Gilani, Sabrina (2020) On the discursive-material enactment of criminal violence: how death and injury come to matter to the criminal law. Law, Culture and the Humanities. pp. 1-19. ISSN 1743-8721

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Abstract

This article seeks to challenge the prevailing view that violence is legally actionable because human bodies are capable of experiencing pain, injury, and death. Drawing on literature in the area of new materialism, this article demonstrates how pain, injury, and death are not ontological properties of the flesh-and-bone body, but rather, they are the effects of how violence is made sense-able, knowable, as part of the criminal legal process. Here, I examine four of the materializing practices through which violence becomes sense-able to us: crime scene photography, forensic pathology, legal judgments, and bodily performance. If the effects of criminal violence can be traced to the discursive practices by which we observe, measure, think, and speak about bodies, it becomes much harder to sustain the view that human violence is exceptional because the human body is special.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	posthumanism, agential realism, posthuman violence, criminal violence, onto-epistemology, Karen Barad, new materialism
Schools and Departments:	School of Law, Politics and Sociology > Law
SWORD Depositor:	Mx Elements Account
Depositing User:	Mx Elements Account
Date Deposited:	29 Sep 2020 08:03
Last Modified:	02 Nov 2020 13:45
URI:	http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/94047

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