Caterina Nirta

Hearing is an intricate but delicate modality of sensory perception, continuously enfolded in the surroundings in which it takes place. While passive in its disposition, it is integral to the movement and fluctuations of one’s environment. Always attuned to the present and immersed in the murmur of its background, hearing remains a situated perception but fundamentally overarching and extended into the open. It is an immanent modality of being in and with the world. It is also the ultimate juridical act, a sense-making activity that adjudicates and informs the spatio-temporal acoustics of law and justice. This collection gathers multidisciplinary contributions on the relationship between law and hearing, the human vocalisations and non-human echolocations, the spatial and temporal conditions in which hearing takes place, as well as the forms of order and control that listening entails. Contributors explore, challenge and expand the structural and sensorial qualities of law, and recognise how hearing directs us to perceiving and understanding the intrinsic acoustic sphere of simultaneous relations, which challenge and break the normative distinctions that law informs and maintains. In exploring the ambiguous, indefinable and unembodied nature of hearing, as well as its objects – sound and silence – this volume approaches it as both an ontological and epistemological device to think with and about law.

Although somewhat marginal in relation to the other senses, smell is the most potent way of anchoring ourselves to the world. We subconsciously find our place in it by sniffing our body, the body of the one next to us, the room in which we are, the culture with which we are familiar. There is an incessant olfactory flow consisting of bodies, human and nonhuman, that are agents of generation, consumption, diffusion, reproduction and dissolution of odours. As they move or pause, as they cluster with others or try to move away, these bodies constantly partake in this olfactory flow, this dense planetary swirl that leaves nothing outside.

Described by Aristotle as the most vital of senses, touch contains both the physical and the metaphysical in its ability to express the determination of being. To manifest itself, touch makes a movement outwards, beyond the body, and relies on a specific physical involvement other senses do not require: to touch is already to be active and to activate. This fundamental ontology makes touch the most essential of all senses. This volume of ‘Law and the Senses’ attempts to illuminate and reconsider the complex and interflowing relations and contradictions between the tactful intrusion of the law and the untactful movement of touch. Compelling contributors from arts, literature and social science disciplines alongside artist presentations explore touch’s boundaries and formal and informal ‘laws’ of the senses. Each contribution unveils a multi-faceted new dimension to the force of touch, its ability to form, deform and reform what it touches. In unique ways, each of the several contributions to this volume recognises the trans-corporeality of touch to traverse the boundaries on the body and entangle other bodies and spaces, thus challenging the very notion of corporeal integrity and human being.

Vision traditionally occupies the height of the sensorial hierarchy. The sense of clarity and purity conveyed by vision, allows it to be explicitly associated with truth and knowledge. The law has always relied on vision and representation, from eye-witnesses to photography, to imagery and emblems. The law and its normative gaze can be understood as that which decrees what is permitted to be and become visible and what is not. Indeed, even if law’s perspectival view is bound to be betrayed by the realities of perception, it is nonetheless productive of real effects on the world. This first title in the interdisciplinary series ‘Law and the Senses’ asks how we can develop new theoretical approaches to law and seeing that go beyond a simple critique of the legal pretension to truth. This volume aims to understand how law might see and unsee, and how in its turn is seen and unseen. It explores devices and practices of visibility, the evolution of iconology and iconography, and the relation between the gaze of the law and the blindness of justice. The contributions, all radically interdisciplinary, are drawn from photography, legal theory, philosophy, and poetry.

José Esteban Muñoz opens his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by stating that “queerness is not here yet. Queerness is an ideality … an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.” Queerness, continues Muñoz, “is a longing that propels us onward … Queerness is essentially about the rejection of the here and now” (2009, 1). He identifies queer utopias with an idea of futurity as an attempt to think of something else that goes beyond the “here and now,” an act of resistance: “the present is not enough. It is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative tastes and ‘rational’ expectations … The present must be known in relation to the alternative temporal and spatial maps provided by a perception of past and future affective worlds” (27). In this article, I aim to show just the opposite. The argument I make here is that queer utopia—transgender—is a futurity of the here and of the now, a virtuality that does not belong to the past nor does it lend itself to projections of the future, but it is totally immersed in the very now of the present.

Taste usually occupies the bottom of the sensorial hierarchy, as the quintessentially hedonistic sense, too close to the animal, the elemental and the corporeal, and for this reason disciplined and moralised. At the same time, taste is indissolubly tied to knowledge. To taste is to discriminate, emit judgement, enter an unstable domain of synaesthetic normativity where the certainty of metaphysical categories begins to crumble. This second title in the ‘Law and the Senses’ series explores law using taste as a conceptual and ontological category able to unsettle legal certainties, and a promising tool whereby to investigate the materiality of law’s relation to the world. For what else is law’s reduction of the world into legal categories, if not law’s ingesting the world by tasting it, and emitting moral and legal judgements accordingly? Through various topics including coffee, wine, craft cider and Japanese knotweed, this volume explores the normativities that shape the way taste is felt and categorised, within and beyond subjective, phenomenological and human dimensions. The result is an original interdisciplinary volume – complete with seven speculative ‘recipes’ – dedicated to a rarely explored intersection, with contributions from artists, legal academics, philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists.

While the presence of monsters in popular culture is ever-increasing, their use as an explicit or implicit category to frame, stigmatise, and demonise the other is seemingly on the rise. At the same time, academic interest for monsters is ever-growing. Usually, monstrosity is understood as a category that emerges to signal a transgression to a given order; this approach has led to the demystification of the insidious characterisations of the (racial, sexual, physical) other as monstrous. While this effort has been necessary, its collateral effects have reduced the monstrous to a mere (socio-cultural) construction of the other: a dialectical framing that de facto deprives monstrosity from any reality. 'Monstrous Ontologies: Politics, Ethics, Materiality' proffers the necessity of challenging these monstrous otherings and their perverse socio-political effects, whilst also asserting that the monstrous is not simply an epistemological construct, but that it has an ontological reality. There is a profound difference between monsters and monstrosity. While the former is an often sterile political and social simplification, the end-product of rhetorical and biopolitical apparatuses; the latter may be understood as a dimension that nurtures the un-definable, that is, that shows the limits of these apparatuses by embodying their material excess: not a 'cultural frame', but the limit to the very mechanism of 'framing'. The monstrous expresses the combining, hybridising, becoming, and creative potential of socio-natural life, albeit colouring this powerful vitalism with the dark hue of a fearful, disgusting, and ultimately indigestible reality that cannot simply be embraced with multicultural naivety. As such, it forces us towards radically changing not the categories, but the very mechanisms of categorisation through which reality is framed and acted upon. Here lies the profound ethical dimension that monstrosity forces us to acknowledge; here lies its profoundly political potential, one that cannot be unfolded by merely deconstructing monstrosity, and rather requires to engage with its uncomfortable, appalling, and revealing materiality. This book will appeal to postgraduate students, PostDocs, and academics alike in the fields of philosophy, critical theory, humanities, sociology and social theory, criminology, human geography, and critical legal theory.

It is often assumed that only cis women experience pregnancy. This fails to account for the trans and nonbinary people who are and have been pregnant, and therefore presents a partial picture of what pregnancy is, how pregnancy is experienced, and the conceptual and normative issues that surround having a pregnancy. In this article we argue for rethinking pregnancy and re-envisioning conceptual, social, medical, and legal approaches to pregnant persons by focussing on trans experiences, thereby trans/forming pregnancy. We highlight the ‘genderfication’ that permeates dominant formulations of pregnancy, which often implicitly or explicitly endorse a biological essentialism that takes birth-giving as necessary and sufficient for motherhood. We look in depth at the United Kingdom, but take our analysis to have far wider applicability and implications. Our aim is to trans/form philosophical approaches to gender and reproduction and contribute to practical guidance built from empirical and theoretical research, looking for positive outcomes for trans individuals who experience pregnancy. We take trans pregnancy seriously, on its own terms, arguing that doing so is both a theoretical and ethical imperative.

This article considers the model of recognition in the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) and, through a critique of the value of stability pursued through this legislation, argues that recognition as a model is incompatible with the variety of experiences of non-binary trans-identified individuals. The article then moves on to analyse self-declaration, part of the proposed reform recently dismissed by the Government. While self-declaration contains provisions that would minimise the length of the process of recognition as well as the level of intrusiveness and stigma associated with it, this analysis highlights some fundamental theoretical concerns with its over-reliance on the strict dialectical logics on recognition and its structural inability to account for and respond to the challenges posed by non-binary trans individuals.

The built environment and the organisation of public spaces reflect the normative notions of male and female. Public toilets, amongst other widely common public spaces, underline these two opposing concepts and challenge the presence of transgender. Within the boundaries of public toilets, transgender and gender non-conforming individuals become a crucial point of debate, scrutiny and controversy. Analysing the politics of such gender-segregated space, this article explores the notion of uniformity and challenges the idea of single-ness as the absolute expression of the self.

There is a significant absence of theoretical work directed at contextualising and understanding trans pregnancy and its implications for the body, the law, ethics, and politics. This aggravates the challenges we highlight in this chapter, contributing to what we refer to as the hyper/in-visibility of trans pregnancy. We analyse these degrees of visibility through the concepts of representation and recognition, focussing on the gendered language of the medical setting in the United Kingdom. Whilst we expect that much of our analysis will be relevant and applicable beyond this setting, it is the traditional Western role assumptions that are being challenged. We argue for the need to employ gender-modality terms for the sake of inclusivity, and advocate for a standpoint methodology, to be able to accommodate the complexities of the hyper/in-visibility of trans pregnancy.