Nayeli Urquiza

While the turn to vulnerability in law responds to a recurrent critique by feminist scholars on the disembodiment of legal personhood, this article suggests that the mobilization of vulnerability in the criminal courts does not necessarily offer female drug mules a direct path to justice. Through an analysis of sentencing appeals of female drug mules in England and Wales, this article presents a feminist critique of the dispositif of the person and its relation to vulnerability. Discourses on drug mules’ vulnerability mobilize the trope of the colonial victim in need of protection, which is often translated into legal mercy. But mercy is rather an expression of biopower which inscribes not only fragility onto the bodies of drug mules by figuring them as exemplar paradigms of colonial subjectivity, but also reinvigorates the dispositif of gender implicit in the legal person. In this set-up, it would appear as if law and politics totalize the registers of life, in this case the contours of vulnerable body. The article suggests we must revisit the image of the wounded body in order to carve out a space for resistance. Drawing on Elaine Scarry and Judith Butler, it suggests vulnerable bodies are marked by a semiotic openness, which renders them subject to appropriation but also able to signify the precarity produced by the law through their resistance to representation.

Immigration case-workers in the uk hear endless stories about flight and persecution by people claiming asylum. However, asylum claims are fragile due to the logocen- tric foreclosures to the acoustic registers in asylum testimonies. In view of the fragility of refugee narratives of flight, legal safeguards aim to create the right conditions for interviewees’ testimonies. Yet, this article suggests refugee status determination pro- cesses sideline the sound of vulnerability by falsely interpreting testimonies that ap- pear to be incomprehensible as untrue or as exceptional accounts of vulnerability. But silenced or fragmented testimonies are not necessarily untrue or devoid of meaning; their meaning is tied to the marginalization of phone in the logocentric logic in law. Instead of accepting the voices of asylum-seekers as aphonic, this article heeds the call to hear the acoustic uniqueness of testimonies, drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s vocal philosophy.