Prof John Kang over at Feminist Law Professors offers up Manliness, Part I: Anyone Call for a Knight?

I know that this blog is called Feminist Law Professors but it seems to me that much of feminism as an ontology is also about masculinity or issues of manliness (consider that notwithstanding its title MacKinnon’s Feminism Unmodified is in substantial ways an untrammeled exploration of hypermasculinity and manliness).

After bringing out the big guns (MacKinnon!) in his defence,  he presents his thoughts on the image of knights and damsels in legal cases. Maybe because I’m constantly engaging in the big Princess Debate with two People I live with (“ok, but, would you like a princess if she wasn’t boring, maman?”),   I thought this looked interesting and I would love to know more about how it plays out in the Canadian context.

I originally assumed that the knights were the judges, but that is not the story that Kang is telling.  I think my assumptions were linked to a presentation I heard recently by McGill Prof Desmond Manderson.  He talked about the historical development of the image of justice as a blind woman in his discussion of Law and the Arts.  I was wondering whether there was a “male” image of justice as a knight/rescuer.  I was also recalling chairing a thesis defence which posited judicial chivalry as an explanatory tool in analysing the sentences meted out to female drug “mules”.  So, another thing to go on my “look into it when you get the time” list.

In any case, I think some of this masculinities scholarship is extremely interesting indeed – Feminist legal scholar Nancy E. Dowd’s “The Man Question” was released in September by NYU Press, and I am intrigued – my copy is on its way.   Here’s a link to an article which was a part of the larger book project.

en garde!