The Semiotic Fractures of Vulnerable Bodies: Resistance to the Gendering of Legal Subjects

Abstract

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Situating Vulnerability and Exploitation in Street-Level Drug Markets: Cuckooing, Commuting, and the “County Lines” Drug Supply Model

“…The question of gender and violability has arisen frequently in scholarship on the “vulnerable subject” (Fineman, 2010). In the context of county lines, these issues often present themselves in the form of inscribing fragility (Urquiza-Haas, 2017) on the bodies of coercively cuckooed women, while assuming purely autonomous behavior from men and women, who are perceived to have failed to manage their own precarity and are repeatedly drawn back into the county lines economy. As Fineman (2008) suggests, “because we are positioned differently within a web of economic and institutional relationships, our vulnerabilities range in magnitude and potential at the individual level” (p. 10).…”

“…Responding to these vulnerabilities has been labeled as one of the core challenges associated with tackling county lines (Coliandris (2015). Much of the messiness associated with working with vulnerability, particularly in legal and enforcement contexts, is intimately linked to the uncritical identity attributes and entrenched tropes associated with the term, particularly when applied to women (Urquiza-Haas, 2017). Indicative of this, much like the case of child sexual exploitation (CSE), the county lines model presents a complex situation in which participating laborers might not necessarily meet the parameters of “traditional” notions of vulnerability—instead straddling categories of “victims” and “perpetrators” (Coliandris, 2015).…”

Do the Challenges of LGBTQ Asylum Applicants Under Dublin Register With the European Court of Human Rights?

“…Such narratives may be stigmatizing because they erase agency, downplay resilience, and obscure the structural nature of vulnerability (i.e., how institutional and societal factors render them vulnerable). Critics therefore worry that vulnerability may justify paternalistic governance mechanisms that widen the scope of social control and undermine the human rights of individuals (Baillot et al, 2009; Dunn et al, 2008; Munro and Scoular, 2012; Urquiza-Haas, 2017).…”