AIDS and the Sexuality of Law: Ironic Jurisprudence

Review This book will broaden our view of the relation between law, science, and sexuality. The author takes us away from the typical subjects of queer legal scholarship - particularly constitutional litigation on privacy, the military, and marriage - and into the world of the adult theater, the workplace, and the prison in order to illustrate complex conceptual linkages between act and identity, science and the law, politics and epistemology. A pleasure to read. - Martha Merrill Umphrey, Amherst College.AIDS and the Sexuality of Law is an ambitious work in which the author assumes the risks of exploring the constitutive role of uncertainty in appellate-level AIDS cases. This is a convincing exploration of the rhetorical means by which the mechanisms of the closet are strengthened - through legal blindness to scientific evidence and by strategic avoidance of scientific uncertainties. Rollins has made an original contribution to the analysis of legal discourse. - Rosemary J. Coombe, Canada Research Chair in Law, Communication, and Cultural Studies, York UniversityThis is a groundbreaking book. By reading ironically the operations of the 'closets' in the jurisprudence of AIDS, Rollins shows us how cultural knowledge about sexuality operates to render silences, elisions, and the 'unknowable' into potent political forces. - Paisley Currah, Associate Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College of the City University of New YorkThis book will broaden our view of the relation between law, science, and sexuality. The author takes us away from the typical subjects of queer legal scholarship - particularly constitutional litigation on privacy, the military, and marriage - and into the world of the adult theater, the workplace, and the prison in order to illustrate complex conceptual linkages between act and identity, science and the law, politics and epistemology. A pleasure to read. -- Martha Merrill Umphrey, Amherst College.AIDS and the Sexuality of Law is an ambitious work in which the author assumes the risks of exploring the constitutive role of uncertainty in appellate-level AIDS cases. This is a convincing exploration of the rhetorical means by which the mechanisms of the closet are strengthened -- through legal blindness to scientific evidence and by strategic avoidance of scientific uncertainties. Rollins has made an original contribution to the analysis of legal discourse.--Rosemary J. Coombe, Canada Research Chair in Law, Communication, and Cultural Studies, York UniversityThis is a groundbreaking book. By reading ironically the operations of the 'closets' in the jurisprudence of AIDS, Rollins shows us how cultural knowledge about sexuality operates to render silences, elisions, and the 'unknowable' into potent political forces.--Paisley Currah, Associate Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York Product Description Ironic Jurisprudence Secondary Effects The Implicated Homosexual Deliberately Cruel, Unusually Indifferent Punishment Impossible Burdens Irony, Silence, and Uncertainty From the Back Cover This book will broaden our view of the relation between law, science, and sexuality. The author takes us away from the typical subjects of queer legal scholarship - particularly constitutional litigation on privacy, the military, and marriage - and into the world of the adult theater, the workplace, and the prison in order to illustrate complex conceptual linkages between act and identity, science and the law, politics and epistemology. A pleasure to read. -- Martha Merrill Umphrey, Amherst College. AIDS and the Sexuality of Law is an ambitious work in which the author assumes the risks of exploring the constitutive role of uncertainty in appellate-level AIDS cases. This is a convincing exploration of the rhetorical means by which the mechanisms of the closet are strengthened -- through legal blindness to scientific evidence and by strategic avoidance of sci