BODIES OF LAW: LAW, JUSTICE AND THE LEGAL SUBJECT

Bodies of Law

‘The body of law’ is an ambiguous phrase designating both the positive law as a corpus; legal codes, statutes and the rulings of common law, but can also designate the subjected body that belongs to and is part of the law as the condition of possibility of the law, the various types of bodies as objects produced by legal regulation, and the diffusion law through the non-legal bodies and structures which support it. The course attempts to explore the relationships that these two ‘bodies’ of law bear to each other.

Module I: Introduction

Session 1:  Bodies that Matter                                [12th March 2009, Thurs]

In which we investigate questions of the mind/ body divide in rationalist discourses, and the somewhat sudden visibility of the ‘body’ in recent social theory and critical theories of the law. We look at the ‘body’ as a sign, in the language of the law, and undertake a specific ‘embodied’ reading of the law of contracts, and see what the insertion of the body question yields. (We also discuss expectations from the course, and the logistics of scheduling, seminars evaluations!)

Readings:
1.    Hyde Alan, Bodies of Law, Princeton University Press: 1997, [pages 6 to 16 (Introduction)]
2.    Naffine Ngaire,  Who are Law's Persons? From Cheshire Cats to Responsible Subjects. Modern Law Review, Volume 66, Number 3:346 (May 2003)
3.    Williams Patricia J., Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor, Harvard    University Press: 1991 [pages 3 to 14, (Chapter 1, ‘The Brass Ring and the Deep Blue Sea’)]
Film Screening:
Clips from Amistad [1997]
Additional Readings:
1.    Butler Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, Routledge: 1993 [Pages 1to 23, (Introduction)]
2.    Pheng Cheah, David Fraser and Judith Gbrich (eds.), Thinking Through the Body of the Law, Allen & Unwin: 1996 [pages 3 to 24, Chapter 1, Thinking Through the Body of Law: notes toward a theory of corporeal justice)

Module II: ‘Corpus Juris’: The Constitutional Body

Session 2: The Body Politic                        [16th March 2009, Mon]

In which we attempt to unravel the double entendre of the word ‘constitution’ (a body of abstracted principles; the physical make up of the human body). We try to imagine what the Indian citizen might look like, through a reading of our Preamble, our Fundamental Rights Chapter, and two cases involving the national anthem. We then turn to inaugural moment of our constitutional tryst, and seek to uncover some bodies that underlie the topography of our nation.  


Readings:
1.    Preamble, Fundamental Rights Chapter (Chapter III) of the Indian Constitution
2.    Cases: Shyam Narayan Chouksey v UOI ( MANU/MP/0292/2003) and   Bijoe Emmanuel v UOI  (AIR 1987 SC 748)
3.    Foucault Michel, Right of Death and Power over Life, in History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Vintage:1990 (Pages 135 to 158)
4.    Upendra Baxi, Memories and Rightlessness, 15th J.P Naik Memorial Lecture, Centre for Women’s Development Studies, 2003
5.    Das Veena, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, Oxford University Press, 2007 (Chapter 2, The Figure of the Abducted Woman, The Citizen as Sexed, Pages 18 to 32)
6.    Case Law: Ajaib Singh, Lehna Singh v State of Punjab (1952 Supreme Court.) and UOI v Chaman Lal Loona (1957, Supreme Court)
Film Screenings:
1.    Clip from Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay [2008]
2.    Cilp  from Son of India [1962]
Additional Readings:
1.    Foucault Michel, Subject and Power, in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume 3 (James D. Faubion Ed. and Paul Rabinow Series Ed.), The New Press: 2000 Pages 326- 348
2.    Butalia Urvashi, Other Side of Silence: Voices From the Partition of India, Viking: 1998 (Pages 27 to 52)
3.    Short Story: Manto Sadaat Hasan, The New Constitution.

Session 3: Un/constitutional Citizens                          [19th March 2009,Thurs]

In which we return to the vexed question of the universal body of the constitution, and the singular body of the individual citizen. Using Article 22(3) (the preventive detention clause) and Foucauldian ‘Govermentality’ as a starting point, we encounter the problematic illegal body that lies at the heart of our constitution.

