Working with an Example of the Body: Legal Thinking as Method in Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies

In this account of a hypothetical book chapter on ‘the body’, I describe how I would devise a chapter using the technique of writing through a single example – particularly, a single representation of the body. The chapter discusses some methodological aspects of this choice of method, as well as its appropriateness to the theme of ‘the body’ in relation to law. It addresses practical concerns like selecting an example, and the ‘enabling constraint’ the method offers to the writing process. Working with a single example is presented as a matter of bringing disparate materials into a ‘constellation’ in order to make the example ‘more itself’, by exploring the conditions and patterns that it makes uniquely visible. The aim of this approach would be to bring together interrelated reflections on how bodies are made meaningful through representational techniques in concrete instances and for specific purposes; the political ontology of representationalism in relation to legal thinking and methods; and scholarly work as an active, critical participant in the acculturation of techniques and ontologies, via the reflexive repurposing of elements of legal thinking.