Scarred Flesh and the X of Law

Bibliographic Data

ID13087151
AuthorsChris Hall (0000-0002-5629-8147, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume10
Issue3-4
Pages410-425
Publication date2023-11-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueTSQ Transgender Studies Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2328-9252 • E-ISSN: 2328-9260
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/23289252-10900928
OpenAlexW4392968595
LanguageEN
References cited17

This essay responds to and expands the concept of the X for trans studies, theorized by Marquis Bey, as a graphic tool for thinking the intersection of gender, race, law, and crime. In doing so, the essay reads Howard Hawks's 1932 film Scarface, a work crossed throughout by the symbology of the X. Rather than providing a simple visual cue for death and closure, the X is vitalized, through a reading of Bey and Scarface together, as the (un)graphing of law that both inscribes and defaces the biopolitical state, which predicates itself on legislating the difference between genders, races, species, spaces, and criminals and law enforcement. The essay thereby moves toward a criminal reading of the Law, in which it becomes possible to see how the state's apparatus betrays its populous and itself, and to sketch out a vision of pluralized life otherwise, figured in the transgressions of a film in which crime becomes law, law becomes crime, and the riotously raced and gendered protagonist weave together the terms that the biopolitical state desperately attempts to hold apart

Aesthetics · Art · Biopower · Cartography · Closure (psychology · Criminal law · Geography · Intersection (aeronautics · Law enforcement · Political science · Politics · Race (biology · Reading (process · Sketch · Sociology · State (computer science · Computer Science · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Gender Studies · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology

Tools

Open DOI