Law and the Sexual Politics of Interpretation

How does the law read books or look at pictures? What happens when legal and non-legal orders of interpretation meet up? When staged around representations of the sexual, the result has often been spectacular public events and debates. The aim of this text is to draw together questions of law and its vision of problems, politics - feminist and non-feminist, and combats over interpretation. Three highly visible areas of controversy stand at the centre of the book: disputes about psychoanalysis and incest; obscenity/pornography; and rape trials. The book looks at moments when law intersects with the interpretative techniques of journalism, literary expression, art, psychoanalysis, medical "sexology", and feminism.