Sarah Keenan

Greta LaFleur

Bambitchell

Marianne Shaneen

Bambitchell: Bugs & Beasts Before the Law, Appendix A-L (2020) is a publication by Bambitchell, the artist collaboration of Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Kyle Mitchell, conceived in relationship to their experimental essay film Bugs & Beasts Before the Law (2019) that explores the history and legacy of the animal trials that took place across medieval and early modern Europe and its colonies in the Americas. The film follows events in which nonhuman animals were put on trial in courts, where they were prosecuted for various crimes ranging from trespassing to murder, as well as the related legal practice of deodand, punishing inanimate objects faulted for human fatality. This publication functions as an appendix to Bambitchell's film, taking readers on a journey through the artists' research. It riffs on the appendix from the 1906 book that inspired Bambitchell's project, E. P. Evans's The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, the first chapter of which is the foundational English-language text on the medieval animal trials. Using collage and intertextual layering, Bambitchell probes the definitive authority of Evans's record, creating a counter-archive that unravels the fictive unity of historical narrative. This layered narrative in text and image is about power performed through the body of the other, revealing how authorities and institutions mediate social relations and subjecthood through such processes as the formation of property and the criminalization of sexual difference. Various perversions of justice across time and space reveal that the absurd logic of the animal trials is not an anachronistic anomaly but rather an adaptive force that continues to shape lives unevenly and to define the bounds of freedom. This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Bambitchell: Bugs & Beasts Before the Law, at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Fall 2020-Spring 2021. Texts include an introduction by curator of the exhibition Nina Bozicnik; the Bugs & Beasts film script; an excerpt from Greta LaFleur's "Complexion of Sodomy," a chapter in her book The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins Press, 2018); and essays by Sarah Keenan (Mercer Union, 2019) and Marianne Shaneen.

Appendix A--L

Bugs & Beasts Before the Law

This book explores the relationship between space, subjectivity and property in order to invert conventional socio-legal understandings of property. Sarah Keenan demonstrates that new political possibilities for property may be unveiled by thinking about property in terms of space and belonging, rather than exclusion. Drawing on feminist and critical race theory, this book shifts focus away from the propertied subject and on to the broader spaces in and through which the propertied subject is located. Using case studies, such as analyses of compulsory leases under Australia’s Northern Territory Intervention and lesbian asylum cases from a range of jurisdictions, Keenan argues that these spaces consist of networks of relations that revolve around belonging: not just belonging between subject and object, as property is traditionally understood, but also the less explored relation of belonging between the part and the whole. This book therefore offers a conceptually useful way of analysing a wide range of socio-legal issues. It will be of relevance to those working in the area of property and legal geography, but also to those with more general interests in socio-legal studies, social and political theory, postcolonial studies, critical race studies and gender and sexuality studies.

Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging

Subversive Property

Bob Diamond

Steven Coles

This book contests how both society and Mental Health Services conceptualise and respond to madness.

Power and Practice

Madness Contested

Sarah Keenan

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