ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on irony as a way of elucidating what is at stake in this project: as a way of characterising what is distinctive about cultural legal studies and the critical insights it generates into how law operates. It examines how work in cultural legal studies has focused on questions of form, style and affect in order to reveal the relationship between representation, subjectivity and law. Legal scholars have long reached out to humanities to explore the potential of representations to disrupt our established perspectives or ways of thinking, and the affective dimensions that give them transformative power. The 2008 scandal over the work of Australian photographer Bill Henson provides an apt example of the ironies that surround controversial cultural texts, and what this can reveal about the complex relationship between representations, subjectivity and law. Rebecca Clift suggests that irony depends upon 'the simultaneous presence of two dimensions of meaning: "inside" and "outside" meanings, the one framing the other'.
