Ethics beyond immanence: rupturing law’s method through sex research

The law defines the sexuality of bodies in limited terms. The law draws lines across the body which force it into identification and categorisation (male, female, straight, gay, human, non-human). These definitions conflict with the materialities of the body and the materialities of the encounter of sex, which are inclined to ‘push’ at and reterritorialize these boundaries. Legal and ethical frames restrict the ability of law and of research to access the encounter of sex, where bodies push these limits by moving, touching, kissing, fucking, caressing and becoming. I claim that ethics as contextual laws that derive from encounters carry the potential to subvert the subjugation of bodies from law’s inside. This subversion is dependant on establishing access to the encounter, which I argue is possible through methodologically radical sexuality research. The researcher’s body is also a sexed body, and I claim that by situating, and tracing the process of situating the ‘I’ within research, the ‘soul’ of the individual finds itself connected to the collective, through lines drawn across it by law. These lines can be ‘ruptured’ through their reconnection to the encounter of sex, which draws law deeper into the encounter itself, such that law can be disrupted through desire into becoming radically ‘ethical’. Through the deployment of Deleuzian Conceptual and Methodological Tools, I frame the basis through which law can become-ethical. The creation of this theoretical frame brings me and my thesis to wade through the ‘waves’ of real encounters with the field, at a nudist beach at Cap D’Agde in Southern France. In the course of doing so, I become reflexive and critical of the Deleuzian conceptual and methodological tools and whether even radical and immanent philosophy is equipped to assist the law in becoming-ethical in its judgment of sex. I claim that access to the encounter and to disrupting law towards radically bodily-sensitive judgment and ‘measuring’ of encounters is a ‘practical’ endeavour. This is the radically ethical responsibility of the Researcher-Practitioner: A lawyer-researcher body who is deployed into the field to subvert the spectres of law and sexuality through practice, which is traced presence within the real, fleeting, everlasting, intimate, joyful, painful, banal, profound, hot, heavy, fast, slow, violent, gentle and sand-drenched encounter of sex itself.

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

PhD thesis

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Westminster

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Brooks, V.

Identifier

oai:westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk:9z8wv

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk:9z8wv