The Scarlet Letter | Season 1 | Episode 10| Richard Joyce

It’s a big-picture, no-easy-answers kind of chat with Dr. Richard Joyce this episode. He takes us on a brain-tingling journey through sovereignty, power, and feminist critique—with a good dash of self-reflection along the way. Dr Joyce talks about how feminist theory has shaped his perspective as a scholar, teacher, and as one of the few men in the Feminist Legal Studies Group. From his early influences to the gendered roots of legal authority, he unpacks how patriarchy, politics, and personal responsibility all intersect in his work. Tune in for an episode that challenges assumptions and celebrates the joy of questioning everything.

First published 2017.

The Scarlet Letter podcast is produced by the Feminist Legal Studies Group. This podcast features interviews with feminists connected to the law, discussing their life, work, and feminist perspectives. It's perfect for anyone passionate about feminist legal scholarship.

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Transcript | The Scarlet Letter | Season 1 |Episode 10| Richard Joyce

Tamara Wilkinson: [00:00:00] Good morning. I'm Tamara Wilkinson and welcome to this episode of The Scarlet Letter, the monthly podcast of the Feminist Legal Studies Group at Monash University's Faculty of Law. Today I'm joined by Dr. Richard Joyce. Richard joined the Faculty of Law in 2011, and he teaches and researches in the areas of international law and legal theory, with a particular focus on the nature of modern sovereignty.

He's the author of Competing Sovereignties, which was published by Routledge in 2012, and a number of articles in the field. Richard also serves as a member of the global faculty at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. Welcome Richard. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Richard Joyce: Thanks Tamara. It's a great pleasure to be here.

Tamara Wilkinson: Richard, perhaps you can start by telling us a bit about what [00:01:00] feminism means to you personally.

Richard Joyce: It's an interesting question. I guess that, and it's wrapped up I guess in, in lots of what feminism stands for. It's a mixed question of politics, of professional responsibility and also personal attitudes I think and relationships as well.

I guess for me, Professionally, and politically, I think it's really a challenge. So it's a consistent challenge to question the assumptions under which I undertake my own research. The kinds of questions that I think are worth pursuing and the approach that one should take to them.

Tamara Wilkinson: Yeah, definitely. I had the privilege of sitting in on one of your seminars last week where you talked to us a bit about critical legal theory and we talked a bit about the extent to which that sort of overlaps a little bit with feminist legal theory, which I found really interesting.

Is that something that you focus at all on in your work?

Richard Joyce: Increasingly so my research that I undertook on my PhD [00:02:00] hasn't got a strong feminist theoretical grounding to it in the sense that the theorists that I use are themselves used by feminists. People like Jacques Derrida, or Jean Luc Nancy, or Peter Fitzpatrick Michel Foucault.

All of these authors are taken up, are engaged with feminist theories.

But are not themselves feminist theorists, and of course they're all men. And so that produces a kind of concern that if you're, as I was, looking at ways in which standard conceptions of sovereignty, of authority, of subjectivity are being constructed, one really ought to engage more with feminism.

And I guess that's why it continues to pose a challenge to me about, how to The sources that I use and and expanding that. I guess the other key influence has really been graduate students, actually. The kinds of work that I supervise. And my colleague, of course, that I supervise with is Janice Richardson quite a lot.

And of course I'm learning a huge [00:03:00] amount from her and and her incredible depth of knowledge about feminist theory. And so you find things that you understood intuitively or through the work that you're doing, which touch on feminism. But which more work needs to be done.

Tamara Wilkinson: Yeah, that's excellent. What a great source of knowledge to draw on from Janice. She's incredible.

Richard Joyce: She knows so much. It's a wonderful colleague in that regard. And it's

I think it's important to retain that open mindedness. That's one of the things that feminism provides. And the other thing I think that it's useful is that it is it's engaged combination of difficult, complex theory with political practice. Yeah. Lots of theorists that I might work with, and I might be accused of this myself, are engaging in theory without being setting out a blueprint for political action.

Yeah. Feminism in a sense doesn't have that luxury that sort of, clearly there can be feminist theorists who aren't engaged in day to day politics, but it's it seems to be all wrapped up in in questions of of active [00:04:00] politics, as well as in, in questions, very difficult questions of theory, which I find a very exciting combination.

Tamara Wilkinson: Yeah. And even to feminism outside the law, has the slogan, the personal is political. Yeah. That's really interesting. So obviously you're one of just a couple of men in our feminist legal studies group here at Monash. You're very welcome. Is there a point when you began to identify as a feminist sort of in a concrete way?

Richard Joyce: So one, hopes that one has always been a feminist, but maybe you didn't realize it. And so probably at university, I would have thought And gaining a better understanding about what feminism really was about. And I think now, I'd like to think now students coming through, even in high school, really should have a better understanding of what feminism is about than I would have had when I was at school.

And I think that is happening more and more. And I think this is programs like safe schools and other things that are really helping students understand different forms of identity and different attitudes clearly is informed by feminist [00:05:00] approaches to how subjects subjectivities are formed and how to support people through different identity challenges that they might have.

So I think a lot of that. Had that been available to me at the time would have been useful and I guess I probably came to it a little bit later than I'd like to say, but I think now if you're not a feminist, I really think, if you're a pop star or a politician, you're really saying, I'm not a thinking person.

I don't, I don't want to question the privilege. I don't want to question the way in which gender roles are formed.

I think everything's fine. And I think, to reject the label is a quite now significant reactionary move that has its own sort of political content.

It's not just a quiet ignorance that one can claim now to say I don't really know if I'm a feminist or I don't really know if I agree with X and Y's approach or whatever. I think it's now to say you're not a feminist is a is, as I said, a significant reactionary move.

Tamara Wilkinson: Yeah. And certainly with the rise of the internet and social media. As you said, everyone's becoming more aware of these things [00:06:00] from hopefully from the high school age. It certainly wasn't something I was particularly familiar with in high school.

Richard Joyce: And I think also as a it's a question of professional responsibility as an academic in a field like law, which is now well represented at the student level by an equal gender split.

Yeah. But we're, putting students into a profession with significant gender inequality, both in the upper reaches of academia and in the legal profession itself.

If we're not actively doing things to try to break down those barriers that students face, then I don't think we're doing our job properly.

Tamara Wilkinson: That's a really interesting way to think of it, and I love it, that's fantastic. Yeah. Professional responsibility. So moving on to a sort of. different but related topic. I was wondering if you could tell our listeners a little bit about your area of research and what you're working on at the moment.

Richard Joyce: Yeah, thanks. My research focuses around the question of sovereignty and how is it that we come to be governed by law and what really lies at the heart of [00:07:00] claims to exercise legal authority.

So often these ideas are just assumed. So we think, okay as long as a law is passed by the parliament, according to its proper processes, and that parliament is acting within the constitution, that we have a valid law.

And we then as people, Members of that community are subject to it and bound by it, which is fine. But it becomes problematic when you have particular kinds of challenges to the underlying ground. What is it that makes our constitution valid? What was it that happened at the time, say in 1901 in Australia or in 1788 in Australia?

Or in, 1789 in France, or in 1776 in the U. S. that created these foundational moments. And what at that time was excluded? What about Indigenous rights? What about women's rights and so on? How were those questions formed? And if you go back to those moments of rupture and look at the ground. What you find if you take it [00:08:00] seriously, I think is a still active and fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of legal systems that continually poses itself and creates a problem but also an opportunity, right?

So one could understand the long history of struggles for say land rights in Australia as a continuing question of sovereignty. And we're now talking about things like a treaty and so on, which will be yet another attempt to resolve, in a sense, an irresolvable problem. How is it that a political community that was here for 40, 000 years suddenly has to accommodate itself to a much younger political community?

Yeah. Why is one a better grounded source of authority than another?

These questions in a sense can't be answered. And, my research is really leaning towards an idea that As between rival claims to authority which have different and, I say, incommensurable grounds, they just can't be based on the same idea.

Yeah. One has to suspend a hierarchy. One has to assume that in fact what we have is a relation between different sources of authority.

And that I think creates [00:09:00] interesting questions of responsibility interesting questions of authority that us to see problems in new lights and give voice to political concerns which might otherwise be be subjugated.

Tamara Wilkinson: Yeah. That's really fascinating and when you were talking about it, it made me think about the power structures that govern our lives in society, In a non legal sense, but also in a legal sense, in the idea that, the patriarchy, it's similar to this idea of sovereignty that you said we tend to go along with it, less so now.

