ABSTRACT
Early in an empirical research project on sexual diversity in the judiciary in England and Wales and other common-law jurisdictions, I had to address a particular challenge.1 Sexuality, I was repeatedly told by informants, was unlike the other strands of diversity: it was a personal and a private matter – strictly extrajudicial. So, while sexuality may appear as a formal strand of judicial diversity policies, officially it is (and ought to be) treated differently: neither recorded nor benchmarked nor audited. In contrast to this official reticence and silence a very different state of affairs was portrayed in the pages of Who’s Who, an annual volume providing short biographical accounts of England’s social elite, including the judiciary.2 Details of the wives, husbands and siblings of the judiciary were (and remain) the norm. This apparently contradictory landscape generated a number of research challenges. How do you research the institutional operation and effects of that which is apparently not spoken about? How do you make sense of a dominant sexual norm the existence of which is denied yet pervasive? And how do you research and make sense of sexuality that key informants insist is and ought to remain absent and irrelevant in an institutional setting? This chapter is based upon one of the research projects I have developed in response to these challenges. Queer theory was an invaluable theoretical tool that provided a number of
insights enabling me to respond to these methodological challenges. I begin this chapter with some of its key insights before describing one of the research projects I developed to examine the formation and operation of sexuality in the judicial institution. It is a project that some legal students and scholars might find bizarre: a study of judicial images, and more specifically, judicial portraits.3 One part of this project focuses upon the aesthetic and artistic traditions used in these portraits: how are judges portrayed and why? And in that context how, if at all, is sexuality represented? I use a collection of official portraits of the chief justices of the Supreme Court of New South Wales as a lens through which to reveal the complexity and fragility of potential answers to these questions. The portraits can easily be accessed from the court’s website.4
