Shaking Mr Jones: International Journal of Law in Context (original) (raw)

This article is about how law constructs its own truths through touch. Whilst there has been an impressive body of work on how the visual paradigm permeates law, less has been written about the other senses and their connected clusters of knowledge, specifically the haptic -or touch-relatedparadigm. One of the aims of the article, therefore, is to bring touch to sociolegal theory. Another aim, however, is to trace some ways in which encounters, dispositions, feelings and contact -all forms of touch in themselves -shape law's objects and parameters. The case-studies in this article all raise the question of how touch constitutes the proper function of criminal regulation in relation to embodied encounters -the nude body in public, the alternative sexual space. 'I have been extremely shaken by this. It has been very upsetting and worrying. I don't want to bring up my children in such an environment.' (Mr Morien Jones, quoted by the BBC, 25 May 2008, talking about the experience of seeing his neighbour Lynett Burgess walk naked along a shared driveway.) 1 Earlier versions of this article were presented at 'Gender Futures: Law, Critique and the Struggle