Literature, Art and the Democracy to Come: A Legal Approach to The Danish Girl
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Fernando Armando Ribeiro
Fernando Armando Ribeiro is Professor of Law at the Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. His fields of research are: Law and Literature, Philosophy of Law and Hermeneutics. He is also a Judge in the State of Minas Gerais, and Member of the Academy of Letters and Science of Minas Gerais. He is in the scientific board of the journal of Brazilian Judges Association, and was awarded with a Fullbright scholarship as Senior Researcher at the University of California at Berkeley (USA).
Abstract
This paper intends to be a legal-philosophical approach to the film The Danish Girl, which tells the story of the first person to undergo a sex change surgery. However, the paper does not attempt to address the preeminent question in the movie, concerning gender issues. Our proposal comes from the hypothesis of art as the best conceivable place for the invention of an “other” that comes. The reflections brought about by the film point to the very heart of the Law and Humanities movement, since it shows how otherness may precede any conceptual dimension, as well as the important question concerning the possibility (or necessity?) of transformation of Law through art. Therefore, we will try to show how the idea of literature, based on Derrida’s concept, [1] could indicate a possible ethical path to implement the confluence between legal and artistic narratives, presenting itself as a fertile soil for the opening to the otherness that comes, towards the transformation of the very idea of justice.
About the author
Fernando Armando Ribeiro is Professor of Law at the Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. His fields of research are: Law and Literature, Philosophy of Law and Hermeneutics. He is also a Judge in the State of Minas Gerais, and Member of the Academy of Letters and Science of Minas Gerais. He is in the scientific board of the journal of Brazilian Judges Association, and was awarded with a Fullbright scholarship as Senior Researcher at the University of California at Berkeley (USA).
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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- The Law and the Line: The Literary Mirroring of a Paradigm
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- Donʼt Ask Us for Lex. Body Exhibition and Forms of Exclusion
- Research
- A Revenger’s Tragedy
- Translation, Copyright & Authority
- Semantics of Chaos: Modernity, Law and the Commons
- Tubal, Shylock, and the Myth of Venice
- Law Meets Literature: Raphael Lemkin and Genocide Studies
- Literature, Art and the Democracy to Come: A Legal Approach to The Danish Girl
- Book Reviews
- Dale Barleben: Staging the Trials of Modernism. Testimony and the British Modern Literary Consciousness
- Lucky Belder Helle Porsdam: Negotiating Cultural Rights. Issues at Stake, Challenges and Recommendations
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Law and Borders: Territory, Space and Time between Diversity and Protection
- The Law and the Line: The Literary Mirroring of a Paradigm
- Half of a Yellow Sun or the Quest for (and Repression of) New Boundaries in Post-Colonial Nigeria: An International Law Analysis
- Freedom’s Frontiers: The Travails of LGBT Travelers
- Queering the Border: Walter Pater’s “Sebastian Van Storck” and the Apocalypse of the Self
- Donʼt Ask Us for Lex. Body Exhibition and Forms of Exclusion
- Research
- A Revenger’s Tragedy
- Translation, Copyright & Authority
- Semantics of Chaos: Modernity, Law and the Commons
- Tubal, Shylock, and the Myth of Venice
- Law Meets Literature: Raphael Lemkin and Genocide Studies
- Literature, Art and the Democracy to Come: A Legal Approach to The Danish Girl
- Book Reviews
- Dale Barleben: Staging the Trials of Modernism. Testimony and the British Modern Literary Consciousness
- Lucky Belder Helle Porsdam: Negotiating Cultural Rights. Issues at Stake, Challenges and Recommendations
