This article examines the intelligibilities and unintelligibilities through which the sense and nonsense of the male body in its sexual relations with other male bodies is made in law. Taking as its point of departure a recent high profile prosecution against seven men, `the Bolton Seven', for consensual sexual relations, its particular focus is the metaphors of space through which the truth of this male body is imagined within the law. The article examines the simultaneous production of various spatio-corporeal regimes (...) within the specific context of English law. Through these regimes the flesh is made law and law is made flesh. (shrink)

Early in the course of undertaking empirical research on the sexual diversity of the judiciary I had to address a particular challenge. Sexuality, I was repeatedly told, is not and ought not to be a difference that is taken into account. At best it ought to be disregarded or taken out of consideration. This generated a number of challenges for my research. How do you research and make sense of sexuality as a difference that key informants assert is absent or (...) seek to make invisible and irrelevant? How do you research the operation and effects of that which is not to be spoken about? How do you research the sexual norm when its existence and operation is denied? This article explores one response. It is a project that may for some be surprising and unexpected. It is a study of judicial portraits. Drawing on the insights of queer theory and art historical scholarship on portraits I undertake a textual analysis of these images, focusing upon the aesthetic and artistic traditions used to make them. A small case study of portraits of the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of New South Wales is used to explore how, if at all, sexuality figured in these portraits. (shrink)