Beyond the script of law: Dildos, tranny cops and protesting anti-terrorism

Abstract

Anti-terrorism initiatives are encroaching further into the freedoms of the liberal subject. The loss of these freedoms, whether real or imagined, need be mourned. This mourning is laborious, painful and sometimes reduced to the condition of melancholia. In the states concerned, protesting against this loss appears both as an effort to get those freedoms back and as an attempt to reckon with the loss. In this article I discuss three scenes of loss; two are protest gestures from the demonstration against the G20 in Melbourne in 2006 and one is from a case study conducted by Freud. These scenes indicate different textures of possibility for protesting loss. In the final scene, I discuss the pe..