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10 Yale J.L. & Human. 537 (1998)
The Absurdity of Property in the Person

handle is hein.journals/yallh10 and id is 545 raw text is: The Absurdity of Property in the Person Jane M. Gaines* I had some reticence about doing a talk about legal culture because my work had moved so far away from it in recent years. In the process of rethinking a book that was published in 1991,1 however, I was surprised to discover some carry-over issues, as most scholars must find when they undertake this exercise. But my new area of interest seemed to be so far afield from the earlier one. In 1991, I had been working on the most banal objects of consumer culture-t-shirts and key rings-and now I was working on the legacies of slave culture in the representation of blacks in early United States cinema. The thread, I think, has to do with a fascination with the way things that are originally unpropertylike become property. Corollary to this is the probability that human beings, when defined as property, will defy attempts to turn them into things, will chafe against all of the constraints that this entails-from the transfer of ownership to bodily violations. It is a stretch to go from the absolutely crass and ap- parently inconsequential topic of licensed character merchandise to the unquestionably serious history of human enslavement and liberation. The connections may not be immediately obvious, particularly given the unfettered trade and accelerated expansion of the entertainment industry and all of its adjacent and subsidiary industries, including advertising and merchandising. The surface distinction concerns me less than the shared legal and philosophical underpinnings-the assumptions about property that literally hold these high-flying and wild-riding industries together and the way litigation threatens to make parts of them come unglued at the same time that it glues them back together pretty much as they were. When it comes to entertainment law, I really am an iconoclast: My interest in legal culture has been motivated by an interest quite unlike-indeed significantly unlike-the interests of the legal profes- * Associate Professor of Literature and English, Director of the Program in Film and Video, Duke University. She is currently completing Other/Race/Desire: Mixed Blood Relations in Early Cinema (forthcoming 1999). 1. JANE GAINES, CONTESTED CULTURE: THE IMAGE, THE VOICE, AND THE LAW (1991).

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