The Boundaries of Legal Personhood: Disability, Gender and the Cyborg (original) (raw)
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VULNERABLE BODIES? GENDER AND LEGAL NORMATIVITY 1
Valeria Giordano, 2021
The plural voices of feminism in the twentieth century, in the construction of the signifier woman, have redesigned in a critical key the relationship between biology, society, culture, problematizing dichotomies traditionally expressive of patriarchy. Today, these dichotomies appear to be strongly in tension in the neo-liberal scenario, in which the use of empowerment devices raises multiple questions about the limits of law with respect to bare life, generating a profound reflection on the boundaries between self-determination and social vulnerability.
Cyborgification and the Disabled Body
2016
In this thesis I aim at unpacking the ways in which traditional theories about disability fail to view the disabled body in an accurate way. I examine the advance of prosthetic technologies as they relate to disability and suggest that in this way the disabled person is a very good example of a cyborg. I then apply cyborg ideologies to ideas of disability and suggest the cyborgification of the disabled body is beneficial both from a flourishing and an ideological standpoint. I finally consider and respond to some objections against advanced prosthetics and transhumanism more broadly.
Clinical Ethics, 2021
The rapid advancement of artificial (computer) intelligence systems (CIS) has generated a means whereby assistive bionic prosthetics can become both more effective and practical for the patients who rely upon the use of such machines in their daily lives. However, de lege lata remains relatively unspoken as to the legal status of patients whose devices contain self-learning CIS that can interface directly with the peripheral nervous system. As a means to reconcile for this lack of legal foresight, this article approaches the topic of CIS-nervous system interaction and the impacts it may have on the legal definition of "persons" under the law. While other literature of this nature centres upon notions of transhumanism or self-enhancement, the approach herein approached is designed to focus solely upon the legal nature of independent CIS actions when operating alongside human subjects. To this end, it is hoped that further discussion on the topic can be garnered outside of transhumanist discourse to expedite legal consideration for how these emerging relationships ought to be received by law-generating bodies internationally.
The Bionic Body: Technology, Disability and Posthumanism
Body, Space & Technology , 2024
This paper looks at the new field of posthuman disability studies and its potential to provide a theoretical framework for critical theory's engagement with modern technologies. Historically, the human body, as represented and defined on stage and in art, has maintained a strictly defined visual integrity. Anything not shaped as 'human' was typically deemed monstrous (from hybrid mythological creatures to severely disabled 'elephant men'). Simultaneously, the category of 'human' was used to circumscribe the boundaries of belonging and the categories of valuation: some groups, including the disabled, were deemed 'sub-human' and designated to either be disposed of (as the carrier of 'life unworthy of life') or, if possible, to approximate the 'human' body. (Romanska 2019: 92-93). Until very recently, the goal of the prosthetics industry was to create limbs that would serve as visual stand-ins for missing limbs. Similarly, the technological capacities of prosthetic limbs were delineated by human capacities: the disabled were to be given as many 'abilities' as the non-disabled, but no more. However, this perception of what the disabled body can and should do has changed with technological progress: not only do the newest prosthetics often look as 'unhuman' as possible, but their capacities put into question the capacities and limits of the non-disabled body. All of these and other issues that have emerged in recent years at the crossroads of posthumanism, disability, and biomimicry have led to the development of posthuman disability studies, which tries to untangle and reconceptualize the ethical, legal, and philosophical boundaries of human enhancement, species belonging, sentiency, life and death, and human rights. The posthuman biomimicry and the prosthetic aspects of digital and AI technologies presuppose a form of disabling of the human body: a body without any connection to some type of machine is an inferior body. In this context, understanding the historical dynamics, critical, philosophical, and ethical debates that have dominated disability studies can provide a framework for how we reconceptualize our posthuman, hybrid future in which our existence with the machines that redefine previous hierarchies is inevitable. Thus, the paper proposes critical posthuman disability studies as a new analytical paradigm for recontextualization and exploration of the new modes of being in the Age of Tech.
