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

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. While it is commonly assumed drug mules are vulnerable because they swallow drugs—an act carrying the risk of death—drug mules’ vulnerability is more complex and arguably arises from the limited control they have over the process of trafficking drugs across international borders for others. For example, someone else prepares their suitcases preventing them from knowing if someone planted something in their bags or, if they accepted carrying drugs, the quantity and type of substance and quantity [62].

  2. As it will become clear later, rather than representing the traditional image of the Virgin Mary, Maria could also be seen to represent a hysterical woman who rebels against the impossibility of symbolizing herself and her own desires. For an eloquent feminist analysis of the Virgin Mary, see Eluned Summers-Bremmers, where she argues that the subversive character of the hysteric in Kristeva’s poetic vision of Stabat Mater, is that it confronts readers with the ‘maternal body at the point where it is effaced by language’ [63, p. 187].

  3. The Court of Appeal in Lewis and Ors actually stated that the new roles (subordinate or lesser, significant, and leading) mirror old names used prior to the guidelines, described by Hallet LJ as “generals, lieutenants and foot-soldiers” [13, p. 5].

  4. Common law jurists have described law as a beautiful flirty woman, ‘patient housewife’, an old shrew, or an erratic careless woman [36].

  5. In the UK, black and Asian minorities are disproportionately targeted for stop and search regarding drugs and more likely to receive a custodial sentence in comparison to white offenders [64, 65].

  6. Human rights violations in countries and regions with harsh drug laws and militarized police functions mobilized to uphold these laws are rampant, affecting not only presumed drug offenders but putting the general population at risk of civil and human rights violations too [66–69].

  7. Scarry describes in the following quote the confrontation between the witness and wounded body and the transformation elicited by its semantic ambiguity, which in this case, points to the question of belonging when the whole body is so radically alter to the point it becomes a wound: “Does this dead boy's body "belong" to his side, the side "for which" he died, or does it "belong" to the side "for which" someone killed him, the side that "took" him?” [59, p. 119].

  8. Indeed, the role of metaphors in bringing into light or relegating to obscurity the lives of injurable bodies finds a parallel in Gilles Deleuze’s exposition of the dispositif, generally translated as a ‘social apparatus’. The latter distributes the “visible and the invisible, giving birth to objects which are dependent on it for their existence, and causing them to disappear” [69, p. 160]. Among other things, Foucault concerned with tracing the ‘lines of sedimentation but also the lines of “fracture”’ [69, p. 159] understood also as force vectors generating creative thresholds.

  9. So many of the objects of our world are created to relief the body in pain by replicating the body’s structure: a chair relieves an aching body as it mimetizes the spine, a house provides relief from cold mimetizing the skin, etc. [59].

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Acknowledgements

This article is partly based on the doctoral research titled ‘Drug mules and the limits of criminal law from the perspective of gender and vulnerability’ (2015), which was funded by Kent Law School’s research scholarship (2010–2013). Emilie Cloatre, Carolina Y. Furusho, Jennifer Fleetwood, Arturo Sanchez Garcia, Thomas Giddens, and Yvette Russell deserve special gratitude for reading and giving extremely poignant comments to the earlier versions of this article.

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    Nayeli Urquiza-Haas

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Urquiza-Haas, N. The Semiotic Fractures of Vulnerable Bodies: Resistance to the Gendering of Legal Subjects. Int J Semiot Law 30, 543–562 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9502-9

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