Readings:
1.    Constitution of India: Article 22 (3), Statute: The Karnataka Prevention of Dangerous Activities of Bootleggers, Drug Offenders, Gamblers, Goondas, Immoral Traffic Offenders and Slum Grabbers Act, 1985 and The Karnataka Habitual Offenders act, 1961,
2.    Foucault Michel, Govermentality, in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume 3 (James D. Faubion Ed. and Paul Rabinow Series Ed.), The New Press: 2000 [Pages 201 to 222]
3.    Chatterjee Partha, Populations and Political Society in The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, Permanent Black: 2004 [Pages 27 to 52]
4.    Poem: Rudyard Kipling What Happened (about the Arms Act)
5.    Dhareshwar, Vivek and R. Srivatsan, Rowdy Sheeters: An essay on Subalternity and Politics, in Subaltern Studies IX
Film Screening:
1. Clips from Legacy of Malthus [1994]
Additional Readings:
1.    Appadurai Arjun, Number in the Colonial Imagination in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation, Oxford University Press:1997
2.    D’souza Dilip, Branded by Law: Looking at India’s Denotified Tribes, Penguin Books: 2001 (Page 76 to 114) 
3.    Scott  David, Colonial Governmentality Social Text, No. 43, (Autumn, 1995), pp. 191-220
4.    Gordon Colin, Governmental Rationality:An Introduction in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Gordon  Colin and Peter Miller, et al  eds.) University of Chicago Press: 1991 (Pages 1 to 49)

Session 4: The Pickpocket, The Leper and The Defecator: More Un/constitutional Bodies
                                    [23rd March 2009,Mon]
In which we attempt a bodily reading of Judgments of the Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court in ‘Right to housing ’and urban ‘environmental’ PILs to uncover how bodies of the urban poor come to be marked.

Readings:

1.    Cases and Statutes: The Karnataka Prohibition Of Beggary Act, 1975 Olga Tellis v  Bombay Municipal Corporation [1985] 2 Supp SCR 51,  Almitra Patel v UOI (Supreme Court, 2000) Pitam Pura Sudhar Samiti vs Union Of India And Ors  Delhi High Court,(2002), Okhla Factory Owners' Association (Regd.) And Anr. vs The Govt. Of National Capital Territory Of Delhi And Ors. (Delhi High Court, 2002)
2.     Ramanathan Usha, Illegality and the Urban Poor, Economic and Political Weekly July 22, 2006.
3.    Ramanathan Usha, Obstensible Poverty, Beggary and the Law, Economic and Political Weekly  November 1, 2008
4.    Radhakrishna Meena, Laws of metamorphosis: from Nomad to offender in Challenging the Rule(s) of Law: Colonialism, Criminology and Human Rights in India, (Kannabiran Kalpana and Ranbir Singh Eds.), Sage: 2008

Additional Readings:
1.    Sharan Awadhendra, ‘New’ Delhi Fashioning an Urban Environment through Science and Law in Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts (Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, et al., Eds.) Sarai, Centre for Study of Developing Societies: 2005
2.    Chatterjee Partha, Is the Indian City becoming bourgeois at last? in Politics of the Governed , Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, Permanent Black: 2004 (Pages _)
3.    Sharan Awadhendra, Claims On Cleanliness Environment and justice in contemporary Delhi, in Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life, Ed by (Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, et al. Eds.) Sarai, Centre for Study of Developing Societies: 2002
4.    Hyde Alan, Bodies of Law, Princeton University Press: 1997 (Chapter 15, Page 251-257)
Offensive Bodies)
Film Screenings:
1. Clips from Deewar [1975]

Module III: Suspicious Bodies/ Criminal Minds

Session 5: Legible bodies: The colonial encounter                [March 26th 2009, Thurs]

