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Introduction—Popular Cultures and the Law

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10304310500084335

1469-3666

Christy Collis, Jason Bainbridge,

Legal Issues in South Africa

In Bristol, a breastfeeding mother is ejected from a pub on the grounds that she has brought a minor into a drinking establishment, and that a pub is no place for a 'proper' mother.In Austria, public strollers through the city square are confronted with the sight of supposed asylum seekers in a large container, and are asked to vote online, reality TV style, to evict the refugee of their choice from the country.In Queensland, legislators try to decide whether dead human bodies preserved through plastination, then dressed, posed, and exhibited are art or desecration.In the world of a Spielberg film, crimes are forseen and averted before they actually occur.And in movie after movie, lawyers argue, judges pronounce, and courtrooms erupt into cheers or tears as cases reach their conclusion.At first, these instances seem to bear little meaningful relationship to one another.However, as the articles in this special issue demonstrate, they all share a crucial common feature: all of these instances are moments or sites at which the 'domains'or cultural formations--of popular cultures and the law intersect and interpenetrate.Traditional disciplinary approaches to these two potent domains tend to segregate them sharply from one another, and thus to limit understandings of their mutual imbrication: accounts of the legal regulation of popular cultures, on the one hand, and studies of television representations of courtrooms, on the other, are certainly productive, but they too often maintain firm ontological barriers between popular cultures and the law.Further, traditional approaches such as these tend to reify two dangerous assumptions: that the law is somehow separate from culture (the idea of "legal closure" (Blomley, 1994, p. 14)); and that popular cultures' legal work is restricted to fictitious representations of judges, lawyers, criminals, and the police.