Bodies under the Law: Feminist Artistic Practice and the Struggle to #Repealthe8th

Abstract

Bodies under the Law:Feminist Artistic Practice and the Struggle to #Repealthe8th* Sinéad Kennedy (bio) Before the Law stands a door-keeper on guard. To this door-keeper there comes a man from the country who begs for admittance to the Law. But the door-keeper says that he cannot admit the man at the moment. The man, on reflection, asks if he will be allowed, then, to enter later. "It is possible," answers the door-keeper, "but not at this moment." Since the door leading into the Law stands open as usual and the door-keeper steps to one side, the man bends down to peer through the entrance. When the door-keepers sees that, he laughs and says: "If you are so strongly tempted, try to get in without my permission. But note I am powerful. And I am only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall, keepers stand at every door, one more powerful than the other." franz kafka, "before the law" The parable "Before the Law," later incorporated into Franz Kafka's posthumous novel The Trial, has long served as a powerful metaphor for legal scholars exploring the experience of those subject to the forces of institutionalized law. In the parable the supplicant fails to circumvent and defy the gatekeeper; growing old, the man finds himself approaching the end of his life without ever having achieved the access he so desperately seeks. Just before his death the gatekeeper tells him that the doorway was made exclusively for him and that upon his demise the entrance to the law will be closed (Kafka 197). Intentionally enigmatic, the parable illustrates the profound psychological effect of the law by expressing the duality of how its processes can be experienced. Purportedly objective and impartial, the law [End Page 241] remains remote from the daily life of the man experiencing it as he lives without access, unable to gain entry. The parable also reveals the illusory character of Kafka's law, which requires the man's cooperation and deference to sustain its power. Were we to reimagine Kafka's parable with a female protagonist, our understanding of the experience would differ: the law would again exist as a partisan system with only the appearance of objectivity. But more significantly, regendering the parable's perspective would make visible the hidden structures of domination and exploitation, as well as the ideological work of institutional apparatuses, that define the modern capitalist/liberal state. Women's experiences of the law are often characterized by violent intimacy, thereby disclosing the law's embodied consequences and its intersection with institutional and intimate violence. In other words, unlike the male body of Kafka's parable, the female body occupies a space not before the law, but rather under the law—as subject to its domination. Through the prism of three feminist performances—Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones's The Touching Contract (2016), Speaking of IMELDA's Pro-Choice Proclamation (2015), and Jones's Tremble Tremble (2017), this essay argues that a central theme of women's artistic practice in Ireland envisions the female body as a site of resistance, exposing the law as a force that grants and then restricts access to institutional authority through its power of determination and punishment. Ireland's Constitution or framing legal narrative, Bunreacht na hÉireann, haunts such feminist practice as a structuring presence. Each of the three performances explored below offer possibilities for creating new forms of knowledge and resistance, thereby allowing women to move collectively from a position of bodies under the law to bodies against the law and, finally, toward the possibility of bodies beyond the law. Feminist Theory Redefines the "Body Politic" Feminist theorists have long engaged with questions of embodiment as they confront the female body's relationship to the law and the state. They argue that the identification of women with a corrupted conception of corporeal reality has been central to the construction and maintenance of the modern liberal state. Feminists thus challenge [End Page 242] the foundational premises of western political and legal theory and its symbolic focus on the male body by transforming the metaphor of the...