| Votes and subjection... | [Nov. 6th, 2008|09:58 pm] |
I think I have another crit-theory essay in the works, this time involving California Propositions 8 and 9.
There's actually a creepy sort of parallel here -- along with Prop 4, though that one (fortunately) failed.
For those outside California -- Proposition 9 is another rather alarming attack on legal ethics. It makes victims of crimes (and their families) a party to the prosecution and sentencing of people blamed for those crimes in ways beyond they have in the past. Victims and victims' families are given more access to the judges passing sentence, and are to be made a part of the parole process.
The common thread between Props 4, 8, and 9 is how they make visible the process by which the state produces the subject/anti-subject structure. In 8, heterosexuals and participants in the civil-marriage process are interpellated as legal subjects by the marking of non-heterosexuals as anti-subjects; 9 makes the same distinction between "victims" and "perpetrators". In each case, the presence of the asserted subject is made meaningful by its juxtaposition with the related anti-subject.
Prop 4 is, in a sense, even creepier, as it establishes the "minor" as a body occupied by the "guardian" subject in a way which I can only read as somehow continuous with sexual exploitation. It's embodiment gone bad -- and while 8 and 9 aren't horrifying in quite the same way, the logic is the same. The asserted subject is given agency not through its own recognition but through its position of state-designated (and, of course, violence-backed) dominance with respect to the designated anti-subject. The state is now in the business of extending embodied subjectivity of its preferred subjects into the bodies of its anti-subjects. |
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