In which we look at the ‘Inquiry’ as a mode for producing bodies of evidence and determining truth. We explore the identification, surveillance and inscription of bodies through technologies of colonial legality, and look at how the body is made to “speak” for the inscrutable and unknowable mind in the Indian law of Evidence.
Readings:
1.    Foucault Michel, Lecture II from Truth and Juridical Forms (Pages 32- 52) and About the Concept of the Dangerous Individual in Nineteenth Century Legal Psychiatry (Pages 176 to 200) in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume 3 (James D. Faubion Ed. and Paul Rabinow Series Ed.), The New Press: 2000
2.    Extract from the Karnataka Police Manual (Volume III)
3.    Sammadar R., Crimes Passion and Detachment: Colonial Foundations of Rule of Law  in Kannabiran Kalpana and Ranbir Singh (eds.), Challenging the Rule(s) of Law, Sage: 2008
4.    Andersen Claire, Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia,  Berg: 2004 (Introduction, Pages 1 to 14 and Chapter 5 Voir/Savoir: Photographing, Measuring and Fingerprinting the Indian Criminal, Pages 140-180)
Additional Readings
1.    Sengoopta Chandak, Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting was born in Colonial India, Pan Books, 2003( Introduction and Pages120 to 170)
2.    Singha Radhika, Settle, Mobilise, Verify: Identification Practices in Colonial India', Studies in History 16 (2000), 151-98
3.    Butler Judith, Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions  The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 86, No. 11, (Nov., 1989), pp. 601-607.

Session 6: Legible Bodies II: The ‘new’ technologies of Truth (Guest Lecture by Lawrence Liang)                                    [March 30th, 2009 Mon]

In which we look at new technologies of ‘forensic’ truth in producing the legible body in the law. We trace the historical trajectory of these technologies from lie detection to narco analysis to brain mapping, and uncover something of law’s relationship with  that ‘dangerous supplement’ of the physical body:  the human  soul.

Readings:
1.    Barthes Roland, The Brain of Einstein in Mythologies, 1957 (Pages 68 to 73)
2.    Kaul Satyendra Kumar and Mohd. Hasan Zaidi,  Narcoanalysis, brain mapping, hypnosis and lie detector  tests in interrogation of suspect Alia Law Agency, 2008 (Extracts from Chapter 4 Brain Fingerprinting: Truth and Justice on the Blip of the Brain, Pages 182 to 212, 229 to 250, 320 to 348)
3.    Ramchandra Reddy v State of Maharashtra ( Bombay High Court, 2004)
4.    Liang Lawrence, And Nothing but the Truth, So Help Me Science, SARAI Reader 2007: Frontiers, Sarai, CSDS: 2007

Module IV:  Habeas corpus ad Subjiciendum: The Sovereign’s Writ and the Subjected Body

Session 7: The Incarcerated                               [2nd April 2009, Thurs]

In which we examine the shift in regimes of juridical punishment, to the ‘reform of the soul’ of the imprisoned, a shift from sovereign’s power over life and death, to the bio-political power to ‘make live and let die’.

Readings:
1.     Foucault Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Vintage Books: 1995. (Panopticism pages 195 to 228 and Complete and Austere Institutions pages 231-256)
2.    Statute: Prisoner’s Act 1894, Karnataka Prison Manual Chapter XIII  and other Extracts
3.    Arnold David, The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge and Penology in Nineteenth Century India, Subaltern Studies VIII, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 148-187
Additional Reading
1.    Foucault Michel, Society Must be Defended, Lectures at the College de France 1975-76, Picador: 2003
2.    Short Story: Kafka Franz, Penal Colony
Film Screening:
Clip from Rabbit proof Fence  [2002]

Session 8: Habeas Corpus                         [6th April 2009,Mon]

In which we explore Agamben’s formulation of the relationship between sovereignty and the exception, through the specific case of the Writ of Habeas Corpus. We read Nasser Hussain, and the A.D.M Jabalpur case to  appreciate how the ‘conferment’ (and suspension) of Habeas Corpus  is fundamental to the foundation and maintenance of  both colonial and constitutional sovereignty.   We then follow the summoned corpus away from   more conventional political domains, through the realms of love peopled by runaway lovers, and unspeakable lesbians!

