ABSTRACT
One of the things that the Family Court comes to recognize in the cases of Re Alex (No 1) and Re Alex (No 2) is that the legal incompetence of a child is not unconnected to the determination of the sex of the person. However, it is one thing to make a legal determination of sex a choice between ‘naturalized’ binary identities (male and female) and quite another thing to link it to an account of the difference attending to the civil institution of ‘masks’. Modern conceptions of personal jurisdiction have treated sex as a kind of natural attribute-something inherent to the ‘natural person’—rather than as something borne much more immanently by the very play of masking and artifice that constitutes the aesthetic dimension of legal personality itself. The broader question for this chapter then may be put in this way: If the mask is not just a representation of sexed identity before the law but itself the substance and texture of sexuality, what does this mean for the ‘law of masks’ as a genre of jurisprudence-particularly in the situation of a court which attempts to determine the sex of a person deemed by virtue of their age to be legally unqualified to do so?
