Whose Body Is It? Technolegal Materialization of Victims’ Bodies and Remains after the World Trade Center Terrorist Attacks

Abstract

This article empirically analyzes how victims’ remains were recovered, identified, repatriated, and retained after the World Trade Center (WTC) terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It does so by asking the question whose body is it. This question brings to the fore issues related to personhood and ownership: how are anonymous and unrecognizable bodily remains given back an identity; and who has ownership of or custody over identified and unidentified human remains? It is in this respect that the article engages with technoscientific and legal, or “technolegal,” trajectories of human remains in the wake of the WTC tragedy. By using the metaphor of “materialization,” it becomes possible to trace how remains are forensically identified and implicated in legal regimes. “Technolegal materialization” as a concept and methodological sensitivity contributes to the current “actor-network theory” (ANT)-inspired legal scholarship, which tends to focus on legal practices in courtrooms but not those beyond them. In this article, 9/11 victims’ remains are followed from “Ground Zero” to the forensic laboratory and beyond and articulates five instances of technolegal materialization of bodily remains and their past and contemporary existences.

Ontologically dirty knots: The production of numbers after the Srebrenica genocide

“…And how to establish reliable records about the category of missing persons, whose bodies are hidden and who cannot speak for themselves? Here, I present three technoscientific and legal – or technolegal (Toom, 2016) – modes of counting Srebrenica victims: forensic anthropological analysis of bones exhumed from mass graves, demographic lists of persons reported missing, and forensic DNA matching of exhumed remains with reference material collected from family members (see Wagner, 2008). The analysis is based on reports submitted to the ICTY.…”

Mourning Missing Migrants

“…Between 2014 and late 2018, close to 18,000 deaths were reported in the Mediterranean. 6 Most recovered bodies remain unidentified; whose body it is is impossible to determine (Toom 2016). In such cases those persons are understood to be missing by their families; they don't know if they are dead or alive, only that they are gone (Edkins 2011).…”

Bodily circulation and the measure of a life: Forensic identification and valuation after the Titanic disaster

“…With notable exceptions (e.g. Toom, 2015 ), to date the valuation studies literature has dealt less explicitly with the material constitution of the things being valued. Studies of erasure and the archive have expanded considerably on the work of Foucault and Derrida, and they deal explicitly with how archival material is constituted and preserved ( Butler, 2006 , 2010 ; Stoler, 1995 , 2010 ) Yet although theorizations of the archive incorporate analyses of economic concerns, with the exception of work that came initially from subaltern studies ( Chakrabarty, 2000 ; Guha, 1997 ; Spivak, 1999 ) they tend to focus on the political and cultural aspects of erasure over and above motivations related to economic class.…”

“…Instantiation is related to what Toom (2015) , in his study of identification practices, has called the ‘technolegal materialization’ of bodies (p. 4). The processing of human remains after 9/11 focused on accomplishing the enormous feat of attributing individual personal identities to even tiny samples, in part to justify the US’s military retaliation for the attacks ( Aronson, 2016 ).…”