Readings:
1.    Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998 (pages1 to 29 and  119 to 135 )
2.    Cases: A.D.M Jabalpur v Shivkant Shukla (1975 Cr LJ 1809) and Bhanu Das v UOI (1977) 1 SCC 834
3.    Hussain Nasser, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of law, University of Michigan Press: 2003(Chapter 3, Pages 69 to 97)
4.    Baxi Pratiksha,  Habeas Corpus in the Realm of Love: Litigating Marriages of Choice in India, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 25:59-78 (2006)
5.    Arasu Ponni and Thangarah Priya, Queer Women and the Law, (Draft Paper, Forthcoming)
Additional Readings
1.    Austin Granville, Working a Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience, Oxford University Press, 1999 Pages 333-347


Session 9: The Tortured                                     [9th April 2009, Thurs]

In which we begin with the Foucauldian mystery of the ‘disappearance’ of the tortured body of the condemned man in modernity. We then examine the ‘ scandal’ of the   tortured body in colonial India and contemporary human rights language, where the hyper-visible tortured body not only blinds us to the routine practices of torture in policing, but also become a   site for the contest over what it means to be ‘human’ in the modern world.

Readings
1.    Foucault Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Vintage Books: 1995. (The Body of the Condemned , pages 3 to 31)
2.    Asad Talal, On Torture, or Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment. Social Research 63.4 (1996): 1081-1109.
3.    Rao Anupama, Torture, the Public Secret, Economic and Political Weekly, June 5, 2004.
4.    D.J Vaghela v State of Gujarat (1984, Gujarat)
5.    Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain, Oxford University Press, 1985 (Chapter 1, The Structure of Torture: The Conversion of Real pain into the Fiction of Power, Pages 27-59)
6.    Interview with S.A.R Geelani (Unpublished Draft)
Film:
Waiting for the Guards [2007]
Additional Readings:
2.Rao Anupama, Problems of Violence, States of Terror: Torture in Colonial India, special issue “Discipline and the Other Body,” Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2001: 186-205.[reprinted in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXXVI, No. 43, October 27, 2001: 4125-  4133]
2. Bhuwania Anuj, “Very Wicked Children”: “Indian torture” and the Madras Torture Commission Report of 1855. (Ph d Student Paper, Unpublished)

Session 10: Spectres of Terror                     [13th April 2009, Mon]
In which we return to Agamben’s formulation of the state of exception and sovereignty, and look at the (dis) embodiment of the absolute ‘other’ of law: Terror.

Readings:
1.    Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998 (pages 166 to 188)
2.    Nayar Pramod, Borderless Bodies in Sarai Reader 07, Sarai CSDS:2007
3.    Suresh Mayur Dead Man Walking: Sovereignty and the Supreme Court in the Age of Terror in Sarai Reader 07, Sarai CSDS:2007
4.    Judgment, Map and List of Dates (From the Court record) Masooda Parveen v UOI (Supreme Court 2007)
Film Screening:
Clip from A Wednesday [2008]
Additional Readings:
1.    Ranabir Samaddar Law and Terror in the Age of Colonial Constitution Making, Diogenes 2006; 53; 18
2.    Geelani Syed Bismillah, The Media constructs a Kashmiri Terrorist (Pages 57 to 79) and Roy Arundhati, And His Life Should Become extinct,(Pages 90 o 124, available online at < http://www.countercurrents.org/hr-roy311006.htm>) in 13th December, A reader:The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament, Penguin books:2006
3.    Agamben Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitch: The Witness and the Archive, Zone Books: 1999 (Chapter 2: The Muselmann, Pages 40 - 89)

Session 11: Nothing to lose but our Chains (Guest Lecture: Namita Malhotra)
                                    [16th April 2009,Thurs]
In which we further probe the legal notions of the body in pain, and raise the question of consent  and pleasure through a reading of the legal discourse around religious ‘hook swinging’ and three British cases involving S/M practices. If pain/pleasure/ religious frenzy exists at the limits of linguistic representation, what kinds of pleasure/suffering does the law permit the legal subject to enjoy/endure? What does the repression of certain kinds of bodily practices say about the sovereign’s monopoly over life?   

