ABSTRACT

This edited collection is a cultural analysis of how law is shaped into procedure and principle by the conditions of everyday life. Law is constitutive of culture just as culture and cultural analyses shape, resist and interrogate legal regulation, exception and norms. So too does law have a dual capacity in the field of culture: it enables the formation of subjects and of cultural practices, and it constrains those very formations. This book uses the animating critical concerns of Cultural Studies over the last 20 years—that is, the symbolic, material, economic, and political practices and power relations that are inscribed in everyday life—to analyze the assembly of practices, procedures, sites, interactions and agents of law. The chapters in this collection accordingly examine the conditions of law’s everyday life, in situations ordinary and extraordinary, to show it in the moment of its working.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

chapter |10 pages

The Force of Meaning

Cultural Studies of Law

chapter |19 pages

Memory and Echo

Pop cult, hi tech and the irony of tradition

chapter |19 pages

Temporal Horizons

On the possibilities of Law and Fatherhood in To Kill a Mockingbird

chapter |20 pages

Instrumental and Gratuitous Violence

The torture and death of Gul Rahman in the CIA Salt Pit

chapter |23 pages

Constructing ‘Decency'

Government subsidized cultural production during the culture wars

chapter |21 pages

Weapons of Sex, Weapons of War

Feminisms, ethnic conflict and the rise of rape and sexual violence in public international law during the 1990s

chapter |24 pages

Legitimating Transphobia

The legal disavowal of transgender rights in prison