#joandayan

"In the long history of what I call "negative personhood", I focus on slaves, animals, criminals and detainees who are disabled by law. Legal thought relied on a sex of fictions that rendered the meaning of persons shifting and tentative: whether in creating slaves or 'persons in law' and criminals as 'dead in law', or in the perpetual re-creation of the rightless-entity. The medieval fiction of civil death lives on in the present. The felon rendered dead in law is no anachronism but a continuing effect of dehumanizing practices of punishment. What does it mean to exist in a negative relation to law?” - Colin Dayan, Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons