Toward a Biopolitics of Injury: Wounding in American Legal Culture

Interdisciplinary research is more often realized in rhetoric than in scholarship. With Injury, Sarah Lochlann Jain offers an original and at times brilliant example of the intellectual insight that can result from work that crosses the bounds of science and technology studies, the study of law and society, and social theory. Jain examines in detail the short-handled hoe, the computer keyboard, and the cigarette. Each of these chapters is written around a series of cases in which a group of people have claimed to have been injured by the product. Jain takes an interdisciplinary approach to her study, deftly linking readings of legal cases, archives, popular culture, and critical theory to understand the sociality of objects in thick relation to the people who claim injury. Thus, she situates each legal case in a rich historical account of the objects, combined with what she calls a semiotic reading. By doing this, she offers analysis of how bodies and objects come to be coded in relation to one another. Neither judges nor juries can claim immunity from the co-constitution of bodies and objects.

In using anthropology's central strength of reading broad social structures through the details of everyday life and interactions, Jain is able to show what each discipline has to gain from such cross-pollinations. As a result, science and technology studies scholars will be required to think more carefully about power as it is implicated in race, gender, and all manner of social and physical difference. Law and society scholars will be introduced to the complexities of analyzing the relationships among humans and the world of objects. And social theorists will have a new opportunity to examine how multiple frameworks of analysis—history, gender and race theory, advertising, product design, law, and legal theory—can be brought together to better understand and theorize contemporary life.

Most broadly, Jain seeks to understand the physicality of humans within palimpsests of corporate, legal, personal, and material power. The key question enabling such analysis is: how and why do certain types of human wounding come to count as legally compensable injuries while others do not? In short, why do some forms of suffering matter socially, leading to design regulation or financial compensation, while others do not? The politics of suffering—or the evaluation of human health and injury—is historically bound, shifting with varying understandings of negligence, responsibility, rational behaviors, and good design. One of Jain's examples nicely illustrates this point. Before the 1960s, the car industry successfully barred any safety regulation, based on its argument that drivers were responsible for "accidents": cars didn't kill people; people did. As a consequence, automobiles were becoming increasingly dangerous through the 1950s. But after the activism of the 1960s, automobile companies were expected to design—at least minimally—for crashworthiness. This example demonstrates how the very definitions of the car, and responsible design and reasonable driving, changed. Each of these shifts also indicates how the high physical costs of U.S. automobility were distributed at different historical moments and how people in the United States came to be physically, as well as socially, defined through automobility. The relationship between different products and their users is simply a question of economics. Indeed, both the short-handled hoe and the typewriter or keyboard were exceedingly inefficient tools, and cheap alternatives had been designed for both that would decrease injuries and increase speed of use. The stories Jain narrates are also stories about race, class, and gender—how these categories are distributed, disciplined, and deployed.

In the United States, injury law is one of the prime arbiters of these equations, but the law, as Jain convincingly argues, is ill-equipped—both institutionally and conceptually—to deal with the enormous ethical issues. At the same time, the dearth of safety regulation and the expense of medical care give injury law a pride of place not found in...