Picking up the question of what FLaK might be, this editorial considers the relationship between openness and closure in feminist legal studies. How do we draw on feminist struggles for openness in common resources, from security to knowledge, as we inhabit a compromised space in commercial publishing? We think about this first in relation to the content of this issue: on image-based abuse continuums, asylum struggles, trials of protestors, customary justice, and not-sotimely reparations. Our thoughts take us through the different ways that openness
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This article challenges much existing scholarship on rape that asserts that the law has reached a best practice plateau and justice for victims is now being held back primarily by the aberrant 'attitudes' of criminal justice actors charged with implementing that law. It contends that previous writing on rape, law and linguistics has failed to adequately account for the question of why law continues to appear systematically deaf to the calls of untold numbers of women for justice in the aftermath of rape. It seeks to illustrate law's continuing complicity in the failure of the institutional response to the crime of rape with particular reference to the rape trial. While purporting to disavow sexist prejudice on one hand, on the other, law makes no ultimate concession to woman's unique sexuate difference. For this reason, it continues to enable the conditions that support the full flourishing of 'attitudes' that prevent the recognition of the crime of rape. This article argues that the law is complicit in its own failure because it is structurally invested, for its own survival and coherence, in the exclusion and erasure of woman's voice, which represents the possibility of a plural form of being and thinking and is thus a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of law.
It has been three years since we held the Feminism, Legality and Knowledge (FLaK) seminar to respond to our developing frustrations and excitement around feminist legal studies and academic publishing. In the wake of our 25th anniversary in 2018, we critically reflect further on our original intention to stock up on decolonising techniques to mix feminism, legality and knowledge whilst building on previous consideration of our self-proclaimed 'international' status. These reflections are prompted by editorial board members' experiences as participants in the Cardiff Law and Global Justice Centre's British Academy-funded Global South Socio-Legal Writing Workshops in Accra (Ghana), Nairobi (Kenya) and Recife (Brazil) in 2018. Following an explanation of the concerns with academic publishing that have prompted this reflection, we provide a narrative of our experiences in each of the three workshops exploring the lessons learned and their impact on our practice as editors and scholars in feminist legal studies. We finish with a renewal of our commitment to decolonise our minds and practices by continuing to struggle to earn the label 'international' for the journal now and in future. A brief introduction to the contents of this issue of FLS follows the reflection.
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