Readings:
1.    Cases: R v Brown [1993] 2 W.L.R. 556; R v Emmett, [Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) Unreported, extracted in [2006] EWCA Crim] 2414; R v  Wilson [1996] 2 Cr. App. R. 241
2.    Weait Mathew, Fleshing it Out, in Law and the Senses: Sensational Jurisprudence (Bentley     Lionel and Leo Flynn eds.), Pluto Press: 1996 (Pages 160-175)
3.    Dirks Nicholas, The Policing of Tradition: Colonialism and Anthropology in Southern India, Comparative Studies in Society and History 39(1): 182-212(1997)
4.    Weait Mathew, Harm, Consent and the Limits of Privacy, Feminist Legal Studies (2005) 13:97–122
Film Screening:
1. Clips from Night Porter [1974]
Additional Readings:
1.    Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sex in the Colonial Contest. New York: 1995. (Chapter 3, Pages 133 to 179)
2.    Powell J. H., “Hook-Swinging” in India. A Description of the Ceremony, and an Enquiry into Its Origin and Significance, Folklore, Vol. 25, No. 2:147-197 (Jun. 30, 1914),



Module V: Desiring Bodies

Session 12: The Homo-sexy!                        [20th April 2009, Mon]

In which we further grapple with the problems that desiring bodies pose to the law. We  start by looking at Foucault’s (Yes again!) notion of power as a ‘productive discourse’ that produces the subjects it names, and through the work of Arvind Narrain and the minutes of the hearing of the Naz Foundation case (Challenge to Sec 377) to study  the  body of the homosexual produced in Indian law. We look at the ‘constitutional’ bodies of gay men in South Africa, in contrast to the criminal bodies of sex workers and finally in the work of Mayur Suresh we meet another sort of homosexual man, (out cruising in Bangalore’s parks) who doesn’t seem to care very much about his subjection under the law
Readings
1.    Foucault Michel, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, Vintage:1990 (The Perverse Implantation and the Repressive Hypothesis, Pages 36-49)
2.    Narrain Arvind, That despicable specimen of humanity: policing of homosexuality in India in Challenging the Rule(s) of Law: Colonialism, Criminology and Human Rights in India, (Kannabiran Kalpana  and Ranbir Singh eds.),  Sage: 2008
3.    Extract of Minutes from the hearing and Counter Affidavit filed by the Union of India in Naz Foundation v UOI before the Delhi High Court
4.    Ghosh Shrimoyee N., Recovering the “Body” of Post Apartheid Jurisprudence - The Search for A Constitutional Justice  (LLM Student Paper, unpublished)                   
5.    Suresh Mayur, I’m only here to do Masti: Sodomy Law and the Limits of Subjectivation,  Paper Presented at the Critical Legal Conference, Hyderabad, 2006. Forthcoming in Narrain Arvind and Alok Gupta (Eds.) Yoda Press: 2009.

Additional Readings
1.    Nicole Fritz Crossing Jordan: Constitutional space for (un)civil sex, South African Journal on Human Rights 20:22:230-248


Session 13: Whores and Dancing Girls                [23rd April 2009, Thurs]

In which we revert to the body of the sex-worker, which made a guest appearance in our last session and further investigate the law’s fetishistic investment in policing her body and her relationship with that other woman ‘unrapeable’ in law- the wife. We then go backwards in history to see the anxieties of race and class she represented in the empire, and look at two judgments of the Bombay High Court, on Bar girls and child prostitutes.

1.    Mc Clintock Anne, Screwing the system, Sexwork, Race and the Law, Boundary, 19:2 (Summer 1992).
2.    Philippa Levine, Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire: The Case of British India, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Apr., 1994), pp. 579-602
3.    Case: Judgment in Fight for Rights of Bar Owners Association v State of Maharashtra (Bombay High Court, 2006) and Counter Affidavit filed by the State of Maharashtra, Public at Large v State of Maharashtra (Bombay High Court, 1997)
4.    Ghosh Shrimoyee Nandini, The Erotics of Helplessness: Reading the case of the Bombay Bargirls (Unpublished Draft, Paper presented at LASSNET Conference, Delhi: January 2009)

Additional Readings

1.    Sunder Rajan Rajeshwari, The Prostitution Question(s) in The Scandal of the State: Women Law and Citizenship in Postcolonial India, Permanent Black: 2003, at 120
2.    Tambe Ashwini, The Elusive Ingénue: A Transnational Feminist Analysis of European Prostitution in Colonial Bombay, Gender and Society, Vol. 19, No. 2, (Apr., 2005), pp. 160-179


Session 14: The Obscene body  (Guest Lecture: Siddharth Narrain)                                                    [27th April 2009, Mon]
In which we look at the prohibited body on display in the laws of censorship, the coalescing of representations of (especially female) pleasure, and ‘anti-national’ sentiment and the kinds of disruptive sexy bodies the law’s repressive order ends up producing. 


