2 - Subjects of Law: Disabled Persons, Racialized Others, and Women

Summary

One of the most fundamental and far-reaching consequences of the law's imagining of “people” as able, white, and male was the impoverishment of individual identity for everyone else. Disabled persons, racialized others, and women were “subject” in at least two senses of the word. First, they were quite literally “subject to” able white men's authority and right. Second, whatever their formal citizenship status, they remained subjects rather than full and equal members of the nation in large measure because they were denied full legal personhood.

For disabled persons, racialized others, and women, the borders of belonging meant being denied rights to property in oneself or to property more generally, being constrained to enjoy rights and protections through able white men, being denied citizenship altogether, having citizenship be contingent, incomplete, or imposed and itself effecting subordination and loss of rights. The abled, racialized, and gendered borders of belonging were assured through administrative regimes that exercised control, authority, or oversight over disabled persons, racialized others, and women. Though there were possibilities for some to escape from their subject identity, escape came at the cost of reinforcing the subject status of others, advantaged men over women, and reinforced the abled, racialized, and gendered borders of belonging more generally. Law effectively rendered whole groups alien, took identity as easily as it granted it, and simply erased others from history. Throughout the long nineteenth century, the borders of belonging depended on violence.