The absent flesh of law : legal bodies and juridical choreographies

The Absent Flesh of Law: Legal Bodies and Juridical Choreographies sutures dance studies—kinesthetic awareness, somatic memory, and performative potential—to the field of the legal humanities. This represents an epistemic shift that aims to resist the logocentric norms of knowing that reproduce colonial hierarchies. The dissertation simultaneously recuperates the agency of constituent power, especially in moments of public assembly. Specifically, it frames constitutional text as corporeal by exposing the body's aporetic disappearance: from French legal codes of the 17th century that structured race, to the contemporary elision of the freedom of assembly, to human rights discourse on bodily integrity. Through this disciplinary crossing, it presents a decolonial orientation to the legal subject, animated with all of its humanisms. Separate but entangled images of protesting ballerinas serve as the motivator for each chapter. Their internationally prolific circulation across publics enforces a cross-cultural method of comparison as the events of the image shuttle between the United States, Algeria, and France—nations linked by racial legacies and postcolonial histories. As such, this project draws upon Francophone and Arab material and furthers research in a comparative race studies. Attending to contemporary Black Lives Matter marches in the United States, demonstrations of the Hirak movement in Algeria, and pension protests in Paris—referenced in each photograph—the protesting ballerina grounds this framework to reveal themes of the disciplined body that is both compliant (to a technique) and resistant (to legal expectations). Each of these images begins well into the 21st-century yet points backward in time to more complex histories in which the body was obscured under law: 1) of confederate legacies constructed in the United States that propagate a racialized history, 2) of imperial rule in France during which ballet served state opulence and secured whiteness as property, and 3) of decolonial hope and postcolonial violence in Algeria. The final chapter opens toward international human rights discourse to call for renewed attention to bodily integrity, beyond a priori concepts of dignity that are circumscribed by a Western aesthetic tradition. Theoretically grounded in histories of the archive and the ephemerality of performance, this research draws upon interdisciplinary methods to communicate to scholars in both the legal humanities and in performance and dance studies. I supplement archival material—of police reports, juridical documents, and constitutional revision—with embodied perspectives learned from more than twenty years as a disciplined body in a dance studio. The tension of this pairing allows me to articulate what is lost when the law presumes linguistic form entirely, while the project's geopolitical triangulation reflects a commitment to postcolonial theory, francophone culture, and comparative race studies. As such, it dares to bring together otherwise disparate interlocuters, forcing a reconsideration of entrenched socio-political hierarchies of discipline.

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Theater and Performance Studies.
Advisor: Meyler Bernadette
Ross Janice
Malkki Liisa
Phelan Peggy