This blog carnival features six contributions from participants in the 2026 Critical Times summer school on ‘Bodies’, which took place in Lucerne in early July. Prompted by Caroline Bynum’s famous mid-90s provocation, “why all the fuss about the body?”, attendees were invited to think anew about the significance of bodies in various contexts, situations and relations. Or, to ask more pointedly: do bodies still matter? And if so, why, when and how? Taken together, the pieces gathered here offer a glimpse of the questions, conversations, and intellectual energies that animated the week in Lucerne. Read side-by-side, they suggest the enduring importance of bodies for critical thinking across law and the humanities – not as a settled object of inquiry, but as a site where questions of power, vulnerability, meaning and belonging continue to be worked out. (Steven Howe, Director of the Critical Times Summer School, University of Lucerne)
If the body is a site of resistance, the corpse is a site of rupture.[1] Our bodies are disciplined by the socio-political-cultural-legal apparatus into normative regimes that do not simply dissipate into nothingness after death. Much as stepping out of proscribed behaviour can mark (the beginning of) an act of resistance, so does stepping out of the realm of the living expose the hierarchies inscribed in this order, and invite reflection on its reimagination.
Feminist, decolonial, queer, and crip theories – as well as their intersections – have long helped us understand how particularly marked bodies are configured as imperfect, abject (legal) subjects. Such approaches have also thoroughly disrupted international human rights critique, challenging the expanse of the category of the human that undergirds it. The human corpse, I contend, necessarily extends such analyses. That is, the corpse embodies the transmission of the markings of gender, race, sexuality, and dis/ability to the far end of the life-death nexus, and the systemic (mis)treatment that these markings invite brings to light the fragility of designating death as a great equaliser.[2]
The Anthropocene, the climate crisis and ecological collapse, alongside the technological apparatus that underwrites these and disciplines everyday life, have also helped usher increasingly urgent questions about the non-human and inhuman of (international human rights) law into critical legal discourse. The corpse also presents a particularly striking opportunity for making sense of these relations.
This contribution sets out an agenda for thinking the corpse of/in international human rights law (IHRL). I argue that this is most organically done from a feminist counter- and posthumanist perspective. I therefore only briefly address what the corpse does to international human rights; while this question itself emerges from my wider concern with what doing justice to the corpse within, against, and beyond this rights regime may look like.
The Corpse as a Human Rights Subject
The corpse is not, in themself, protected by the provisions of IHRL or recognised as a subject thereof. They appear only as victims of (often) extreme violence and/or as the deceased family members of persons who still have access to the whole repertoire of IHRL. They are confined to the margins of its legislative tools and tribunal records and exist only in relation to the still-living.
For instance, regional human rights mechanisms have regularly gestured to the need to preserve the dignity of the dead by drawing on the rights of their surviving kin. The prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, or the right to humane treatment, especially in the context of enforced disappearances (e.g. Guzman Medina y Otros v. Colombia), and the right to privacy (e.g. Sabanchiyeva and Others v. Russia) have been invoked in this regard. This dependent construction is also reflected in the one instrument that most vocally addresses the dead: the Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.
Naturally, scholars have debated the viability of stretching the human of IHRL to include the corpse, though the debate seems to have stagnated somewhat in the last decade. Corpses are variously described as lacking agency; as bodily remains that cannot sense their (mis)treatment; and that, as far as we are aware, therefore cannot consciously perceive the benefits of being treated with dignity. Others insist that corpses are owed moral obligations at the very least. Meanwhile, the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Morris Tidball-Binz, has called for the development of guiding principles for the humane treatment of the dead since 2024, noting especially the discrepancy between existing rules for protecting the dead during conflict and those for the dead of the everyday. In 2025, he and several academics and practitioners in the field of forensic medicine and human rights proposed seven areas on which such principles could be developed.
