Description:
This course will examine the evolving mass of U.S. laws respecting the human body--its relative sanctity and vulnerability, its reproduction, and its ultimate disposition. The course will survey a number of issues, using each as a case study revealing how society, science, and the law interact to influence the creation of legislation regarding corporal and capital punishment, cadaver dissection, racial segregation, medical malpractice, sexual sterilization, obscenity, contraception, abortion, human experimentation, brain death and organ donation, and burial practice. The class will investigate each case’s history from its first legal notice to its present legal status. Ultimately, each case study will highlight how the competition between traditional religious and cultural conceptions of bodily integrity and ascendant scientific notions of corporality resulted in the passage of laws that privileged one or more understandings of the body. This examination will reveal how laws inform and condition people's understanding and conception of what the body is and how it should be treated. This course hopes to prompt a re-conceptualization of the human body, reconfiguring it from an agglomeration of all-too-mortal biological “stuff” into an “immortal” social artifact susceptible to ideological resurrection and reconstruction over time. Class readings will come from important legislation and court cases, as well as the work of intellectuals, lawyers, physicians, and scientists. Discussions and assignments will pursue a critical understanding of the social construction of what the body is and of claims to bodily integrity and (in)violability. Ultimately, the course will allow students to consider how the law can, does, and should or should not mediate the way society and individuals control bodies--their own and others.