Law’s Changing Bodies: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Law and Embodiment

Abstract

Feminist scholars and theorists have long engaged with the body and questioned its relation to law. This special issue continues this legacy, while also drawing on and contributing to more recent scholarly interest in embodiment, gender and law. The issue was inspired by a wish to foreground the body, embodiment and lived experience in relation to law, from both contemporary and historical perspectives. It examines the ways in which lawmay preclude, encourage, marginalise or stratify certain kinds of embodiment, and how particular kinds of embodiment may be gendered, sexed, classed and/or racialized, includingby lawand legal institutions. Suchdiscussionsquestion the embodied consequences of particular legal decisions, and vice-versa, potential modes of embodied resistance that might drive legal, and broader social, change. What bodily effects and embodied affects are shaped by law,whetherdirectlyor indirectly, andwhat are the embodied consequences of such decisions/omissions?What theoretical or methodological perspectives can enhanceorenrichourunderstandingof the relationshipbetween lawand the body, and law and embodiment? We have also sought to attend to recent developments across varied disciplineswhich challenge commonunderstandings of the body as individuated and static – instead exploring the inherent plasticity of the body, and the ways in which embodiment is relational, situated, subjective and continuous. Many of the articles in this issue follow those whose bodies and modes of embodiment are marginalised – such as prisoners, trans young people, children of misattributed paternity, birthing fathers, the colonised – and their journeys of engaging with, and disrupting, legal orders and institutions. We see in these accounts a complex interaction between old and new legal imaginaries and sensoria, as well as the difficulties faced by legal decision-makers in grappling with the inadequacies of simplistic, cis-heteropatriarchal understandings of gendered/sexed bodies. As several of our authors demonstrate, while such disruption may be productive in the sense of challenging exclusion or hierarchy, we must continue to question law’s emancipatory potential. Hegemonic notions of whose bodies are violable, or how bodies are gendered/ sexed, often persist in unexpected or unintended ways.