Impersonations: Troubling the Person in Law and Culture by Sheryl N. Hamilton (review)

This book makes a sophisticated and unique contribution to socio-legal investigations of legal personhood. Despite wide-ranging variations in ontological and cultural status, the common law overwhelmingly divides entities into two legal categories: persons or property. The stakes are incredibly high in this binary system. Personhood assigns rights to entities so categorized that guard against instrumental treatment by others and thus signal that entity’s high social and cultural value. Entities that fall under law’s property category, in contrast, become the object of rights held by legal persons; denied subjectivity, they are things subject to the full array of commodifying practices that property status permits.

In such a starkly hierarchical ordering, it is easily grasped why acquiring personhood – or as the author calls it, ‘personification’–has been a goal for those human beings whose personhood has been denied as well as for the advocates of non-human beings classified as non-persons/property. Yet, as the author argues, such ‘liminal beings’ do not fully fit into the archetype of the legal person – the rational, adult human whose abstracted and individuated form betrays the white, male, and propertied norms shaping this purportedly neutral vision of the legal person. Despite the fact that most beings will not fit comfortably into this exclusively designed category, the question of who/what should enter the coveted legal zone of personhood (animals? machines? the environment?) persists.

The author thus seeks to shift the focus from the ‘person’ question to reveal the instabilities of personhood’s configurations. As its specific and valuable contribution to the literature, the book highlights the impact of another ‘shadowy figure’ that nonetheless ‘haunt(s) our discussions of the person’ – the persona. The persona is defined as the ‘socially active, culturally produced trace of the person, a copy of the person, and yet never subordinate to its original.’ The book sets out to demonstrate why in their quests for personhood, even where successful (such as for women and corporations), liminal beings never fully become persons in the traditional sense; rather, they are better understood as personae with their experiences revealing the shaky, suspect, and anxiety-ridden basis for law’s exaltation of human reason as the basis for personhood.

The author takes up an eclectic but relevant set of topics to explore her persona thesis, namely, corporations, women, clones, machines, and celebrity personae. The book devotes one chapter to each of these categories of beings whose personhood is always already impugned. The author deliberately uses storytelling to begin and structure the analysis, a move meant to underscore the importance that ‘life stories’ of liminal entities play in debates about who/what is a person. While the author’s assemblage of topics omits important contemporary issues (animals) and is historically disparate (the chapter on women is about the historic Persons case in Canada decided in 1929 while other chapters address modern-day personhood encounters), the author plays to her strengths in feminist legal analysis of media/communications. The chapters and their ‘web of tangled subplots’ succeed in showcasing the multiple and ongoing anxieties humans hold about their uniqueness vis-à-vis the ability of other liminal beings to reason and how these anxieties influence the law’s pronouncements on personhood. The book gives a clear and multilayered account of why the foundational line that the law draws between persons and property is so precarious and the trouble Canadian courts have in attempting to secure this line in the face of technological challenges to presumed species and implicitly masculinized boundaries on which legal personhood depends.

Although the cultural anxieties and fears shaping legal personhood discourse are excavated well, the persona thesis remains underdeveloped. Explanation of the usefulness of the ‘persona’ concept to that category of liminal being in each chapter is left to the last few pages. Even here, argumentation is uneven. A further issue is the focus for the book’s title: Impersonations. The author does not reveal the significance of this concept...