Law's Cut on the Body of Human Rights

Chapter One:Fantasies of the Cut; Chapter Two: The Making of a Fantasy; Chapter Three: "I love you.. I mutilate you": Chapter Four: The remnant of the (mutilated) flesh; Chapter Five: The Law's Clear Message; Chapter Six: The Sacred Flesh of Human Rights; Chapter Seven: The Torture of the Good; Chapter Eight: Woman Does not Exist in Human Rights

Auteur

Juliet Rogers teaches criminology at the University of Melbourne

Résumé
Scenes of violence and incisions into the flesh informa the demand for law. The scene of little girls being held down in practices of female circumcision has been a defining and definitive image that demands the attention of human rights, and the intervention of law. But the investment in protecting women and little girls from such a cut is not all that it seems.a Law's Cuta on thea Body of Human Rights: Female Circumcision, Torturea anda Sacred Flesha considers how such imagesa come to inform lawa and the investment of advocates of law in an imagination of this scene. Drawing on psychoanalytic anda postcoloniala theory, and accompanying ideas in political theology, Juliet Rogers examines the language, imagery and excitement that accompanies recenta initiatives to legislate against what is called 'female genital mutilation'. The author compliments this examination witha a consideration of the scene of torture exposed in images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.a Rogers argues that the modes ofa fascination and excitement that accompanya scenesa of torture and female circumcisiona betray the fantasy of aa political conditiona against which the subject of liberal law is imagined; this is subjectivitya in aa state of non-mutilation, non-prohibition or, in a psychoanalytic idiom, non-castration.a To support the fantasy of this subject,a the mutilated subject, the authors suggests, is rendered as flesh cut from the democratic nation state, deserving of only selective human rights, or none at all.

Contenu

1. Fantasies of the Cut 2. The Making of a Fantasy 3. "I love you, I mutilate you": The remnant of the (mutilated) flesh 4. The Law's Clear Message 5. The Violence of the Other's Law 6. The Sacred Flesh of Human Rights 7. The Torture of the Good 8. Woman Does not Exist in Human Rights