The Miracle of the Black Leg
eBook - ePub

The Miracle of the Black Leg

Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Miracle of the Black Leg

Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law

About this book

Brilliant essays from the renowned Nation columnist—aka the Mad Law Professor—tackling questions of identity, bioethics, race, surveillance, and more

Beginning with a jaw-dropping rumination on a centuries-old painting featuring a white man with a Black man’s leg surgically attached (with the expired Black leg-donor in the foreground), contracts law scholar and celebrated journalist Patricia J. Williams uses the lens of the law to take on core questions of identity, ethics, and race.

With her trademark elegant prose and critical legal studies wisdom, Williams brings to bear a keen analytic eye and a lawyer’s training to chapters exploring the ways we have legislated the ownership of everything from body parts to gene sequences—and the particular ways in which our laws in these areas isolate nonnormative looks, minority cultures, and out-of-the-box thinkers.

At the heart of “Wrongful Birth” is a lawsuit in which a white couple who use a sperm bank sue when their child “comes out Black”; “Bodies in Law” explores the service of genetic ancestry testing companies to answer the question of who owns DNA. And “Hot Cheeto Girl” examines the way that algorithms give rise to new predictive categories of human assortment, layered with market-inflected cages of assigned destiny.

In the spirit of Dorothy Roberts, Rebecca Skloot, and Anne Fadiman, The Miracle of the Black Leg offers a brilliant meditation on the tricky place where law, science, ethics, and cultural slippage collide.

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Yes, you can access The Miracle of the Black Leg by Patricia Williams in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Essays. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Contents
  4. 1. Detachment
  5. 2. Amputation
  6. 3. Lone Ranger
  7. 4. Prophylaxis
  8. 5. Utopia
  9. 6. Making Nice
  10. 7. Erasure
  11. 8. Process of Elimination
  12. 9. Roots
  13. 10. Proxy Wars
  14. 11. Dogsbody
  15. 12. The Dispossessed
  16. 13. The Raw and the Half-Cooked
  17. 14. Gathering the Ghosts
  18. Acknowledgments
  19. Notes
  20. About the Author
  21. Publishing in the Public Interest
  22. Copyright