The Semiotic Fractures of Vulnerable Bodies: Resistance to the Gendering of Legal Subjects

While the turn to vulnerability in law responds to a recurrent critique by feminist scholars on the disembodiment of legal personhood, this article suggests that the mobilization of vulnerability in the criminal courts does not necessarily offer female drug mules a direct path to justice. Through an analysis of sentencing appeals of female drug mules in England and Wales, this article presents a feminist critique of the dispositif of the person and its relation to vulnerability. Discourses on drug mules’ vulnerability mobilize the trope of the colonial victim in need of protection, which is often translated into legal mercy. But mercy is rather an expression of biopower which inscribes not only fragility onto the bodies of drug mules by figuring them as exemplar paradigms of colonial subjectivity, but also reinvigorates the dispositif of gender implicit in the legal person. In this set-up, it would appear as if law and politics totalize the registers of life, in this case the contours of vulnerable body. The article suggests we must revisit the image of the wounded body in order to carve out a space for resistance. Drawing on Elaine Scarry and Judith Butler, it suggests vulnerable bodies are marked by a semiotic openness, which renders them subject to appropriation but also able to signify the precarity produced by the law through their resistance to representation

Sexual difference and the conduct of critique (Nietzsche and Irigaray)

For Nietzsche, a phenomenon, a belief, a mode of knowledge, or of subjectivity, confronts us with the possibility of creating, rather than presupposing, the criteria for its evaluation. In his Untimely Meditations, he widened the parameters of criticizability in just this way, proposing that history might be evaluated from the criterion of whether it is good or bad for life. Nietzsche provokes us to ask what the right question is to bring to history. Stepping back to formulate a response might allow us to appreciate the difference between interrogating the accuracy of historical accounts and assessing their effects.Per a Nietzsche, un fenomen, una creença o una manera de coneixement o de subjectivitat ens enfronta a la possibilitat de crear, en lloc de pressuposar, els criteris per avaluar-lo. En les seves Consideracions intempestives va ampliar els paràmetres de la criticabilitat precisament en aquest sentit, proposant que la història pugui ser avaluada des del criteri de si és bona o dolenta per a la vida. Nietzsche ens impel·leix a preguntar-nos quina és la pregunta correcta que hem de fer a la història. Prendre distància per formular una resposta podria permetre'ns d'apreciar la diferència entre interrogar l'exactitud dels relats històrics i avaluar-ne els efectes.Para Nietzsche, un fenómeno, una creencia o un modo de conocimiento o de subjetividad nos enfrenta a la posibilidad de crear, en lugar de presuponer, los criterios para su evaluación. En sus Consideraciones intempestivas amplió los parámetros de la criticabilidad precisamente en este sentido, proponiendo que la historia pueda ser evaluada desde el criterio de si es buena o mala para la vida. Nietzsche nos impele a preguntarnos cuál es la pregunta correcta que debemos hacer a la historia. Tomar distancia para formular una respuesta podría permitirnos apreciar la diferencia entre interrogar la exactitud de los relatos históricos y evaluar sus efectos

Love discourses, sexed discourses? Luce Irigarays �tre deux

Luce Irigaray's Être deux (1997) synthesises her linguistic research with an interpretation of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Lévinas. The linguistic research focuses on consistency both of an individual subject's discourse, and of the overall research find

Complementarity and Futurity:Looking Back at this Sex which is 'Not One'

What is the future of sexual difference — long considered to constitute a perfect whole, then deemed a limited, even a masculine conception? Insofar as &#8216;two sexes&#8217; ever stood for oppositionality and complementarity, the alternatives appeared to be sexual sameness, identity, or equality. If these options once seemed to saturate the field of conceptual possibilities, new challenges to the imagination of sex have more recently emerged in the languages of différance, queer, trans, assemblage and plasticity. Among these, this lecture reflected on a curiously persistent interest in sexual difference in the emergent field of new materialisms. In fact, these become contexts in which the qualities of a maximal plasticity are attributed to sexual difference. Even Luce Irigaray finds herself reconfigured, and to surprising ends — now seen as offering the resources for going beyond sexual difference. The lecture asked to what extent this form of looking back can be seen as a transformative strategy available for a broader deployment. Penelope Deutscher is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University. Her publications include The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Ambiguity, Conversion, Resistance (2008), How to Read Derrida (2005), A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (2002) and Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy (1997). She co-edited (with Françoise Collin) Repenser le  politique: l’apport du féminisme (2004) and (with Kelly Oliver) Enigmas: Essays on Sarah Kofman, (1999). She is currently working on two projects: From Analogy, on the historical grounding of women&#8217;s rights claims in analogical proximities with  animals, slaves  and sovereigns; and Foucault&#8217;s Children: Thanatopolitics and Reproductive Futurism – elements of which currently appear in South Atlantic Quarterly, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, Theory, Culture and Society, and Telos.Penelope Deutscher, Complementarity and Futurity: Looking Back at this Sex which is ’Not One’, lecture, ICI Berlin, 11 June 2013, video recording, mp4, 25:19 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e130611