Yoriko Otomo

The Gentle Cannibal: The Rise and Fall of Lawful Milk

Abstract Milk, a globally traded commodity, is ubiquitous throughout our food systems. In light of its ever-increasing production and consumption, this article seeks to contextualise the fluid within a history of its regulation, tracing the role of state intervention in shifting milk feeding from the domestic to the public and to the international sphere; from the sacred and precious to the surplus and profane; and from corporeal matter to industrial material. There is a range of scholarly publications on milk, a couple of them looking specifically at legal aspects of milk production, and some taking feminist or animal welfare approaches to its commodification. The majority deal with either breastmilk and breastfeeding practices, or cows milk production. This article extends the literature by analysing the co-evolution of regulation that, on the one hand, restricted direct human/animal contact in milk feeding while, on the other, enabled the creation of national and global cows’ milk production systems and distribution networks. The argument advanced is that there is no coincidence here: milk, with its symbolic and physiological powers of nurture and purification, plays a central role in securing the political economy of the late modern state and making lawful the bodies of its cities and its citizens. Furthermore, control over female human and animal lives through the process of milk production is an expression of political liberalism that cannot be ignored in any jurisprudence which takes that project seriously.

Gender, War, and Technology: Peace and Armed Conflict in the Twenty-First Century

Since the end of the Second World War, the global order has witnessed tremendous change. Social, behavioural, and economic changes have been shaped in large part by a post-war ideology that presumed scalable inventions could make human life extend further, act faster, andwork cheaper. Technological developments have continued to shape the global order on multiple registers, including in the realm of armed conflict. With the evolution of proxy warfare during and after the Cold War (and the resulting war-weariness among the populations of the Great Powers), the capacity for states to exercise their influence, both remotely and diffusely, has been driving the global military research agenda. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of the Internet, the development of cybernetics/artificial intelligence, and the creation of new genetic and programmable materials as well as laser weaponry. This century such technologies have evolved to produce the likes of drones, the emerging category of lethal autonomous weapons or ‘LAWs’, and other military landbased autonomous and semi-autonomous robots. All of these developments have occurred against the backdrop of a radically uneven global order, intensifying divisions between regions, states, peoples, and groups, and entrenching existing inequalities, both transnationally and within states. The transformation of armed conflict through such inventions has not only shaped targeting methods and the remoteness of warfare, among many other factors, but has also produced an apocalyptic vision of everyday surveillance warfare. This has

Unconditional Life: The Postwar International Law Settlement

Drawing on philosophy, history, and critical theory, this book introduces a new perspective on the significance of post-war international law developments. The book examines the public discourse regarding technological risk in the Second World War texts of unconditional surrender in the World Trade Organization’s EC–Biotech dispute and in the International Court of Justices’ Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion. The volume describes international law in terms of its management of, and relation to, the risks associated with technological innovation in war and in trade. It proposes that international law, too, is itself a kind of technology: one intended to manage the material and existential risks inherent in the creation of a new international, post-colonial, political community emerging out of the Second World War. Members of this community are imagined to possess a universal quality: humanness, which itself is underscored by a power of invention. The book demonstrates how international lawyers’ inability to adjudicate questions of large-scale technological risk is due to the competing and intractable claims of international law. Offering a feminist analysis of the political economy that has created this crisis of governance, the book provides a way of understanding the structural inequities that will need to be addressed if international law is to remain a relevant forum for the adjudication of war and trade into the twenty-first century.

Dogs, Pigs and Children: Changing Laws in Colonial Britain

This special issue emerges out of a symposium of the same name, held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in September 2013. The impetus behind the meeting was to think collectively about the ways in which law has shaped human–animal relationships over time and across continents, within the context of British colonialism. A range of thoughtful and provocative papers were given by scholars from a number of disciplines including theology, childhood studies, critical animal studies, history and law. Why dogs, pigs and children? And why might writing about them find a home in a feminist law journal? Dogs, pigs and children mattered to people. While all three were marginal to the human polis, they (and to extrapolate, animals more generally) played a central role in the everyday lives of most. Dogs as pets, hunters, guardians, fighters and scavengers. Pigs as pets, composters, hide and food. Children as workers, inheritors and companions. Above all, dogs, pigs and children were central to their families and to their communities at large, not only for what they signified in terms of material security, but also for their symbolic power to project the character and capacity of their adult human owner. So perhaps they were not so marginal after all. Liminal, perhaps, but critically important in the roles that they play for human political economy. And in this liminality, dogs, pigs and children have lived through law in similar ways to women: as the property of political actors, as half-subjects or as virtues. Even more acutely than women, they are largely absent as subjects from

Endgame: Feminist Lawyers and the Revolutionary Body

This article examines feminist fantasies of revolution and the revolutionary body, arguing that rather than seeking to substitute for law an order without a name, international law should instead be thought as a space in which to hold onto the question of authority, where crisis and revolution are not singular events but rather, movements that are created by the act of re-reading legal text.

Of Mimicry and Madness: Speculations on the State

This article looks at the deployment of violence between and within states in terms of mimetic desire, using the work of Rene Girard, Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray.