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Legal Constructions of ‘Objectivity’ and ‘Subjectivity’, Subjectivity and…

- - - - Compare: Carole Pateman's The Sexual Contract (1988)
      - The idealized equality foundational to liberalism does not provide the means to reach actual equality.
      - With the de facto racism and multicultural settler states of today, the Racial Contract manifests in unspoken agreements, discrimination contracts, resource allocation, and taking for granted wealth, property, and opportunities (p. 73).
- - - - Emerging conceptions of ownership shaped emerging abstractions of "savagery," which enabled chattel slavery and terra nullius
- - - - Affirmative action
        
        "The raced individual" as a "legal construct"
        
        Race-as-personal vs. race-as-social
- - - - And yet, "the practices of handling consent forms objectify the addressee" (p. 256)
        
        What about illegible consent forms? "...it is because consent forms as objects are not conceived as tools to represent the person’s agency that no particular attention is given to making them legible" (p. 263)
- - - - Practices of utopia and dystopia (also see Octavia Butler, Savannah Shange) are embedded in the accentuation or lack of subject/object relations.
        
        Utopia for some is never utopia for all.
        
        Compare to Shange's Progressive Dystopia (2019): "The postapocalyptic frame is not hyperbolic -- for Black and indigenous people in the Americas, the apocalypse came and never left, resulting in the dystopian reality of those of us enduring settler colonialism in the wake of chattel slavery" (p. 12)
        
        In this short story, the happiness of Omelas depends on the misery and abuse of one child, which all of the townspeople know about.
        
        Choice: "To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one" (p. 37)
        
        Some people who go to visit the child decide to leave the city -- leaving utopia for the unknown.
        
        Here, subjecthood is intrinsically tied to happiness.
        
        What happens when you give up your subjecthood/happiness so that someone else can have theirs?
- - - - Connections between subjecthood and national identity
        
        Legal subjectivity as "the identity that is produced by juridical discourses and practices" (p. 330)
        
        Examines border construction by colonial treaties (1824 Anglo-Dutch Treaty, Franco-Siam Treaty of 1904)
        
        Social practices of government (p. 333)
        
        Posits that transforming human beings into subjects is itself objectification (?)
        
        Based on Foucault's "modes of objectification"
        
        Notes that Foucault used "objectification" and "subjectification" interchangeably -- potentially confusing (p. 334)
        
        "the construction of the identity of the polities of [Southeast Asia] was made under a number of dualities: Native Power/European Power; Uncivilized State/Civilized State; Inferior/Superior" -- and object/subject (p. 338)
- - - - Babies born in occupied territory do not legally exist as official citizens of Ukraine
        
        What does it mean to exist but not be legally recognized as a subject by one's government? (And not recognized as an object either, just invisible?)
        
        Different sets of rights for subjects living in different places
        
        Situates "bottom-up processes of self-making" alongside "top-down processes of being 'made' citizens," and argues that they cannot be understood independently from each other.
        
        Holding a passport vs. seeing self as having citizenship
        
        Processes of accommodation and resistance by residents of Crimea
        
        Objectification: "What the people of the occupied territories “hear” is that they are, secondary to the body politic: attached, but not fully joined as political subjects."
- - - - "Twin problems of objectification and subjectification" as entwined with legal pedagogy (p. 3)
        
        What is "objective" or "neutral" in the law classroom is often "the embodiment of a white middle-class world view" (p. 3)
        
        Notes common failure to question the dominant perspective of legal inquiry, portraying minority perspectives as "subjective" personal experience
        
        Objectification: - Law students of color are expected to assume a "perspectiveless," "colorless" stance when discussing race -- removing the personhood and lived experience from the discussion (p. 3).
        
        Subjectification: Law students of colors are expected to offer "minority 'testimony'" on the command of the professor (p. 6).
        
        Alienation: Discussions that focus on problems/values that students of color do not share, or overlook issues most relevant to them (p. 9).
        
        Understands academic and emotional consequences of these processes