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Bionic bodies, posthuman violence and the disembodied criminal subject

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Version 2 2023-06-12, 09:31
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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-12, 09:31 authored by Sabrina GilaniSabrina Gilani
This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form through the law of homicide and assault. By analysing how the body is materialised through the criminal law’s enactment of death and injury, this article suggests that the biological positioning of these harms of violence as uncontroversial, natural, and universal conditions of being ‘human’ cannot fully appreciate what makes violence wrongful for us, as embodied entities. Absent a theory of the body, and a consideration of corporeality, the criminal law risks marginalising, or altogether eliding, experiences of violence that do not align with its paradigmatic vision of what bodies can and must do when suffering its effects. Here I consider how the bionic body disrupts the criminal law’s understanding of human violence by being a body that is both organic and inorganic, and capable of experiencing and performing violence in unexpected ways. I propose that a criminal law that is more receptive to the changing, technologically mediated conditions of human existence would be one that takes the corporeal dimensions of violence more seriously and, as an extension of this, adopts an embodied, embedded, and relational understanding of human vulnerability to violence.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Journal

Law and Critique

ISSN

0957-8536

Publisher

Springer

Volume

32

Page range

171-193

Department affiliated with

  • Law Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2020-09-29

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2021-01-18

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2020-09-28

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