Toward a Biopolitics of Injury: Wounding in American Legal Culture

Abstract

Interdisciplinary research is more often realized in rhetoric than in scholarship. With Injury ', Sarah Lochlann Jain offers an original and at times brilliant example of the intellectual insight that can result from work that crosses the bounds of science and technology studies, the study of law and society, and social theory. Jain examines in detail the short-handled hoe, the computer keyboard, and the cigarette. Each of these chapters is written around a series of cases in which a group of people have claimed to have been injured by the product. Jain takes an interdisciplinary approach to her study, deftly linking readings of legal cases, archives, popular culture, and critical theory to understand the sociality of objects in thick relation to the people who claim injury. Thus, she situates each legal case in a rich historical account of the objects, combined with what she calls a semiotic reading. By doing this, she offers analysis of how bodies and objects come to be coded in relation to one another. Neither judges nor juries can claim immunity from the co-constitution of bodies and objects. In using anthropology's central strength of reading broad social structures through the details of everyday life and interactions, Jain is able to show what each discipline has to gain from such cross-pollinations. As a result, science and technology studies scholars will be required to think more carefully about power as it is implicated in race, gender, and all manner of social and physical difference. Law and society scholars will be introduced to the complexities of analyzing the relationships among humans and the world of objects. And social theorists will have a new opportunity to examine how multiple frameworks of analysis history, gender and race theory, advertising, product design, law, and legal theory can be brought together to better understand and theorize contemporary life.