In this chapter, I lay out a theory cataloguing the conditions under which international courts may be expected to issue audacious rulings. This theoretical framework relies on previous literature and insights gathered from interviews with experts in and around the Court. The necessary condition for audacious courts is a wide discretionary space within which they may act without fearing repercussions from states. Yet, such a wide discretionary space is not always given; when it is given, states might still attempt to influence courts through direct or indirect means. Such means include closing down courts’ discretionary space and widespread negative feedback, as well as related threats. International courts, in turn, are compelled to realign their priorities to react to or pre-empt such measures. This is a form of trade-off whereby courts adjust their behaviour to ensure continued access to resources and to preserve their reputation and public image. The chapter also introduces additional factors that increase the likelihood of audacious rulings (i.e., proposed new understandings’ congruence with changing societal needs, legal developments external to the regime, and civil society campaigns).

This chapter explains why the norm against torture and inhuman and degrading treatment dramatically expanded in the period after 1998. Relying on the theoretical framework, it assesses the conditions that made the Court audacious enough to effectuate these resource-intensive positive obligations. First, as a full-time court with compulsory jurisdiction, the new Court came to enjoy a wide discretionary space. This attribute conferred it with judicial courage to issue audacious rulings across the board and recognize a range of important positive obligations under Article 3. Second, there was a growing need for positive obligations in European societies, especially in the aftermath of the Eastward enlargement. Positive obligations were necessary for both the Western and Eastern European countries alike. They served a supplementary role for the protection of rights in Western Europe and played a crucial role in inducting Eastern Europe into a rule of law tradition. Last but not least, creating positive obligations was less likely to raise eyebrows because they were already established in the jurisprudence of other courts and were actively promoted by civil society groups.

In this chapter, I explore how the new Court, immediately after its creation in 1998, enforced increasingly lower thresholds of severity to find a violation under the prohibition of torture and introduced several key positive obligations. I provide a detailed assessment of how, with a few audacious rulings, the new Court reversed the compromises made by the old Court, especially regarding the member states’ national security concerns. Different from the old Court, the new Court could act audaciously across the board. The most visible implication of this was the fact that the new Court accepted almost all the novel claims brought before it—even those concerning resource-intensive positive obligations and the violations perpetrated by private actors. As epitomes of sudden change, these positive obligations assumed a taken-for-granted status not long after their initial acknowledgment. Having described the achievements of the new Court, I also discuss the areas where progress was slower. In particular, I take a look at the Court’s treatment of claims arising from systemic racist policies.

Chapter 1 examines autobiographical accounts of rape in Tracey Emin’s Strangeland (2005), Jana Leo’s Rape New York (2009), and Virginie Despentes’s King Kong Theory (2006). Starting with Emin’s naming and shaming of her rapist as feminist praxis, the chapter continues by focusing upon the powerfully political messages about rape and its social significance delivered by Leo and Despentes. The close readings I offer in this chapter demonstrate that what may initially be recognised as factual descriptions of violence are accounts skilfully crafted to deliver maximum intensity, or what I term ‘affective audacity’. This is channelled to persuade the reader to agree with the wider societal arguments they make. The chapter pays considerable attention to the formal and rhetorical structure of what I describe as ‘body-essays’ to argue that Leo and Despentes repurpose their sexual traumas to argue against social inequality, and that all three authors exhibit new audacity in their resistance of victimhood and refusal of silence.

A short afterward suggests the new audacity archive can be expanded through the inclusion of other writers not tackled in this text and that we will need feminism’s new audacity in these troubled times.

Chapter 2 is concerned with the role of the writer as artist. It focuses on three auto/biographical texts which document the ugly difficulties of writing the self: Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012), Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2012), and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (2012). None of these texts is a pure autobiography: Bechdel’s graphic memoir follows her psychotherapeutic unravelling of her relationship with her mother; Heti’s ‘novel from life’ recounts a crucial friendship between Sheila and her artist friend Margaux; and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines is part memoir, part biographical essay about female writers such as Virginia Woolf, Vivien(e) Eliot, and Zelda Fitzgerald, who she dubs the ‘mad wives’ of modernism. All three texts are interested in female genius and tell of the unravelling of the self from others en route to becoming an artist. I argue that ugliness is crucial to their aesthetic projects: the ugliness of the self and its secrets, the ugliness of writer’s block, the ugliness of betrayal, and the ugly terrain of genius.

Vanessa Place is one of this volume’s more notorious authors. I examine Place’s Tragodía (2010-11), a three-volume publication reproducing court reports written as part of her job as an appellant attorney for convicted rapists and paedophiles. Poetry scholars have hailed the project as a work of audacious feminism. This chapter provides careful comparisons of one of Tragodía’s cases with the original legal appeals documents from which it is drawn and another, non-poetic work by Place, The Guilt Project. I argue that Place’s conceptual audacity complicates and works against her stated feminist politics vis-à-vis the sex workers in the trial. Place provides a highly curated encounter with traumatic material, one which raises ethical questions about audacity’s role in furthering an author’s reputation and how that interacts with her stated feminist position. I use this final chapter to explore the ambivalences and contradictions in the politics of one particularly contentious new audacity author. Taken together, these chapters provide a guide to the contours of new audacity writing, its stakes, its politics, its contradictions, and its challenges to contemporary orthodoxies.

Lupercus is addressed twice in Pliny’s collection, receiving two very different pieces of Quintilianic imitation. Epistles 9.26 is a partner-letter to Epistles 1.20 (subject of Chapter 6), arguing for audacity in oratory. It opens with another window imitation (Institutio 2 and De oratore), and proceeds – I suggest – to some especially free imitatio of Institutio 12.10, completing in quite different fashion the work begun in Epistles 1.20. Epistles 2.5 is a partner to Epistles 7.9 (subject of Chapter 8), and behaves differently again. A relatively short letter, it features dense, eclectic and wide-ranging imitation of the Institutio. More than that: with two more window imitations (Cicero and Seneca the Elder), I argue, the letter miniaturises Quintilian’s first book and styles itself as a belated proem to Pliny’s collection.