1.    The Cinematograph Act- Guidelines for Certification of Films, Excerpts from the Content Code of the Broadcast Bill (2007)
2.    Gupta Charu, ‘Dirty’ Hindi Literature: Contests around Obscenity in Late Colonial India.
3.     Kapur Ratna Postcolonial Erotic Disruptions: Legal Narratives of Culture, Sex, and Nation in India 10 Colum. J. Gender & L. 333 (2001)
4.    Cases: Joyce Zee alias Temiko v State of Maharashtra  (Bombay High Court, 1978), Maqbool Fida Hussain v Ram Pandey (Delhi High Court, 2008)
5.    Touch of  Evil  and Their Lordships Go to the Movies, in  The Public is Watching, Sex Laws and Videotape : Lawrence Liang with Mayur Suresh and Namita Malhotra, PSBT: 2007
Additional Readings
1. Carole S. Vance More Danger, More Pleasure: A Decade After The Barnard Sexuality Conference, 38 N.Y.L. Sch. L. Rev. 289


Module VI: Abject Bodies

In which we move to other sites of anxiety for the law, and look at the law’s affective registers of disgust and revulsion: its relationship with conceptions of contamination, stigma, bodily and mental deformity’ and ‘defect’, and how it resolves the problems that these bodies pose to it’s constitutional order.

Session 15: The ‘Diseased’                               [30th April 2009,Thur]     In which we ponder over the conception of stigma, and remembering what we learnt in the class on sex workers in relation to venereal disease, now focus on other emblematic diseases that plague the social body.  We look at the metaphors of the  ‘citizenship of the unwell’ through Sontag’s work, and then move to two emblematic diseases in the Indian context Leprosy and AIDS.
                 
1.    Das Veena, Stigma, Contagion, Defect: Issues in the Anthropology of Public Health, Conference Paper available at <http://www.stigmaconference.nih.gov/FinalDasPaper.htm>
2.    Sontag Susan, Illness and its Metaphors and AIDS and its Metaphors, Penguin Books: 1991 (Pages 3, 91  to 101  and 110 to 122)
3.    Extract of Minutes from the hearing and Counter Affidavit filed by  Respondent no 7. B.P Singhal in Naz Foundation v UOI before the Delhi High Court
4.    Cases: Lucy D’souza v State of Goa (1989) and Dhirendra Pandua vs State Of Orissa (2008, Supreme Court)
5.    Buckingham Jane, Patient Welfare vs. the Health of the Nation: Governmentality and Sterilisation of Leprosy Sufferers in Early Post-Colonial India Social History of Medicine Vol. 19, No. 3 pp. 483–499

Additional Readings
1. Robertson J,  Leprosy and the elusive M. leprae: Colonial and Imperial medical exchanges in the nineteenth century, Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos vol.10  suppl.1, 2003
 available at <http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-59702003000400002>


Session 16: The ‘Untouchable’                        [4th May 2009, Mon]

In which we explore the idea Kristeva’s notion of Abjection  and apply her ideas to the issue of caste. We read the body of the ‘untouchable’ through colonial legal metaphors of uncleanness and pollution, and post colonial India’s reformist moves that have sought to ‘rehabilitate’ this body. We complicate the story by looking at the case of the Sirasgaon rape where caste and gender inhabit the same body.
Readings:
1.    Kristeva Julia, Approaching Abjection in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, (trans. Leon S. Roudiez) Columbia UP:1982, [extracts/note available at <http://www.scribd.com/doc/10269033/-Kristeva-Abjection-Short-Version>]
2.    Galanter Marc, Changing Legal Conceptions of Caste in Law and society in modern India, Oxford University Press :1989 (Chapter 7, Pages 141 to 181)
3.    The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrine (Prohibition) Act , 1993 and the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 and Rules.
4.    Rao Anupama, Understanding Sirasgaon: notes towards conceptualising the role of law, caste and gender in a case of "Atrocity" in  Gender & Caste: Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism ( Anupama Rao,ed.) Kali for Women: 2003
5.    Extracts from Mulk Raj Anand’s novel ‘The Untouchable’ [Pages to be assigned]

