Criminal Law, Feminism and Emotions: Thinking through the Legal Unconscious

This book critically engages criminal law issues relating to sexuality and violence in order to argue that an attention to emotions can produce a more nuanced, and more adequate, feminist account of legal subjectivity.

Although the relationship between law and feminism has resulted in a vast body of work, the issue of emotions has not been foregrounded in feminist legal scholarship. Indeed, many feminists have argued that reason and not emotion must provide the foundational basis for all laws and legal reforms; an argument that has led to a division of the legal and the psychic or the emotional into separate and distinct zones. Challenging this separation, the book engages a range of recent criminal law cases and legislations in India in order to advocate for a ‘feminine’ law that embraces its inherent cracks and contradictions. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, the book takes up a range of issues surrounding sexuality and violence in order to propose a shift from viewing law as reason to seeing law as the terrain of messy and contradictory emotional continuums; where legal subjects are viewed in their psychic dimensions, and where law itself is opened up to its own unconscious desires. Foregrounding emotions in this way, the book argues, can offer new insights into the operation of criminal law, and new orientations for feminist ways of responding to, and engaging with, it.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students working in the areas of criminal law, legal feminism, and gender studies.