David Bowie Outlaw

Alex Sharpe is a professor of law at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Sexual Intimacy and Gender Identity ‘Fraud’ (Routledge, 2018), Foucault’s Monsters and the Challenge of Law (Routledge, 2010) and Transgender Jurisprudence (Cavendish, 2002).

• 1.Introduction. 2.Law’s Monsters: the Hopeful Undecidability of David Bowie. 3.Authenticity: What a Drag . 4. ‘Flirting’ with Fascism: The Thin White Duke, Art and Ethical Limits. 5. Cutting Up the Laws of Writing: The Burroughs Effect. 6. Bowie Love: Beyond Law. 7. References

David Bowie Outlaw undoubtedly belongs with those few great texts on music that are equal to the wild glories that inspired their creation. It is as perfectly formed as a Mick Ronson riff. It's like the build from Suffragette City, funnelling and intensifying its own energies. You need to be a great act to pull off a thesis as bold as this: Bowie is a law giver but, unlike most law givers, Bowie’s law destroys the law: the only command is ‘create afresh’. Sharpe’s Bowie is a figure of ethics, or a spirit that knows its own wealth must be constantly squandered. This is not philosophy, this is not jurisprudence, this is a genocide of old ideas and dead forms. Here is the secret Sharpe shares with us: We are Bowie. Adam Gearey, Professor of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London