Austin Sarat (Editor) Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He has also served as Mellon Professor of the Humanities for the Bard Prison Initiative. He has authored or edited more than one hundred books, including Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Human Execution. Susanna Lee (Editor) Susanna Lee is Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Comparative Literature at Georgetown University. She is widely published in the areas of literature and moral authority, intellectual history, law and humanities, detective fiction, popular culture, and literary theory. She is the author, most recently, of Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-Boiled History.
Description
"This book must be read cover to cover, as it is more than the sum of its parts. The six regulatory projects at its core are arranged biographically, as if one life extending from gametes to execution. The result is a provocative analysis of the ways the U.S. state claims social substance through regulatory scenarios selectively staged on the bodies of individuals. In the aggregate, the asymmetrical contests over those stagings compel a rethinking of liberal assumptions regarding citizenship as promising either legal and political agency or full membership in a national community."--Carol J. Greenhouse, Princeton University "Editors Austin Sarat and Susanna Lee shine stark light on how inconsistent and contested are regulations of reproduction, medical testing and treatment, punishment, and public health in the United States, post Covid-19. Striking essays by scholars and advocates expose how the language of autonomy, equality, harm, and dignity have little or no explanatory power when compared with the impact of individuals' economic resources, geographic locations, age, race, sex, and gender on government power deployed against human bodies. This compelling collection deserves reading and re-reading by anyone hoping to understand how contemporary America inscribes the political contests on people's physical lives."--Martha Minow, Harvard University