'Nutty Professors', 'Men in Suits' and 'New Entrepreneurs' : Corporeality, Subjectivity and Change in the Law School and Legal Practice

Abstract

This article is an exploration of the relationship between the social production of heterosexual masculinities and the 'making of men' as legal 'professionals' - as prac tising lawyers and legal academics. The focus is an analysis of the ways in which a range of categories of 'masculine' subjectivities are presently encoded as heterosexual within the institutional and organizational contexts of legal academy and legal prac tice. Theoretically, the article is concerned to explore what insights, if any, may be derived from recent scholarship on the relationship between identity, subjectivity and corporeality when seeking to re-conceptualize what has for some time, and from different perspectives, been identified to be the distinctly masculine cultures of the law school and law firm. How, the article asks, is 'masculinity' embedded in the nego tiations and contradictions of routine cultural practices, the evasions, fantasies and anxieties of 'everyday life' in the legal profession? Far from conceptualizing Woman as 'Other' to a masculine (legal) norm, the article seeks to unpack the nature of this 'norm' via an exploration of the ways in which certain (sexed) subject positions emerge within specific cultural sites and are experienced as encoded 'masculine' phenomena. The article seeks to 'name men as men' in an investigation of the relation ship between 'doing law' and the 'making' of men's subjectivities.