‘Somewhere. Some time. Somehow. Something has to change’: Prima Facie and the cruel optimism of feminist legal advocacy

IF 1.7 3区 社会学 Q2 CRIMINOLOGY & PENOLOGY
Rosanne Kennedy, Tanya Serisier
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Abstract

In her play Prima Facie, playwright and lawyer Suzie Miller uses theatre to critique legal responses to sexual violence. This article thus offers an analysis of the play as both feminist theatre and feminist advocacy. We examine the rhetorical and performative strategies it deploys, arguing that they are effective because they mobilise long-standing feminist tropes which use a representative figure of the traumatised victim and the repetition of statistics to position the audience as potential victims of violence. Such strategies, however, fail to account for the complexity of sexual violence, intersectional understandings of it, or its relationship to other structural forms of harm that flow from turning to the state, as articulated by Black feminist scholars. These limitations also function in the play’s loop between an indictment of law’s failings and recuperating the law as a privileged site for responding to sexual violence. We read this tension as exemplifying the play’s enactment of a cruelly optimistic relationship to law, which is, we argue, a recurring feature in feminist cultural advocacy around sexual violence. However, we also suggest that reading the play through the words of its protagonist can open visions of justice beyond what Carol Smart has described as the ‘siren call of law’.
的某个地方。一些时间。在某种程度上。“有些事情必须改变”:表面上看,女权主义法律倡导的残酷乐观主义
在她的戏剧《表面》中,剧作家兼律师Suzie Miller用戏剧来批判法律对性暴力的反应。因此,本文从女权主义戏剧和女权主义倡导两方面对该剧进行了分析。我们研究了它所使用的修辞和表演策略,认为它们是有效的,因为它们调动了长期存在的女权主义比喻,使用受创伤受害者的代表性人物和重复的统计数据,将观众定位为潜在的暴力受害者。然而,这些策略未能解释性暴力的复杂性,对它的交叉理解,或者它与其他结构性伤害形式的关系,这些形式从转向国家流动,正如黑人女权主义学者所阐述的那样。这些限制也在戏剧的循环中发挥作用,在控诉法律的失败和恢复法律作为应对性暴力的特权场所之间。我们认为,这种紧张关系体现了该剧对法律的残酷乐观关系的设定,我们认为,这是围绕性暴力的女权主义文化倡导中反复出现的特征。然而,我们也认为,通过主人公的话语来阅读这部戏剧,可以打开正义的视野,而不仅仅是卡罗尔·斯玛特所说的“法律的警笛召唤”。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
3.80
自引率
11.10%
发文量
33
期刊介绍: Crime, Media, Culture is a fully peer reviewed, international journal providing the primary vehicle for exchange between scholars who are working at the intersections of criminological and cultural inquiry. It promotes a broad cross-disciplinary understanding of the relationship between crime, criminal justice, media and culture. The journal invites papers in three broad substantive areas: * The relationship between crime, criminal justice and media forms * The relationship between criminal justice and cultural dynamics * The intersections of crime, criminal justice, media forms and cultural dynamics
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