Scarred Flesh and the X of Law

Abstract

This essay responds to and expands the concept of the X for trans studies, theorized by Marquis Bey, as a graphic tool for thinking the intersection of gender, race, law, and crime. In doing so, the essay reads Howard Hawks's 1932 film Scarface, a work crossed throughout by the symbology of the X. Rather than providing a simple visual cue for death and closure, the X is vitalized, through a reading of Bey and Scarface together, as the (un)graphing of law that both inscribes and defaces the biopolitical state, which predicates itself on legislating the difference between genders, races, species, spaces, and criminals and law enforcement. The essay thereby moves toward a criminal reading of the Law, in which it becomes possible to see how the state's apparatus betrays its populous and itself, and to sketch out a vision of pluralized life otherwise, figured in the transgressions of a film in which crime becomes law, law becomes crime, and the riotously raced and gendered protagonist weave together the terms that the biopolitical state desperately attempts to hold apart.