Dr Karen O'Connell

Karpin, I.A. & O'Connell, K. 2005, 'Speaking into a Silence:The Australian Constitution and the Rights of Women' in Beverley Baines (ed), The Gender of Constitutional Jurisprudence, Cambridge University Press, New York, USA, pp. 22-47.
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O'Connell, K. 2005, 'The Devouring: Genetics, Abjection and the Limits of Law' in Margrit Shildrick, Roxanne Mykitiuk (eds), Ethics of the Body:Postconventional Challenges, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 217-234.
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"The Devouring" is the Romany term for the Holocaust, in which up to half a million Romany people died and an unknown number were harmed C , (Rittner and Roth 1993). "Devouring" is a word that in the context of , the Holocaust describes a form of destruction that is also consumption. .', In the Holocaust, people, ways of life and thought that were fundamental to European life were not simply expelled, but destroyed in a self- , annihilating violence. The Nazi regime tried to destroy the roots of its . own European culture, steeped as it was in Judaic tradition.

O'Connell, K. 2009, 'The Clean and Proper Body: Genetics, Stigma and Disability Discrimination Law', Australian Journal of Human Rights, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 139-162.
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The dividing line between the stigmatised and normalised, `clean and proper+, body is integral to law. Disability discrimination laws, even as they set out to offer protection to those defined as disabled, entrench the division between normalised self and stigmatised other, projecting onto the `disabled+ body those abject qualities of incapacity or vulnerability that the privileged normalised body seeks to deny. This seemingly static relationship, however, has the potential to be transformed by the disruptive qualities of the new genetics. Genetic technologies create novel forms of abjection, revealing all bodies as flawed and undermining the fantasy of the clean and proper body. This allows for the possibility of a new approach to disability discrimination laws, based on a more ethical relationship between the normalised and stigmatised body

O'Connell, K. 2008, 'Pinned Like a Butterfly: Whiteness and Racial Hatred Laws', Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 1-12.
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This article explores ideas of whiteness and racial harm by focusing on an area of law in which these themes are pivotal: the regulation of racial hatred. Racial hatred provisions in anti-discrimination laws were established to provide a public space protected from offensive or intimidating racist behaviour. However, based as they are in equality doctrines, they also allow whites to bring claims of racial hatred against blacks. How does law respond, and how should it, when white applicants present themselves as victims of racial harm? This article argues for a legal response that makes embodiment central to the resolution of these cases.

O'Connell, K. 2007, ''We Who Are Not Here': Law, Whiteness, Indigenous Peoples and the Promise of Genetic Identification', International Journal of Law in Context, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 35-58.
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In contemporary law, genetic technologies of the body have provided a new layer of complexity to legal determinations of racial identity. Indigenous peoples in particular are often forced to present themselves before law as invisible peoples requesting embodiment, possessing no set identity and requiring a legal determination of their status. In return for their participation in genetic research indigenous peoples have been promised, amongst other things, a reliable identification that would make them visible as indigenous before the law. This article examines genetic and non-genetic approaches to identifying indigenous peoples through a case study of Australian law and argues that while genetic technologies may have little to offer indigenous populations they do hold out the possibility of making visible to whites and white institutions their own obscured racial identity.

Karpin, I.A. & O'Connell, K. 2002, 'Intimate Strangers: law, genetics, Globalisation and the 'Human Family'', Australian Feminist Law Journal, vol. 17, no. December, pp. 63-82.
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MatriLineTM, one of the services offered by the Oxford Ancestors project, a genetic mapping exercise carried out by Professor Brian Sykes of Oxford University, offers women the opportunity of using 'the proven power of mirochondrial DNA to probe into the deep past') MatriLine analyses individual DNA to locate women in relation to a framework of European maternal ancestors, linking them 'to one of seven women: Ursula~ Tara, Helena, Katrine~ Velda, Xenia or Jasmine'

Redman, R., O'Connell, K. 2000, 'Achieving Pay Equity Through Human Rights Law in Australia', Australian Journal of Human Rights, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 107-122.