Law & Humanities Blog |
| Transgender Identity and Popular Culture: Images From Film Posted: 14 Nov 2013 11:36 AM PST Sharon Cowan, University of Edinburgh School of Law, has published 'We Walk Among You': Trans Identity Politics Goes to the Movies as Edinburgh School of Law Research Paper No. 2013/39. Here is the abstract. Recent legal and social acknowledgement of (some) trans citizenship claims demonstrates the continuing evolution of trans politics and identity, and the relationship between socio-political identities and popular culture. This article examines current debates over trans citizenship and identity, and argues that certain kinds of identity and citizenship claims have cultural currency in contemporary representations of sex/gender. In order to address these issues, this article highlights key disputes and tensions in contemporary debates about transgender identity, citizenship and claims to legal rights, by examining the ways in which sex/gender identity is portrayed in three films -- Cabaret, Transamerica and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Each film demonstrates various ways of interpreting and reworking the constraints of heteronormative binary notions of sex/gender, and these struggles over meaning are also reflected in the ways in which different articulations of trans identity and citizenship claims have been legally and culturally recognized. The article explores the ways in which particular accounts of trans identity are given primacy within law, and how film can help us to reflect upon questions about which sexed/gendered people get to count as legal citizens. |
The paper concludes by reminding us that despite discourses of recognition, it is important to remember the exclusionary as well as inclusionary tendencies of law.Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 
Michael Burger Wins First Penny Pether Award
Posted: 14 Nov 2013 10:25 AM PST
News from Amy Dillard on behalf of the Penny Pether Law and Language Scholarship Award Committee:
Michael Burger of Roger Williams University School of Law is the winner of the first annual Penny Pether Award for Law and Language Scholarship for his article Environmental Law/Environmental Literature. 40 Ecology L.Q. 1 (2013). The award will be officially presented this Friday at the West Coast Rhetoric Scholarship Workshop at UNLV's Boyd School of Law. Dozens of terrific articles and essays were nominated for the award. In partial recognition of the strength and tremendous diversity of the works we were so lucky to read, we are also pleased to give honorable mention to Kevin Curran for his article, Hospitable Justice: Law and Selfhood in Shakespeare's Sonnets, 9 Law, Culture, & Humanities 295 (2013), and to Ruthann Robson for her essay, 27 Words, 13 Memoir 85 (2013).
The committee wishes to thank everyone who nominated authors for the award and to the authors themselves for their great work. It looks forward to making this award an annual tradition.
[NB: Committee announcement edited slightly].
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