Law in Drag: Trials and Legal Performativity
2011; Columbia University Libraries; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.7916/cjgl.v21i2.2638
ISSN2333-4339
Autores Tópico(s)Law in Society and Culture
ResumoTo import Judith Butler's work into a conversation about law to unfurl a provocative new map of a familiar landscape and to revel in the pleasure of traveling it, off-road, looking anew at landmarks so many have passed by for so long. She has a way of talking about law that pins down its complicity in a stubbornly enduring social order even as she breathes life into it as a domain for exploration and critique. The force of her thinking--for me, particularly her thinking about performativity --shatters conventional ideas about what law by enabling us to ask how it enunciated, what it produces, how it done. Can one think of law as a kind of formation in itself, one that authorizes itself via what Butler has called a sovereign conceit but that in fact called into being in the very act of calling others to account? Taking up performativity this way might seem slightly off-color. After all, as Butler has framed it, the interpellative process has a political edge to it. Its purpose, as she proposes in Excitable Speech, is to indicate and establish a in subjection. (1) One could hardly argue that law a subject in subjection. And yet, in what follows, I will try to elaborate on the ways in which at least one kind of legal operation, the trial, implicated in an interpellative process (2) that destabilizes its own relation to state power, though neither fully nor innocently. Moreover, I will argue that the trial a legal space ripe for critical analyses of identity formation, a place in which the norms that bring certain kinds of moral or moralized subjects into being are contested rather than assumed. In trials, alterity (that is, difference or otherness) within norms can be at least partially exposed because of the ways in which trials stage their own performative relation to law. Though I think one could make this claim as it relates to trials generally, I'd like to focus on one particularly self-reflexive trial--self-reflexive because of the way it self-consciously stages a fracturing of the meaning of law--by way of illustrating the incisiveness of the concept of performativity in complicating notions of the juridical. While the arguments that follow should not be understood as a celebration of trials as radically transformative legal spaces, either for the law or for the social subjects that come before it, thinking about their performative enunciations of law does, in my view, open up a way to analyze moments of disruption and foreclosure in the ongoing citational processes that constitute social identity. (3) Trials always begin with a story, but even in its barest outlines this one perhaps more remarkable than most. In 1901, a sixteen-year-old woman named Evelyn Nesbit first met the great New York architect and aesthete Stanford White. (4) A striking beauty, she had pulled her family out of poverty by moving from Pittsburgh to New York to find success as a photographic model and budding stage performer. (5) White, in his late forties, had a penchant for young beauties and he drew Nesbit into an extravagant world of glittering champagne parties and private modeling sessions before either seducing or raping her (depending on the account) in the mirrored bedroom of his private penthouse suite in the first Madison Square Garden (a spectacular building of his design). (6) Though clearly traumatized by the event, Nesbit became White's mistress even as she was being courted by other wealthy playboys, including her future husband Harry Thaw. She relied on White for money, of course, but they also appear to have been deeply entranced by one another, and though their affections eventually waned, Nesbit would never--even during her testimony in Thaw's trials--fully renounce him. (7) Born to a wealthy Pittsburgh family, Harry Thaw lived an eccentric and profligate life, as debauched in its own way as was White's. Having seen Nesbit onstage at around the same moment White came into her life, Thaw's attraction to her quickly turned into an obsession, and once she began to separate herself from White, Thaw leaped in as her protector and financial supporter. …
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