“There Is an Eye on Us”: International Imitation, Popular Representation, and the Regulation of Homosexuality in Senegal

Drawing on data from Senegal, this article develops the concept of pockets of world society to explain how adherence to a liberal vision of gay rights emerges within an otherwise illiberal legal landscape. Pockets of world society appear at the site where the global field of human rights penetrates the national juridical field. Senegal’s Ministry of Justice sits at this juncture. It is a member of both fields but tends toward a logic of international imitation. The ministry accommodates world society’s stance on homosexuality, offering a moderate re-interpretation of its nation’s criminalization, and quietly circumventing local law to enact global scripts of sexual actorhood. In stark contrast, Senegalese courts, located solely within the national juridical field, adhere to a logic of popular representation, rejecting sexual self-determination, insisting on national sovereignty, and carrying out the nation’s criminalization of homosexuality in accordance with both law and collective will. These conflicting logics are driven by external pressures, field membership and position, professional trajectories, and sources of legal legitimacy and social accountability. Finally, I contend that the conflict in Senegal spotlights not only world society’s limits, but its persistent strength and its ability to disrupt the coherence of the law.

Western centrism, contemporary international law, and international courts

The article unpacks the notion of western centrism in contemporary international law by developing a framework to capture its varied patterns. It argues that western centrism can have three different manifestations – systemic, evaluative, and professional – depending on whether it refers to the rationality, the narratives, or the actors at play in the international legal field. The article then discusses three theoretical approaches that can help scholars dealing with western centrism in international (legal) scholarship. These are: (i) the critical readings of those scholars that explain international law through the lens of power and domination; (ii) the Stanford school of sociological institutionalism, which explains international institutions and norms through the role of culture and global scripts; and (iii) post-Bourdieusian reflexive sociology, which analyses the roles of transnational legal elites in colonial and post-colonial settings. Finally, the article reconstructs the experience of the Caribbean Court of Justice in the light of western centrism, demonstrating that, different from what is often argued in the literature, the Court is not a failed replica of the Court of Justice of the EU, but an institution in its own right, with its own approach to international law, its own successes and failures.

Gaining Harmony: Glocal Subjectivity in Two Indonesian films for Children

This paper investigates the representation of glocal subjectivity in two Indonesian films for children, Lima Elang (2011) and Langit Biru (2012) . The notion of subjectivity is crucial in positioning children in the era of globalisation, where children regularly encounter multiple and diverse values. Drawing on McCallum's (1999) proposition of subjectivity and Gutierrez's (2013) glocal subjectivity, the films are analysed using formal system analysis ( Bordwell and Thompson, 2008 ), which takes both narrative and cinematic aspects into consideration. There are two findings from the analysis. First, glocal subjectivity is formed through shared global scripts and signs, though these are somewhat adjusted in response to local signs and values. Second, this subjectivity is represented as agentic development of awareness and understanding; harmony is achieved through local supports. Although there is a blend of global and local subjectivities in the film texts, the glocal subjectivity favours global subjectivity, which reveals the dominant ideology of the text.

Pathways of Global Cultural Diffusion: Media and Attitudes about Violence against Women

Lay people around the world are aware of many global cultural scripts, but the specific pathways through which they are exposed to global and competing scripts remain abstract. I address this theoretical issue through an analysis in contemporary Malawi. I show how transnational organizations promoted media content laden with global scripts denouncing violence against women, while foreign media entertainment organizations spread and inspired content that normalized violence. Exposure to these unique media sources influenced people’s attitudes in opposite directions. Global and competing scripts both may be diffused within the same general source of information and have distinct effects.

Film Adaptation, Global Film Techniques and Cross-Cultural Viewing

Adaptation is often a transcoding into a different set of conventions, and here we argue that print to film adaptations introduce and depend upon a bundle of conventions and techniques which are already globalised and hence facilitate cross-cultural understanding more than print media might do. Films for children and young adults seldom reach a cross-cultural audience, but we contend that this is a consequence of uni-directional globalisation rather than any barriers constituted by the films themselves. In an analysis of narrative conventions and cinematic techniques in film adaptations from China, South Korea and Japan we show that cinematic features enable boundary crossing and ensure childhood experiences are intelligible cross-culturally. These features are broadly of two kinds: elements of narrative, especially global scripts, and cinematic techniques of cognitive and technical kinds. Scripts, whether of general types such as a children's film structure or cause-and-effect structure, or thematic types such as the triumph of the underdog, are widely recognisable. We examine conceptual metaphors, which are intrinsic to human cognition, the visual strategy of emotional mirroring, and film as a metonymic mode which sustains a deeper significance while requiring minimal decoding activity on the part of viewers and promoting mutual understanding between cultures.