Law Undone

Corporeal Subversion in Mariella Mehr’s Stoneage

  • Emma Patchett Käte Hamburger Kolleg, Bonn
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22029/oc.2017.1126
Keywords: body without organs, corporeality, eugenics, nomadism, law, Yenish

Abstract

At a time in which the corporeality of excluded subjects is prominent in socio-political discourse, this article proposes a critical interdisciplinary reading of the way in which the juridical positioning of the corporeal is designed to obscure the threatening ruptures in the originary body of the law. The sedentarizing anti-nomadic program of removing children and incarcerating them as wards of the state in Switzerland between 1926 and1972 demonstrates a systematic juridical authorization of the attempt to disrupt and excise the ‘diseased’ and ‘degenerate’ body of the Yenish from the ‘ordered’ body of the pure state. Through a close analysis of Mariella Mehr’s novel Stoneage (1990 [1981]), read through a theoretical framework informed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s work on the “Body without Organs,” Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Primo Levi’s “Muselmann,” and vulnerability theory, this article aims to lay bare the ways in which law is implicated in the process of negating corporeal disorder in the context of a eugenic program conducted against the ‘unlawful’ body.

Author Biography

Emma Patchett, Käte Hamburger Kolleg, Bonn

Emma Patchett is an independent postdoctoral scholar. She was most recently a Research Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Recht als Kultur,” Bonn, where her postdoctoral research focused on minority legal cultures and the European spatial imaginary. Prior to this she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College London, exploring the legal spatiality of refugees and the borders of the state in offshore detention regimes. She was awarded her PhD in 2015 from the University of Muenster, where she was a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the CoHaB (diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging) ITN. Her doctoral research examined legal spatiality in the context of the contemporary literature of the Roma diaspora. She has had work published in Polémos, the Australian Feminist Law Journal, and Law and Literature. She co-edited the collection Spatial Justice and Diaspora with Sarah Keenan (Counterpress, 2017), and has recently published a monograph, Spacing (in) Diaspora: Law, Literature and the Roma (De Gruyter, 2017).

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Issue
No 3 (2017): Law Undone
Section
_Articles