Lady Vanishes: Gender, Law and the (Virtual) Body, The
Austl. Feminist LJ, 2008
It is an oscillating state of disappearance and appearance, of waxing and waning, which signifies one particular point where we are now at in addressing and questioning the body. Certainly, the preoccupation with extremes of bodily presence and absence can readily be seen in the popular media. Somewhere after the news channels (reporting with increasing concern on the growing problems of obesity and starvation) but before the shopping channels (selling clothes for the extra-large and featuring models that are extra-thin), unhappily sandwiched between 'Dog Borstal' (overweight and mutinous canines) and 48 more music channels, one can find programme after programme on the body. While Dog Borstal is in the ad-break (which features slimming aids and exercise items) 'Half Ton Hospital' is over on the next channel, which shows near-spherical people as they struggle to gain control of their riotous flesh, alarmingly amplified by the effects of widescreen. The widescreen effect spreads over onto other channels, where the viewer can observe a display of fat babies (which I thought were supposed to be fat, but in this case, are clinically overweight), share in High Definition 3 the extreme cosmetic surgeries of minor celebrities as they sculpt and reform, inject and subtract according to fashion (it seems that interior designers are out, designer interiors are in … ), then watch it all disappear in yet more documentaries following the heaving endeavours of those now trying to *Contact: Centre for Law and Society, Lancaster University Law School, Lancaster University Lancaster UK LA1 4YN b.chatterjee@lancaster.ac.uk. Dr Chatterjee is a Lecturer in Law who, when not watching TV, interrogates legal issues from an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing particularly on gender, sexuality, sexual expression and cyberspace. She thanks the anonymous reviewer for their constructive comments and suggestions, and the editors of this special edition, Elena Loizidou and Sara Ramshaw, also Judith Grbich, for their patience, suggestions and support. Thanks to
The Vanishing Body of Disability Law: Power and the Making of the Impaired Subject
Canadian Journal of Family Law, 2018
The influence of disability studies on legal scholarship is most visible in the social model, which claims that people are not disabled because of their bodily impairments, but by society in its refusal to accommodate their impairments. However, a modest but growing discourse within disability studies argues that the notion of impairment, in addition to disability, is socially constructed. This article aims to bring this problematized conception of impairment, informed by Michel Foucault's conception of power, into contact with legal scholarship. Judith Mosoff's sensibility about the role of impairments in the legal treatment of disabled people illustrates this critical outlook, which has the potential to guide scholarship and legal reforms. For instance, in the context of family law, those reforms could affect the evaluation of a person's fitness to parent or her right to childcare support. The first part of this article makes a prima facie case for a critical ontology ...
Disability at the periphery: legal theory, disability and criminal law
Griffith Law Review, 2014
This special issue of the Griffith Law Review is dedicated to an examination of the relationships and intersections between disability, criminal law and legal theory. Despite the centrality of disability to the doctrines, operation and reform of criminal law, disability continues to inhabit a marginal location in legal theoretical engagement with criminal law. This special issue proceeds from a contestation of disability as an individual, medical condition and instead explores disability's social, political and cultural contexts. This kind of approach directs critical attention to questioning many aspects of the relationships between disability and criminal law which have otherwise been taken for granted or overlooked in legal scholarship. These aspects include the differential treatment of people with disability by criminal law, the impact of core legal concepts such as capacity on criminal legal treatment of people with disability, and the role of disability in ordering and legitimising criminal law. It is hoped that the special issue will contribute to the shifting of disability from its peripheral location in legal theoretical scholarship much more to the centre of critical and political engagement with criminal law.
European Studies
Summary Most western contemporary legal systems are grounded in natural law principles established by modern humanism even though various alternatives, post-humanism being among the most influential, start influencing their understanding. In addition, the effect of the rapid pace of technological development on humanity has made the inherent limitations of its rules and other social arrangements manifest, as the use of technology is growingly used for human enhancement. The advocacy seeking to expand the catalogue of human rights and to cover transhumanism has started to bear fruit, but more conceptual developments are needed to lay the foundations for a more systemic regulatory development. This reflection paper focuses on the use of microchip implants, from among the augmentation practices that have recently flown under the radar of legal scientific research. These electronic devices re-shape the experience of being human and their various applications suggest that the penetration...