The Miracle of the Black Leg
Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
The Miracle of the Black Leg
Pre-order for $19.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Carmen Jewel Jones
About this listen
Beginning with a jaw-dropping rumination on a centuries-old painting featuring a white man with a Black man's leg surgically attached (with the expired Black leg-donor in the foreground), contracts law scholar and celebrated journalist Patricia J. Williams uses the lens of the law to take on core questions of identity, ethics, and race.
With her trademark elegant prose and critical legal studies wisdom, Williams brings to bear a keen analytic eye and a lawyer's training to chapters exploring the ways we have legislated the ownership of everything from body parts to gene sequences—and the particular ways in which our laws in these areas isolate nonnormative looks, minority cultures, and out-of-the-box thinkers.
At the heart of "Wrongful Birth" is a lawsuit in which a white couple who use a sperm bank sue when their child "comes out Black." And "Hot Cheeto Girl" examines the way that algorithms give rise to new predictive categories of human assortment, layered with market-inflected cages of assigned destiny.
The Miracle of the Black Leg offers a brilliant meditation on the tricky place where law, science, ethics, and cultural slippage collide.