Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Of The Monstrous Regiment And The Family Jewels, Marett Leiboff

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

This article seeks to engage with the deeply-imbricated anxieties about post-mortem sperm harvesting, and its subsequent use by widows and fiances, in a small body of case law from Queensland and Victoria and the 2005 recommendations of the Victorian Law Reform Commission. It does so by suggesting that these anxieties can be uncovered through unstated cultural resonances about the 'proper' function of men and women in reproduction. These resonances recall some of the responses to supposed 'unnatural' and 'monstrous' behaviours of women, as they were characterised in the initial stages of the early modern period, when the emerging reason and …