Additional Readings
1.    Hyde Alan, Bodies of Law, Princeton University Press: 1997 (Chapter 13, The Racial Body, Pages  221-240)
2.    Sainath P., Head-loads and heartbreak Gender & Caste: Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism ( Anupama Rao,ed.) Kali for Women: 2003

Film Screening
Shit
Session 17: The ‘Cripple’ and the ‘Feeble minded’            [7th  May 2009, Thurs]
In which we explore the ‘ableist’ body and the reasonable mind of the legal subject, the  negative ontologies of victimhood that the law recognizes and privileges, and attempt to interrogate the notions of the ‘normal’ body.

Readings:
1.Fiona Kumari McMillan, Inciting Legal Fictions: Disability’s date with Ontology and the Ableist Body of the Law, Griffith Law Review Vol 10:1, 43
2.Government Order, No 4-2/83 HW III, dated 6th August 1986 on Uniform Definitions of the Physically Handicapped.
3.Dhanda Amita, Legal order Mental Disorder, Sage: 2000  (Page 17 to 33, Introduction)
4. Sunder Rajan, Beyond the Hysterectomies Scandal in The Scandal of the State: Women Law and Citizenship in Postcolonial India (Pages 73 to 104)





Module VII: “He means She”: Sexing the Body of Law

Session  18:                        [11th May 2009, Mon]

In which we  turn our attention to Butler’s assertion that one is not born, but “becomes” a woman and Frug’s analysis of the law’s sexualized, maternalised, terrorised female bodies to  locate bodies of women as sites of meaning in criminal, constitutional and matrimonial laws.

1.    Butler Judith, Gender Trouble, Routledge:2007 (Chapter 1, Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire)
2.    Frug Mary Jo, A Postmodern Feminist Manifesto: An Unfinished Draft, 105 Harv Law Rev 1045 (1992)
3.    Naffine Ngaire, The Body Bag, Naffine Ngaire and Rosemary Owens (eds.), Sexing the Subject of Law, Sweet and Maxwell: 1997 (Pages 79 to 94)
4.    Hyde Alan Law’s Penis, Law’s Vagina in Bodies of Law, Princeton University Press: 1997, 
5.    Ramanathan Usha, Images (1920-1950): Reasonable Man, Reasonable
Women and Reasonable Expectations) in Engendering Law:  Essays in Honour of Lotika Sarkar, (Dhanda, Amita; Parashar, Archana eds. ) Eastwest Books: 1999(Pages 33-70)
6.    Sunder Rajan, Shahbano, in Feminists Theorize the Political,(Butler Judith and Joan Scott, eds.) , Routledge Books: 1992(Pages

Additional Readings
1.Sarkar Tanika, Conjugality and Hindu nationalism: resisting colonial reason and the death of a child-wife in Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation : Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism, Permanent Black: 2001 (Chapter 6)


Session 20: Performing Sex    (Guest Lecture By Veena Gowda)     [14th May 2009, Thurs]
In which we use the insights offered up by Butler’s theorizing of performative acts to understand how women “become”(or fail to become) good wives/ chaste daughters/ virtuous victims  in the Family Courts of Bombay
 
Readings
1.    Butler Judith, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,  Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4. (Dec., 1988), pp. 519-531.
2.    Basu Srimati, Playing off Courts: The Negotiation of Divorce and Violence in Plural Legal Settings in Kolkata. Journal of Legal Pluralism 52: 41-75 (2006)

Additional Reading

1.    Berti Daniel, Trials, Witnesses and Local Stakes in a District Court of Himachal Pradesh ( unpublished draft manuscript Note:This essay is not about gender, but Marijuana growers in Himachal Pradesh, but is included here because it shows courtroom performances in an interesting light)
2.    Kapur, Ratna (2002) ‘The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Resurrecting the “Native” Subject in International/Post-Colonial Feminist Legal Politics’, Harvard Human Rights Journal, Spring, 1-37




Module VII: The Marketplace of Bodies

Session 20: Body Parts/Body Contracts                [18th  May 2009, Mon]

