Ruth A. Miller

The Limits of Bodily Integrity : Abortion, Adultery, and Rape Legislation in Comparative Perspective

Contents: Introduction Reproduction and race suicide Sexuality and citizenship formation Defining Europe Women and the political norm Conclusion Bibliography Index.

Rights, Reproduction, Sexuality, and Citizenship in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey

T he 2003 May Day demonstrations in Ankara were well attended. An array of political, social, and cultural groups, each with an agenda and each with a vocal, activist platform, took to the streets to protest inequity and to make their voices heard. A note that day in the late edition of the newspaper Hürriyet chose to focus on two groups: first, the farleft Turkish Workers’ Party, operating under the slogan “No to Labor Legislation that Brings Back Slavery!” and, second, a group of transsexuals marching under a sign that read “Humane Life Platform” (Ercan 2003, 1). Dispensing with the workers’ party after the first few lines, the rest of Hürriyet’s note discussed the activities of the transsexuals, concerning itself especially with the difficulty the police faced in searching them for concealed weapons prior to granting them entry to the protests. Unable to decide whether male or female security personnel should be responsible for hand searching them, the police eventually allowed the transsexuals to enter the demonstration without any physical contact at all. In this slice of political life from twenty-first-century Turkey, we have two examples of highly functional modern institutions. There is, first of all, the popular press, Hürriyet, performing its role as both creator and arbiter of national unity. By associating the apparently inappropriate and marginal leftist group with the likewise apparently inappropriate and marginal group of transsexuals, Hürriyet both defines the mainstream mass community of readers and reinforces the strength and inevitability of the norm. At the same time, however, there is the popular peaceful demonstration itself—a vital and indeed fundamental signifier of the modern rights-based nationstate. The popular demonstration is, in fact, just as crucial to healthy political

Law in crisis : the ecstatic subject of natural disaster

Taking natural disaster as the political and legal norm is uncommon. Taking a person who has become unstable and irrational during a disaster as the starting point for legal analysis is equally uncommon. Nonetheless, in Law in Crisis Ruth Miller makes the unsettling case that the law demands an ecstatic subject and that natural disaster is the endpoint to law. Developing an idiosyncratic but compelling new theory of legal and political existence, Miller challenges existing arguments that, whether valedictory or critical, have posited the rational, bounded self as the normative subject of law. By bringing a distinctive, accessible reading of contemporary political philosophy to bear on source material in several European and Middle Eastern languages, Miller constructs a cogent analysis of natural disaster and its role in modern subject formation. In the process, she opens up exciting new lines of inquiry in the fields of law, politics, and gender studies. Law in Crisis represents a promising new development in the interdisciplinary study of law.

On Freedom and Feeding Tubes: Reviving Terri Schiavo and Trying Saddam Hussein

Abstract This essay addresses changing twenty-first century approaches to the right to bodily integrity. That bodily integrity is a right in need of protection has been a claim central to liberal political theory for at least the past two hundred years. At the same time, the nature of contemporary United States exceptionalism is such that this right has been drastically reinterpreted in recent years. In particular, there has been a movement away from understanding the right to bodily integrity as a private right, in which an individual’s bodily borders must be protected from political intrusion, and toward a situation in which violations of one’s “own” bodily integrity are conceived of as acts of treason. It is true that we can see hints of this transformation prior to the twenty-first century, especially in Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality. Using recent media representations of Saddam Hussein and Terri Schiavo as case studies, however, I suggest that these nineteenth and twentieth century hints have become a twenty-first century reality. Both Schiavo and Saddam Hussein were represented as individuals who had, in various ways, trespassed their own bodily borders and therefore had undermined broader notions of democracy, freedom and that critical rhetorical underpinning of the rule of law—habeas corpus.

Nanobots Run Amok, or The Future of Law and Literature

Abstract Recent writing in defense of the humanities has left legal studies in a difficult position. To demonstrate the social and political value of humanistic inquiry, scholars out to save the humanities have produced a series of rhetorical oppositions—between skill and knowledge, between technique and art, and most fundamentally, between scientific method and humanistic method. Although these oppositions are untenable, they have nonetheless fractured fields like law—fields that inhabit all of these ostensibly discrete arenas. Moreover, the implications of these splits and fractures are more than administrative or methodological. They are also temporal. Drawing a distinction between scientific or technological study and humanistic or literary study requires, first and foremost, drawing a similar distinction between scientific and humanistic time. This article explores two potential repercussions of these splits within law. First, it suggests that the legal subject most natural to crisis-induced temporal frameworks is a nonhuman subject—a machine running code or a nanobot running wild. Second, it suggests that the legal language most characteristic of temporally split law is nonhuman language—computational code or infinite repetition. As a result, it concludes, the “good citizen” that the contemporary study of the humanities is supposed to forge is, essentially, not human.

Seven Stories of Threatening Speech: Women's Suffrage Meets Machine Code

Historian Ruth Miller offers an ambitious critique of agency-focused accounts of women’s suffrage movements in the United States and England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Miller draws upon women’s suffrage to contribute to critical theory, by describing the ‘operation and execution of nonhuman, computational speech, and the threat that this speech poses to physical or environmental systems’ (p. 5). Indeed, Miller explains that her book is ‘not about women’s suffrage or women’s movements in and of themselves ... instead, speech is the central concern’ (p. 51). One of Miller’s goals, then, is to explain, ‘how a particular mode of speech ... came to be associated with the suffragists’ (p. 58). The question of how such associations were formed, in addition to the significance of their effects, is outside of the scope of her text. I quote Miller at length in order to do justice to her argument, and also to indicate how ambiguities arise from using terms like ‘linguistic activity’, ‘language’, and ‘speech’ without explicit definition. Engaging with the scholarly literature in the social sciences that has dealt with these challenging rubrics would strengthen her argument. Miller comments that anti-suffragists gave ‘no mention of the speakers’ [suffragists’] words or their ideas’ (p. 60). Ironically, she does the same, focusing exclusively on anti-suffragists’ descriptions of suffragists to assemble evidence for her argument. To be fair, this is a function of Miller’s focus: she is not describing suffragists or their speech, but rather,

Cruel and Uncaring Doctors

Abstract This essay addresses two seemingly unrelated questions. First, can ethical truth and scien- tific truth effectively interact with one another? Second, what underlies the popular trope of the woman viewer attracted to the man who plays a doctor on TV? Taking the FOX series House as a case study, I argue that these two questions are not as unrelated as they might appear. Scientific truth and ethical truth can and do come together in the figure of the fantasy doctor. Their interaction, however, leads to a legal and political universe predicated on the mockery of choice and the unraveling of the social contract. The trope of the desiring woman viewer is thus one further variation on the three-century-old theme of feminine threats to liberal-democratic process.