loss. In the final scene, I discuss the performance of the theatrical protest group the Tranny Cops and their dildo-esque parody of the impotence of the state and of the liberal subject before the ever-encroaching sovereign. It is the additions to the Tranny Cops’ bodies — mustaches, dildos, uniforms — which pronounce a complex somatechnic relation of the subject to law and offer a mode of performing subjectivity as a (Lacanian) passage a l’acte that is beyond the script of law.
Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2003
In January 1994 the Family Law CounciJ3 in Australia published a Discussion Paper4 on issues pert... more In January 1994 the Family Law CounciJ3 in Australia published a Discussion Paper4 on issues pertaining to the practices described by the Family Law Council as 'female genital mutilation' or 'FGM'.5 The Council's apparent aim was to generate discussion in Victorian communities on this topic, and to use this discussion to write a report to the Attorney-General. In June 1994 the Council produced its Report to the Attorney-General on the issues related to 'female genital mutilation' as it understood them. Included in this report were the Council's
PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 2014
Griffith Law Review, 2011
Catharsis has become a key concept in facilitating the healing of nations and individuals after t... more Catharsis has become a key concept in facilitating the healing of nations and individuals after trauma. It is implicitly required of people who testify before nation-building trials and truth commissions, and it is desired of the audience to nation-building events. Catharsis is intended to facilitate the nostalgic promise to produce the reconciled nation in the future. Catharsis, however, was abandoned in psychoanalysis because of its short-lived effects and the tendency for subjects, as Freud describes it, to ‘fall ill’ again in similar ways. This tendency is because, despite the heightened emotional appearance of catharsis, the inner conflict of the patients is not resolved. In this article, I discuss the role of catharsis in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and in the recent Apology to Australia’s Indigenous people, and consider how the very demand for catharsis can foreclose prematurely on possibilities for tolerating the crucial conflicts that emerge in projects of nation-building and reconciliation, specifically when those conflicts involve the assuming of incommensurable positions – such as that of perpetrator and of victim.
The Hastings Center report
Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2006
... They do not affect out way of life unless we encounter them directly, they do not disturb the... more ... They do not affect out way of life unless we encounter them directly, they do not disturb the prevalence of power in the mode Ed Mussawir has offered in this edition, they do not disturb the sovereign's repetitive decision, his 'experiment and repetition and therefore also [his ...
Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2009
Informit is an online service offering a wide range of database and full content publication prod... more Informit is an online service offering a wide range of database and full content publication products that deliver the vast majority of Australasian scholarly research to the education, research and business sectors. Informit is the brand that encompasses RMIT Publishing's online products ...
International Law and its Others
Every man child among you shall be circumcised. And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreski... more Every man child among you shall be circumcised. And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you. Legislation to prohibit the practices described as ‘female genital mutilation’ has become an international franchise. Laws which mark the needs, desires and demands of the subject of ‘mutilation’, together with the subject who is apparently ‘non-mutilated’, have been enacted with unprecedented enthusiasm over the last two decades, in countries we might now call the ‘coalition of the willing’. The laws are strikingly similar and most of them include the phrase ‘female genital mutilation’ to describe the many practices that are said to occur in these countries and beyond. Indeed, in Australia, this term is called upon ‘to embrace all types of the practice’. The laws, and the research and consultations which preceded their enactment, also describe the sexual, psychological, hygiene and aesthetic needs and desires of the subject. In short, the process of making the laws and the laws themselves combine to provide a manual for Being. Not just any being, of course, for the laws are based upon empirical and theoretical research, public response and popular fiction produced largely in, and for, Western consumption. The laws are a manual for the franchising of a Western subjectivity whose sexual, psychological, aesthetic and hygiene requirements are based upon those of what Gayatri Spivak has termed the capital S Subject, what the Family Law Council in Australia has termed the ‘non-mutilated’ woman and what I will argue in this paper is the international subject.
Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2007
Something is always lost to the sovereign, democratic, liberal or otherwise. This is the very fun... more Something is always lost to the sovereign, democratic, liberal or otherwise. This is the very function of law, but in contemporary times of (anti) terror, when obedience demands obeisance and protection from terror includes torture, it is becoming increasingly difficult in the United States, Australia and Britain to imagine a `fair and free contract' with the sovereign. What is to be done? Purchasing freedom as cars, perfume and fries performs one evasion of the violence of the sovereign decision. The collapse of signification into the product is an effective gesture to enable a liberal democratic subject to imagine it is obtaining or ingesting freedom in the cloth or, as a food group. Similarly, offering freedom as a gift to the Middle East enacts a denial or even foreclosure that speaks of freedom as if it can be administered militarily. This article discusses the mirroring of the imagery in the Wachowski brothers' Matrix Trilogy with contemporary political rhetoric in the...
Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2005
Freedom is not something to be thought about since September 11 and since freedom can be both giv... more Freedom is not something to be thought about since September 11 and since freedom can be both given to the Iraqis as a gift from the ‘coalition of the willing,’ and purchased in the form of ‘freedom jeans,’ ‘freedom cars,’ and ‘freedom perfume.’ Freedom, in its unthinkable presence as gift, product and foundational premise of Western democracy, has assumed a psychotic structure in the psyche of the Western subject. The status of freedom as a product to be chosenand purchased, and as a gift given to the Iraqis via military intervention, offers an ontological status to the psychotic subject of the West as a being in a state of being unquestionably, unthinkingly free. The questionable ontological status of the Western subject–who I refer to in this paper as West–as a free subject, is collapsed into a signifier without paternity; a signifier whichdisables questions about whetherone is or isn'tfree in the free West. This article discusses the signification of freedom represented in p...
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Papers by Juliet B Rogers