In which we investigate the notion of body as property, and through readings on various kinds of ‘commodifications’ of body parts, states of bodily injury /bodily capacities/ bodily representations   in law arrive at an anatomy of the law that is rife with contradictions

Readings
1.    Hyde Alan, Bodies of Law, Princeton University Press: 1997,  (Chapter 3 The Body as Property Pages 48 to 79)
2.    Indian Council of Medical Research, Draft Surrogacy Bill(2008), The Transplantation of Human Organ Act, 1994,Workmen’s  Compensation Act, 1923 (Schedule)
3.    Diprose Rosalyn, The Gift, Sexed Body  Property,and the Law in Pheng Cheah, David Fraser and Judith Gbrich (eds.), Thinking Through the Body of the Law, Allen & Unwin: 1996 
4.    Cohen Lawrence Where it Hurts: Indian Material for an Ethics of Organ Transplantation in Law and Anthropology: A Reader (Sally F. Moore ed), Blackwell: 2004
5.    Case: Chhoti si Love Story case: Manisha Koirala vs Shashilal Nair(Bombay High Court)

Additional Readings
1. Coombe Rosemary, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation and the Law,  Duke University Press:1998 (Chapter 2, Author (iz)ing Celebrity Pages 88-129)


Session 21: The Body Corporate                    [21st May 2009, Thurs]

In which we attempt a bodily reading of corporate legal personality, and come up with some surprising answers

Film Screening
1.    The Corporation (2003)
.
 
Session 22: Reading the Indian Contract Act: Sab Ganda Hai, par Dhanda hai yeh! (Guest Lecture : Prashant Iyengar)        [25th   May 2009, Mon]

In which we read the Indian Contract Act and try to excavate it’s bodily assumptions

1.BALCO Employees Union vs UOI (Supreme Court, 2001)
2.Case law: Kamarbai and another vs State (Contracts against Public Policy)
3. Frug Mary Jo, Rereading Contracts: Feminist Analysis of a Contracts Case book, 34 Am. U. L. Rev. 1089

Additional Readings
1.Owens Rosemary, Working in the Sex Market, in Naffine Ngaire and Rosemary Owens (eds.), Sexing the Subject of Law, Sweet and Maxwell: 1997 (Chapter 7, Pages 119-146)
2.Pearson Gail, First steps in global rules – making the Indian contract Act            Paper  presented at LASSNET Conference New Delhi January 2009

Session 23: The Technoscientific Body            [28th May 2009, Thurs]

In which we locate the body in transnational flows of capital, cultures and commodities and attempt to see how human life is reconfigured, and  what kinds of il/legal bodies the flows and  practices of globalisation and technoscience produce.
Readings
1.    Haraway Donna, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse, Routledge: 1997) (Chapter 2 FemaleMan meets Oncomouse, Pages 49 to 118, Table 6.1- Pages 219-229)
2.    Turner Bryan S., Body ,Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 23, No. 2-3, 223-229 (2006)
3.    Coombe Rosemary, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation and the Law (Chapter 1, Objects of Property and Subjects of Politics Pages 40 to 88)
4.    Vasselu Cathryn, Patent Pending : Laws of Invention, animal Life Forms and Bodies as Ideas, in Pheng Cheah, David Fraser and Judith Gbrich (eds.), Thinking Through the Body of the Law, Allen & Unwin: 1996(Pages 105 to 119)
Additional Readings
5.    Grafinkel Simson, Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century, O’Reilly:2000, (Absolute Identification, Chapter 3, Pages 37 to 67)


Conclusion

Session 24: A Frenzy of Bodily Insurrections        [1st June 2009, Thurs]

In which we try to explore at last the idea of an embodied justice within the law
Readings
1.    Derrida Jacques, Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority, 11 Cardozo L. Rev. 919, 981 (Mary Quaintance trans., 1990
2.    Golder Ben and Peter Fitzpatrick, Foucault’s Other Law (Chapter 2 Pages 53 to 97) Routledge:2009
3.    Hyde Alan, Conclusion: A body Fantasia in Hyde Alan, Bodies of Law, Princeton University Press: 1997
Film
Offside (2006)

Session 25 and 26: Presentation of Seminar Papers    [4th  and 8th  June 2009]