Naomi Mezey

Cultural analysis, cultural studies, and the law : moving beyond legal realism

Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law is a field-defining collection of work at the intersection of law, cultural analysis and cultural studies. Over the past few decades the marked turn toward claims and policy arguments based on cultural identity—such as ethnicity, race, or religion—has pointed up the urgent need for legal studies to engage cultural critiques. Exploration of legal issues through cultural analyses provides a rich supplement to other approaches—including legal realism, law and economics, and law and society. As Austin Sarat and Jonathan Simon demonstrate, scholars of the law have begun to mine the humanities for new theoretical tools and kinds of knowledge. Crucial to this effort is cultural studies, with its central focus on the relationship between knowledge and power. Drawing on legal scholarship, literary criticism, psychoanalytic theory, and anthropology, the essays collected here exemplify the contributions cultural analysis and cultural studies make to interdisciplinary legal study. Some of these broad-ranging pieces describe particular approaches to the cultural study of the law, while others look at specific moments where the law and culture intersect. Contributors confront the deep connections between law, social science, and post-World War II American liberalism; examine the traffic between legal and late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scientific discourses; and investigate, through a focus on recovered memory, the ways psychotherapy is absorbed into the law. The essayists also explore specific moments where the law is forced to comprehend the world beyond its boundaries, illuminating its dependence on a series of unacknowledged aesthetic, psychological, and cultural assumptions—as in Aldolph Eichmann’s 1957 trial, hiv-related cases, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent efforts to define the role of race in the construction of constitutionally adequate voting districts. Contributors. Paul Berman, Peter Brooks, Wai Chee Dimock, Anthony Farley, Shoshanna Felman, Carol Greenhouse, Paul Kahn, Naomi Mezey, Tobey Miller, Austin Sarat, Jonathan Simon, Alison Young

The Distribution of Wealth, Sovereignty, and Culture Through Indian Gaming

Postmodern, Traditional, and Culture as Negotiation-and concludes that, by not considering the cultural choices it creates, the IGRA fails to provide an effective means of strengthening tribal sovereignty and economic development. In particular, Ms. Mezey stresses the IGRAs ironic effect of forcing tribes to surrender some measure of sovereignty in order to exercise the federal gaming right. She also suggests that those tribes that reap the greatest benefits from the IGRA may suffer least from the problems the statute sought to eliminate. I. POSTMODERN CONSUMERISM AND GAMING The Rabbi told my great great grandfather that if he wanted to cure his gambling addiction, he would have to move from Miskolc, Hungary to New York City. The move saved him from the pogroms and the Nazis, but needless to say, it did nothing for his gambling problem.

Dismantling the Wall: Bisexuality and the Possibilities of Sexual Identity Classification Based on Acts

As rhetorical categories, heterosexuality and homosexuality loom as large over our political culture as they do over the personal identities of most Americans. Sexual identity is constructed both privately and publicly, as much in intimacy as in political battle. Privately, it is difficult to divorce identity from conduct because both are inextricably part of who we are. In public discourse, however, identity and conduct are rhetorically segregated. While something of a fiction, this decoupling has an enormous effect on how we understand and enforce the categories of heterosexual and homosexual. This article explores how these terms acquire their categorical potency and exclusivity, as well as how definitions of sexual identity mask a great variety of sexual practices that do not fit neatly into either category. Bisexuality is one valuable way of accounting for and articulating the discrepancies between those people who call themselves heterosexual or homosexual and the sexual acts they actually perform. The categories are rhetorical (as opposed to real, in the sense of connoting an actual set of sexual practices) because of a disjuncture between the concepts of homosexual and heterosexual and the sexual acts they claim to signify. These categories effectively delineate and control the expression of sexual identities within cultural and political discourse without being able to control or even account for sexual behavior. The categories are also rhetorical, or discursive, in the sense that homosexuality and heterosexuality maintain their bipolarity through the very language that constitutes them, a language that represents and reproduces mutually exclusive identities within a system that purports to account for all possible choices. One irony of the salience of homosexual and heterosexual as clearly understood identities is that the