Volume 12, Issue 1 - Focus: Articulating the Body Politic: Intersections in Law, Culture, and Society, Ed. Matteo Nicolini

The acknowledgement of the concept of gender identity is a somewhat recent conquest that has come about thanks mainly to the accomplishments of science and modern technology. The Italian system outlines the generally dominant judicial categories and gives only a partial idea of the historical and judicial evolution of the story of gender. History shows that past societies were more tolerant, or simply more accepting of issues of sexuality. Their more relaxed attitude was reflected in culture and literature and in their more open approach towards matters regarding homosexuality, transsexuality, intersexuality and even transvestism. But it was with Shakespeare that the supremacy of heterosexuality and the sexual canons of the dominant culture saw a major shake-up. Shakespeare used devices like the feminization of the male and women playing male parts as narrative pretexts to comment on themes such as the rivalry between the sexes in the contention for power, conflicts that give rise to a symbiosis between genders and disfigurements of the body that overturn the social order that is shaped by gender binary.

On the 16th August 1819, a crowd of around sixty thousand gathered outside Manchester to listen to the renowned radical Henry Hunt. When the crowd appeared to grow restless the authorities ordered in a regiment of Hussars. Eleven were killed, hundreds injured. The radical presses swiftly condemned the “Peterloo massacre.” So, away in Italy, did the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The consequence of Shelley’s anger was one of the greatest poems of political protest in the English language. It was entitled The Mask of Anarchy . This article is about this poem. It asks why Shelley wrote it, what he wanted to say, and how he chose to say it.

This article explores the figure of John Calhoun in two movies, The Gorgeous Hussy (1936), directed by Clarence Brown, and Amistad (1997), directed by Steven Spielberg. In both these movies, John Calhoun’s character had very few but significant scenes that portrayed him as one of those having moral responsibility for the forthcoming Civil War. This representation is in line with the traditional treatment reserved for Calhoun in American history and literature. Building on these cameos in this essay I shall try to reconstruct his thoughts on two matters: States’ rights and slavery.

Charles Dickens’ novels often present a peculiar vision of the mid-nineteenth-century Victorian government and, more generally, of public administration. In Little Dorrit , the author presents his personal critique of a corrupt, nepotistic and detached bureaucracy that works to maintain itself, stifling citizens’ economic initiative in the process and likewise hindering the development of society. In the same novel, however, the author presents the Marshalsea prison as an unexpected example of ‘domestic’ administration, an official institution that simultaneously punishes and protects, and where, contrary to the other public institutions, the protagonists have really been part of.

The article analyses how the features of modern political representation have developed in Spanish constitutional history from a multidisciplinary perspective (political philosophy, political science, constitutional law and literature). Between the eighteenth- to the twentieth-century, indeed, the Kingdom of Spain experienced transformations in the concepts of sovereignty, periodic suffrage, free public opinion, and the free and non-revocable mandate. The article also takes into account how the evolution of concepts at stake affected the evolution of the others.

The aim of this essay is to compare the two House of Cards TV series – the British one and the American one – from a constitutional viewpoint. In so doing, the contribution tries to answer some research questions: how are the constitutional systems of the UK and the US respectively portrayed in the two TV series? More generally, how can contemporary political dramas approach constitutional issues?

The article addresses the different narratives that characterize English constitutional history. It first examines the mainstream narrative, i. e., the retrospective reading of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constitutional events dispensed by jurists and politicians in an attempt to pack the Establishment Constitution. It then focuses on the alternative legal narratives about the Constitution elaborated during the Civil War and the Restoration. Among them, it ascertains John Bunyan’s impact on the Establishment Constitution. Bunyan was a member of the New Model Army, a radical, and a Puritan who ended up in prison. Despite this background, he exerted a strong influence on Victorian society and on Thackeray’s representation of the body politic. As a consequence, Bunyan entered the political discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century when politicians started to reform English representative institutions, and therefore became part of the Establishment Constitution.

This article explores how a selection of films produced in Germany during the period of the Weimar Republic represent and critique the criminal justice system. Its starting premise is that the cinema of the era emerges as an important site for the negotiation of the contemporary crisis of law and justice outside the parameters of official legal procedure and politics. Focusing on a set of key legal and ethical dilemmas surrounding particular paragraphs of the German Criminal Code (§ 218 on abortion, § 175 on homosexuality, § 51 on criminal responsibility attribution), the aim is to exemplify how certain representative films contain and disseminate a popular jurisprudence that both reflects and contributes to contemporary legal-political debate.

Contemporary popular culture uses mythical and cultural symbols like monsters as metaphors in order to analyse and shape society and its trends. A perfect example is Frankenstein’s creature, who is a modern monster able to embody human crisis, desires, and fears about self-identity, inclusiveness and social recognition. In particular, in the field of advertising, the use of monsters sets new boundaries between human society and monstrousness. Indeed, advertising acts as a modern Dr Frankenstein by manipulating and determining who the modern monsters are.

This essay initially identifies and explores issues relating to relativity and relativism in cultural and political matters. It highlights the problematic character of the prime virtue that liberals claim to be the product of this relativistic outlook, tolerance, and points out that relativism equally supports illiberal agendas, as emphasized by Benito Mussolini. The essay then examines Shakespeare’s profound treatment of relativity in his As You Like It , focusing especially upon Rosalind and Orlando’s riddle exchange in Act 3, Scene 2, and the related sequencing of Orlando’s poems. In closing, the essay attempts to show how the West could benefit from revisiting great works of Western literature such as As You Like It , as it grapples with its moral crisis, works which plumbed the depths of the very problems we face today. But we will only garner from these texts the lessons we truly need to learn if we set aside, if only provisionally, the historicist assumptions which have blinded us to the contemporary pertinence and value of an older wisdom which by all appearances is more profound than our own.

Knowledge about the discursive strategies employed in environmental communication when addressing social practices is fundamental in order to understand how the public’s active engagement and behavioral change can be brought about, encouraged or discouraged through environmental discourse. This paper purports to investigate the representation and popularization of environmental rights in media texts, with particular focus on TED talks. More specifically, the analysis aims to explore which and how communicative meanings are continuously constructed around environmental issues. The popularization strategies present in a collection of TED talks are investigated, and processes of accommodation and simplification are analyzed with the aim to point out any discrepancies between the nature of rights in legal texts, and their textual realization in non-legal examples. The analysis traces the malleability of terminology related to environmental rights and shows how the selective usage of qualifying words like “sustainability” and “solidarity” can contribute to the fungibility of the concept of “environmental right” itself. The paper also emphasizes the broad social importance assumed by the mismatch between the need for clear legal definitions and the leverage of vague terminology to favor specific policies.