Australia’s #MeToo moment has witnessed the publication of women’s experiences of sexual violence without their knowledge, involvement or consent. Focusing on Eryn Jean Norvill, Catherine Marriott and Ashleigh Raper, this article explores relationships between consent and subjectivity within the unauthorised public disclosure of women’s experiences of sexual violence that target high-profile alleged male perpetrators. These cases reveal that the absent presence of consent signifies a denial or repudiation of subjectivity, and responses by the women at their centre highlight discursive relationships between narrative, consent and subjectivity. The article explores the failure of recent and proposed law reform to protect women from such harms, and the conceptual efficacy of consent in enabling women’s subjectivity in #MeToo storytelling.

In her 2019 book The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism, Jessica Whyte investigates ‘the historical and conceptual relations between human rights and neoliberalism’. 1...

I’ve long had to theorise the material and epistemological bruises upon my body. I became so efficient I could almost anticipate the precision of the blow before it landed, providing the most vivid...

In his book, Drawing out The Law: A Spirits Guide 1 leading Anishinabek legal scholar, John Borrows challenges readers to engage with an Indigenous legal traditions on their own terms: I really don...

Focusing on targeting law and practice in contemporary high-tech warfare, this article brings international humanitarian legal scholarship into conversation with posthumanist feminist theory for the purpose of rethinking international humanitarian law (IHL) in terms of the posthuman condition. I suggest that posthumanist feminist theory – in particular Rosi Braidotti’s scholarship – is helpful to the IHL scholar for understanding and describing high-tech warfare that recognises the ‘targetable body’ as both material and digital. Posthumanist feminist theory, moreover, avails us of a much-needed critical position from which to reframe the question of what the ‘humanitarian’ aim in IHL is: who, and what, can the ‘human’ of this humanitarianism be? This article sets out the framework for a posthumanitarian international law as an ethical-normative order worthy, as Braidotti puts it, of the complexity of our times.

This article seeks to receive Peter Fitzpatrick’s foundational work on postcolonial jurisprudence, The Mythology of Modern Law, today – a historical moment of profound crisis. It argues that in order to carry forward the task that this groundbreaking book sets for itself, and thus to enact one mode of receiving it, we need to stage tragedies of modern international law. In doing so, it develops upon a body of scholarship reflecting on the particular relationship between the form of tragedy and the form of myth, whereby the form of tragedy emerges as a method for receiving, and reworking, broken-down mythology from the past by way of staging it as a problem for the present. It concludes by showing how tragedies of modern international law illuminatingly stage encounters with a plurality of different international law(s), and reveal how it is (modern colonial) blindness to encounters with the laws of others that produces its catastrophes.

This paper argues that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological ontology may serve as an important and exigent critique of the dominant understandings of nature and living being that circulate today. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature involves a return to perceptual experience – a return that amounts to a restoration of the inexhaustible depth of the world, and offers a non-subjectivist account of embodied participation or relationality. This emphasis on participation can lead to an increased attentiveness to difference. The paper begins with a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Cartesian ontology and the idea of depth, as outlined in his last published text ‘Eye and Mind’. The idea of depth is then related to Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with the work of Jakob von Uëxkull, as outlined in the Nature lectures in 1956–60. Finally, the paper links these discussions to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body and his phenomenological ontology.

This article elaborates an account of ontology that is developed in the writings of Luce Irigaray. I argue that she strives for an ontology of sexual difference rather than one based on any conception of human identity. Like Nietzsche she does this by working with the Pre-Socratic philosophers and other non-Platonic theorists to address not only the materiality of the world but also its incorporeal qualities and capacities.

In this essay, I situate Irigaray’s philosophy of sexuate difference between the Heideggerian response to the collapse of the project of Western modernity (‘only a god can save us’) and that of decolonial theorist Oscar Guardiola-Riviera (‘only Indians can save our modern soul’). First, I return to Heidegger’s theorisation of ‘planetary technicity’ as the ontology of modernity, arguing, with Heidegger, that in order to respond to this problem we must return to the question of Being. From here, I link Heidegger’s theory of technicity with the work of decolonial theory on the ‘coloniality of Being’, suggesting that one reason for Heidegger’s pessimism is that he did not think technicity from beyond a Eurocentric perspective. The recent ‘ontological turn’ in decolonial anthropology that seeks to study Indigenous thought as ontology, however, shows that there are resources for thinking beyond the onto-logic of technicity. Yet, here, I return to Irigaray’s critique of Heidegger for his forgetting of sexuate difference in his analysis of technology to say that a move to a decolonial ontology beyond planetary technicity can only take place if we go through an ontology of sexual difference: because, as Irigaray shows, the onto-logic of technicity that underwrites coloniality and modernity begins in an ontological annihilation of life, sexuate difference, and the maternal debt, the only way to recover this is by thinking the question of sexuate difference. Finally, I conclude by examining the case of the Kogi peoples of Colombia who have warned Westerners that the destruction of the planet can only be stopped if we learn to recompense our common Mother. This case, I suggest, shows how and why the turn to non-Western ontologies as a way out of the death project of modern technicity must reckon with the work of Irigaray.

The recent retirement of Justice Susan Crennan prompts questions about her judicial legacy. These questions take on a particularly gendered dimension given her Honour’s status as the second woman appointed to the High Court of Australia. This article examines critically the legacy Justice Crennan and others sought to craft about her upon her retirement from the Court. It does so by examining the judicial farewell speeches made in commemoration of her time on the Court. These largely overlooked social scripts provide revealing insights about the interaction between individual and institutional values in public legal discourse. Two motifs punctuate these speeches in ways that are significant in forming impressions about the gendered dimensions of Justice Crennan’s legacy – her Honour’s ‘humanity’ and ‘collegiality’. By asserting that ‘collegiality is not compromise’ (as Justice Kiefel before her had done), Justice Crennan emphasised its importance for the institutional wellbeing of the Court. In so doing, Justice Crennan brought into sharp focus gendered implications that flow from recent tensions about the role and contributions of judges. These tensions reveal that the masculinist character of law and its institutions continues to shape how women’s legal authority is received.