Gender Futures:
Law, Critique and the Struggle for Something More  

3-4 April 2009 @ Westminster University, London

Emily Grabham, Research Fellow, CentreLGS, Kent Law School , Kent University, UK

Shaking Mr Jones: Law and Touch

“I have been extremely shaken by this. It has been very upsetting and worrying.

I don’t want to bring up my children in such an environment.”

(Mr Morien Jones, quoted by the BBC, 25 May 2008, talking about the experience of seeing his neighbour Lynett Burgess walk naked along a shared driveway.)

Touch has attracted a great deal of critical scholarship of late. It has been re-oriented by recent work on the sensorium, which attempts to shift understandings of the senses away from the traditional five sense model toward an appreciation of the unpredictable and fluid workings of intersensoriality. In recent scholarship, its significance has been understood variously as a radical alternative to the scopic paradigm, one of the contributing factors to Enlightenment rationalities, and as an integral aspect of challenges to Marx’s theory of value. Touch can therefore function in ideological, epistemological or perceptual terms. However, this paper is about the rationalities of touch: what touch feels like when it is understood not as a means of acquiring knowledge, or interpreting its significance, but instead when touch itself is knowledge. Drawing on Mariana Valverde’s work on the forensic gaze, I investigate how embodied dispositions – feeling ‘shaken’, feeling shocked, feeling someone else’s pain – are mobilized in the same contexts (criminal trials) as are forensic clues, but with differing effects.