This paper examines Irish campaigns for condom access in the early 1990s. Against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, activists campaigned against a law which would not allow condoms to be sold from ordinary commercial spaces or vending machines, and restricted sale to young people. Advancing a conception of 'transformative illegality', we show that illegal action was fundamental to the eventual legalisation of commercial condom sale. However, rather than foregrounding illegal condom sale as a mode of spectacular direct action, we show that tactics of illegal sale in the 1990s built on 20 years of everyday illegal sale within the Irish family planning movement. Everyday illegal sale was a long-term world-making practice, which gradually transformed condoms' legal meanings, eventually enabling new forms of provocative and irreverent protest. Condoms 'became legal' when the state recognised modes of condom sale, gradually built up over many years and publicised in direct action and in the courts.
Between 1935 and 1985, Irish law criminalized the sale and importation of condoms. Activists established illegal markets to challenge the law and alleviate its social consequences. They distributed condoms through postal services, shops, stalls, clinics, and machines. Though they largely operated in the open, their activities attracted little direct punishment from the state, and they were able to build a stable network of medical and commercial family planning services. We use 30 interviews conducted with former activists to explore this history. In doing so, we also examine the limits of`illegality' in describing acts of everyday resistance to law, arguing that the boundaries between legal and illegal, in the discourses and practices of those who sought to challenge the state, were shifting and uncertain. In turn, we revisit illegality', characterizing it as an assemblage of varying selectivelyperformed political practices, shaped by complex choreographies of negotiation between state and non-state actors. We wish to thank our informants, and those who assisted us in contacting them, and securing access to archives. We acknowledge funding received from Kent Law School and the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Kent. We are grateful to colleagues for feedback, and to the anonymous reviewers. The title quotation is from speech by DF (clinic doctor, Dublin) speaking at the opening of a new illegal clinic. This article is dedicated to the late Dr. John Waldron, formerly of the Galway Family Planning Clinic.
This article interrogates the contributions that Actor‐Network Theory (ANT) has made, and can continue to make, to the critical study of law. Both within its original field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and beyond, ANT has enabled a reimagining of the ‘social’ as relational, heterogeneous, and fluid. In turn, it has argued for a renewed attention to materiality in social analysis. For law, such approach is potentially fruitful, significant, and disruptive of a number of assumptions of previous (socio‐)legal scholarship. In this article, I sketch out key elements (and critiques) of ANT, previous efforts to bring ANT into law, and discuss its potential for enhancing understandings of law. At the same time, I argue that ANT in law is best approached with a commitment to care, and to kinship, and in conversation with feminist thinkers, legal ethnographies, and the discrete voices of law.
Recent social science scholarship has employed the term “pharmaceuticalization” in analyses of the production, circulation and use of drugs. In this paper, we seek to open up further discussion of the scope, limits and potential of this as an analytical device through consideration of the role of law and legal processes in directing pharmaceutical flows. To do so, we synthesize a range of empirical and conceptual work concerned with the relationships between access to medicines and intellectual property law. This paper suggests that alongside documenting the expansion or reduction in demand for particular drugs, analysts of pharmaceuticalization attend to the ways in which socio-legal developments change (or not) the identities of drugs, and the means through which they circulate and come to be used by states and citizens. Such scholarship has the potential to more precisely locate the biopolitical processes that shape international agendas and targets, form markets, and produce health.
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