Richard Joyce: No, and these things are not unconnected. So a lot of the early Enlightenment theorists who gave us, in a sense, our doctrines of sovereignty that we apply in, in, in modern Western political communities modeled their ideas on the head of the household. Yeah. This is the sovereign over a natural family community. Yeah. In the same way that political sovereigns govern over their people. And it's even in that move, there's that shift from natural [00:10:00] sources of authority to conventional sources of authority. And so you have theorists like Rousseau will say we're going to create something wholly in a sense, wholly new.

We're not going to be bound by religious authority or by inherited authority. Yeah. monarchical authority. Those things are really conventions. They're not natural. We can challenge those. And yet the authority of the father in the household is not challengeable.

Kant would say that, anybody can be a citizen except all women, and if, and domestic servants and a few other people.

So it's interesting to think of those groundbreaking moments in theory where we really shifted from one paradigm to another lift. women's rights on the outer of that transformation. And so clearly then there has been there was work to be done in what are these legacies of the enlightenment?

What is the unfinished business of the enlightenment? And I think feminism clearly is one of those things.

Tamara Wilkinson: Yeah. And in a similar way, I think sort of modern feminism It aims to not do the same thing again, in the sense that [00:11:00] while we're advancing women's rights, we don't want to leave behind the rights of people of color or, the rights of non binary genders and things like that.

So that's really fascinating. And

Richard Joyce: I think that's, and that's one of the great things I think about feminism is it's are the contradictions that It's provoking. And in a certain sense, it's almost self critiquing mode of activity. There's to say that one's a feminist is to really throw oneself into a massive challenge.

How do you account for how it is that we become who we are? These are very difficult questions. What are the power structures that go into that? And those are questions which you have to then take issue with your own privilege, whether it be racial economic,

to do with sexual preference, to do with education, any number of different things.

To which certain strands of feminism will be subject to those critiques, absolutely. And I don't think that's to the discredit of feminism. I think that's to its ultimate, one of the reasons for its ultimate success. If you're not interested in easy answers. Then you're fine. If you really want easy answers, then feminism, like lots of things, will be [00:12:00] disappointing.

Tamara Wilkinson: Yes. Yeah, it's very true. And when you're critiquing the system from within the system you do have to grapple with those questions and, yeah, have a lot of, personal reflection.

Yeah. Obviously, we've talked a little bit about the connection between your work and feminist legal theory.

And I think it's pretty clear as well that there's A connection between your work, the areas that you're interested in, and your own personal feminist outlook. As you said, you're very concerned to, to look at the sources that you're using making sure they're inclusive and things like that.

It's really, it's great.

Richard Joyce: Yeah, I mean I think it's, in a sense it's difficult. How does one incorporate feminist thinking into your work? But also not there, there are, there's a specialty that I don't do in a sense, and so there are people like Janice who are experts in feminist legal theory who provide excellent support for colleagues.

And you think I'm not just suddenly going to become Janice Richardson because I [00:13:00] am interested in feminism, but I need to think about just continually think about the way in which feminist theory might be relevant or impact. Start to think. I wouldn't say that. The sources that I, there's a go around looking for sources in order to have a gender balance as such, but just to, to think about sources that if I'm can incorporate that substantive theory in, but it's one of those things, I guess we, if you're looking at the history of sovereignty, and you're looking at critiquing, and the same thing can be said, of course, for its cultural biases as well.

My target really is the conception of modern sovereignty and that, that conception was created by mostly white men.

Tamara Wilkinson: Yeah, of course.

Richard Joyce: And so I need to understand what those white men said order to mount a critique of them.

Conscious, of course, that I am also a white man and that I have, and it's a way of understanding that people who have been educated in a legal structure, in a sense they created, their inheritor as well as their critic.

So it's looking at ways of understanding that both personal and and intellectual engagement.

Tamara Wilkinson: Yeah. Yeah. That's really [00:14:00] interesting. Thank you so much, Richard. This has been a really fascinating discussion that I've enjoyed very much. And it's been great to hear a bit more about your work. So we really appreciate it.

Richard Joyce: And thanks Tamara for the opportunity. It was great to chat.

Tamara Wilkinson: Thank you all for listening to this episode of The Scarlet Letter. You can catch us again next month on SoundCloud, iTunes, or on our blog, which is found at feministlegalstudies. wordpress. com. And don't forget to subscribe to The Scarlet Letter to make sure you never miss an episode.