Horror in the Halls of Law: Pluralising Legal Stories in Once Upon a Time in Australia

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 2021, the Me Too movement took prominence in Australia following incidents which exposed gendered violence in the nation’s chief political, and legal institutions. The authors, teachers and students at one of the leading law schools in Australia took a range of actions, culminating in writing a graphic novel called Once Upon a Time in Australia: Conversations about how our Me Too movement exposed the troubles of Truth in Law (Counterpress, 2014). In this article, the authors write about their methodology and offer auto-critiques of their work, in a process they describe as critical performative iterations. This method facilitates speaking out thoughts and lived perspectives into knowledge which aligns with feminist standpoint theory, while also resisting their voices from asserting new essentialised truths. These critiques consider the limitations of the authors’ standpoints. They also consider the genre of horror, the insider/outside trope, and the politics of citation in Law.