Book Reviews : JANE M. GAINES, Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice and the Law. London: British Film Institute, 1992, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1991, 340 pp., £14.95 paperback
| Date | 01 March 1993 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399300200106 |
| Author | Steve Redhead |
| Published date | 01 March 1993 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
105-
BOOK
REVIEWS
JANE
M.
GAINES,
Contested
Culture:
The
Image,
the
Voice
and
the
Law.
London:
British
Film
Institute,
1992,
University
of
North
Carolina
Press,
Chapel
Hill,
1991,
340
pp.,
£14.95
paperback.
The
question
of
law
and
representation
is
a
pervasive
one.
It
alludes
both
to
the
idea
of
the
relationship
of
law -
national
and
international
legal
systems -
to
the
means
of
communication
or
the
mass
media
in
general,
and
the
theoretical
question
of
’what
is
the
object
of
law?’,
that
is,
what
does
Law
represent?
It
has
been
widely
assumed
in
contemporary
legal
and
social
theory
that
there
is
increasingly
a
crisis
in
representation;
indeed,
some
of
the
debates
about
postmodernity
and
modernity,
and
modernism
and
postmodernism,
have
centred
on
such
an
issue
as
the
defining
characteristic
of the
end-of-the-century
mood
in
which
we
now
find
ourselves.
Jane
Gaines’s
book,
originally
entitled
Likeness
and
the
Law:
Image
Properties
In
the
Industrial
Age
when
it
was
published
in
the
United
States
of
America
in
1991,
is
an
interesting
contribution
to
legal
and
cultural
studies
in
this
area
and
the
British
Film
Institute
should
be
congratulated
for
bringing
its
theoretical
focus
on
1970s
British
Cultural
Studies
back
home.
Nevertheless,
part
of
the
difficulty
with
assessing
the
overall
influence
of the
book
is
that
the
author’s
determination
to
’demonstrate
the
effectivity
of
the
Marxist
features
of
British
cultural
studies’
through
case
studies
of
the
images
surrounding
Oscar
Wilde,
Jackie
Onassis,
Nancy
Sinatra,
Superman
and
Dracula
leaves
the
reader
in
something
of
a
theoretical
time
warp.
This
feeling
of
participating
in
conversations
from
an
earlier
era -
pre-1980s -
is
further
emphasized
in
Gaines’s
concentration
on
American
Critical
Legal
Studies
(where
European
Marxism
has
retained
its
hegemony)
rather
than
the
later
British
variety
of
CLS
where
debates
around
psychoanalysis,
literary
theory,
postmodernism
and
a
range
of
feminisms
have
pushed
critical
cultural
analysis
in
some
very
different
directions.
Despite
such
major
misgivings
there
are
rich
and
thoroughgoing
investigations
in
the
’empirical’
chapters
into
the
legal
fields
of
privacy,
trademark
protection,
’star’
contracts
and
so
on,
which
should
be
compulsory
reading
for
anyone
interested
in
intellectual
property
law
and
the
communications
media.
If
we
take
the
field
of
intellectual
property,
in
particular
copyright
and
the
law,
and
consider
it
in
the
context
of
a
certain
area
of
inquiry
such
as
cultural
industries,
the
two-sided
nature
of
the
question
of
law
and
representation
can
be
seen.
The
thrust
of
legal
change
in
this
domain
has
come
from
a
delayed
reaction
to
the
new
communication
technologies:
for
instance,
video,
computers,
cable
and
satellite
television.
The
two
statutes
in
Britain
which
mark
the
historical
period
in
question
(the
post-1945
era)
are
the
To continue reading
Request your trial