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Shaking Mr Jones: law and touch1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2010

Emily Grabham
Emily Grabham*
Affiliation:
Kent Law School, University of Kent
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Abstract

This article is about how law constructs its own truths through touch. Whilst there has been an impressive body of work on how the visual paradigm permeates law, less has been written about the other senses and their connected clusters of knowledge, specifically the haptic – or touch-related – paradigm. One of the aims of the article, therefore, is to bring touch to sociolegal theory. Another aim, however, is to trace some ways in which encounters, dispositions, feelings and contact – all forms of touch in themselves – shape law’s objects and parameters. The case-studies in this article all raise the question of how touch constitutes the proper function of criminal regulation in relation to embodied encounters – the nude body in public, the alternative sexual space.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 5 , Issue 4 , December 2009 , pp. 343 - 353
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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