Teaching Posthumanist Ethics in Law School: The Race, Culture, and Gender Dimensions of Student Resistance
![handle is hein.journals/anim16 and id is 295 raw text is: ESSAY
TEACHING POSTHUMANIST ETHICS IN LAW
SCHOOL: THE RACE, CULTURE, AND GENDER
DIMENSIONS OF STUDENT RESISTANCE
By
Maneesha Deckha*
This Essay challenges laws' hegemonic humanist boundaries by analyzing
the challenges involved in mainstreaming posthumanist subjects into the
legal curricula. Posthumanist subjects in legal education are perceived as
marginal and unworthy of serious discussion and scholarship. The author
identifies the problems that can arise in introducing posthumanist critical
content through her experience of teaching animal law as an optional course
and as a part of a compulsory first-year course on property law and in ad-
vising on an upper-year student-led conference. She argues that the biases
related to gendered, racialized, and otherwise differentiated norms inher-
* © Maneesha Deckha 2010. Maneesha Deckha is an Associate Professor at the
University of Victoria School of Law. She received her B.A. from McGill University in
1995 and her LL.B. from the University of Toronto in 1998. Called to the Bar in Ontario
in 2000, Professor Deckha practiced with the Ontario Government until 2001 and then
earned her LL.M. at Columbia Law School. She joined the University of Victoria
Faculty of Law as an Assistant Professor in 2002. Her research interests include femi-
nist legal theories, law and culture, bioethics, and the boundaries between property and
personhood, especially as they relate to nonhuman animals. Her work has been pub-
lished in the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, the Osgoode Hall Law Journal,
the Hastings Women's Law Journal, the UCLA Women's Law Journal, the Harvard
Journal of Gender and Law, the Journal of Animal Law and Ethics, the Stanford Jour-
nal of Animal Law and Policy, the Medical Law Review, Ethics & the Environment, the
Wisconsin Journal of Law, Gender and Society, and the Yale Journal of Law and Femi-
nism. She has taught Bioethics, Personhood and the Law, Feminist Legal Theories,
Property, Administrative Law, and Legal Process. In 2006, her seminar on Animals,
Culture and the Law received the U.S. Humane Society's Animal and Society New
Course Award. She is a member of several academic and professional associations and
has received numerous grants and awards. In 2008, Professor Deckha was promoted to
Associate Professor at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law and was also selected as
a Canada-U.S. Fulbright Scholar to take up the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Visiting Chair
in Law and Society at New York University for the Fall 2008 semester.
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Teaching Posthumanist Ethics in Law School: The Race, Culture, and Gender Dimensions of Student Resistance
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