Bionic bodies, posthuman violence and the disembodied criminal subject

This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form through the law of homicide and assault. By analysing how the body is materialised through the criminal law’s enactment of death and injury, this article suggests that the biological positioning of these harms of violence as uncontroversial, natural, and universal conditions of being ‘human’ cannot fully appreciate what makes violence wrongful for us, as embodied entities. Absent a theory of the body, and a consideration of corporeality, the criminal law risks marginalising, or altogether eliding, experiences of violence that do not align with its paradigmatic vision of what bodies can and must do when suffering its effects. Here I consider how the bionic body disrupts the criminal law’s understanding of human violence by being a body that is both organic and inorganic, and capable of experiencing and performing violence in unexpected ways. I propose that a criminal law that is more receptive to the changing, technologically mediated conditions of human existence would be one that takes the corporeal dimensions of violence more seriously and, as an extension of this, adopts an embodied, embedded, and relational understanding of human vulnerability to violence

Losing Innocence

This project was inspired by our group\u27s desire to heighten its social awareness as it explored the loss of innocence resulting from impoverishment. As creative writers we chose to explore this theme through poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction—our subjects ranging from working in a women\u27s shelter to college life. Because the process of writing is one of investigation, we developed a deeper understanding of the loss of innocence and a broader interpretation of the meaning of impoverishment, choosing in advance to not limit ourselves to an economic interpretation of the word. We attained our goals through observation, discussion, information gathering, writing, and revision of creative work, meeting frequently to discuss our work and ideas. We strove to bring each individual piece to a publishable quality and plan to submit our works for publication. In the hopes that others will gain from our awareness, .we plan to present our writing at the conference, individually reading our work to the audience