The Corpse as Vulnerable
This tension seems to speak to how the corpse sits at an unruly intersection between the human and nonhuman. But the fact remains that before, during, and after their physical removal from the spatio-temporal order in which international human rights manifest, corpses are exposed to significant violence. This liminal space is a markedly vulnerable one. Corpses are disposed of in mass graves, mutilated, used as bargaining chips, and stripped of their personal affects in armed conflict; they are systematically enforceable-y disappeared by violent regimes; they are denied cultural and religious rituals of mourning when belonging to an occupied people; their recovery and repatriation are obstructed if they are migrants who die on their journeys; they are violated along lines of gendered violence, bringing to the fore the ‘violent intimacies’ that death, dying and burial trigger for trans people and their kin; they are reduced to symbols of a denied Palestinian futurity.
IHRL seems to recognise these vulnerabilities and the violence they may translate into on the part of the surviving kin of the deceased, but it does not recognise this violence as manifest in the dead themselves.
The Corpse as Bestial
‘Since humanist modernity as a whole has done nothing but multiply the technologies of death, animalism should invite us to a new way of living with the dead. With the planet as a corpse and as a ghost.’[3]
The poignant absence of the dead from the corpus of IHRL indeed reflects a strict division between the living, breathing human subject of IHRL and the nonhuman. Unlike (elements of) the natural environment, which have similarly challenged contemporary human rights discourse and practice, the corpse also retains something bestial within its bounds. Death is not a neat state of becoming. The dead sputter out of life expelling gases and emitting odours. During public health crises, they are read as threats to the aliveness of other bodies – some of the earliest COVID-19 dead were hastily disposed of without due regard for ritual, and the bodies of deceased AIDS patients were feared as eternally contagious. Those corpses deemed monstrous in life for using their bodies to oppose colonial violence, or those transitioning out of the gender regime, take this monstrosity with them.
This helps us read the corpse along the history of bestialised bodies, and the care with which we should approach the question of ‘inclusion’ within IHRL’s humanism. Namely, the idea that legal liberalism, as a remedy, does not challenge the constitutive norms of its realm and can therefore not imagine liberation outside its confines; and that, as humanism projects a highly exclusionary norm, we must attend to the question of what conception of ‘human’ we are challenging in the first place.
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, for one, argues that the blackened body produced by Enlightenment thinking and/in liberal humanism is produced not as an exclusion, but as a ‘violent imposition and appropriation […] of black(ened) humanity in the interest of plasticizing that very humanity’.[4] Animalisation, she argues, is anything but incompatible with humanisation. Jackson reminds us that the radicality of thinking with animalisation and cross-species relationality is necessarily compromised by the ‘racially hierarchized universal humanity’ that circumscribes our bodies.
I heed this when thinking with the corpse in IHRL. The incentive to signify marginalised and made-vulnerable bodies with (legal) meaning through processes of inclusion largely reflects the history of IHRL itself, and may emerge from grassroots organising itself; but this regime ultimately depends on constricting the boundaries of humanity to ascribe dignity to certain bodies. The consequence of reducing blackened humanity to mere exclusion, Jackson explains, is that we ignore alternative conceptions of being and the nonhuman that these bodies have produced. The dead body might help us explore these abject-ed conceptions further along the vector of time.
The Corpse as Figuration?
While corpses are not equal in the circumstances of their deaths or in their access to dignified treatment and burial, what the corpse always already does is inscribe a human body with a degree of inhumanity. They can be read as that fleshy material link between the embodied human rights subject and their bestialised abjection (through which they become).
I propose that what the corpse does to IHRL can be read as their functioning as a (feminist posthumanist) figuration. Feminist figurations are ‘materially embedded and embodied signposts of crucial knots of knowledge and power, anticipating emergent meta-patterns of resistance and of dissonant and creative becoming’; they are ‘anomalous, hybrid, and ‘weird’’.[5] They make clear the intersections of embodied experience and the norms that structure these, and thereby help us rethink not just the bounds of being but imagine new relations between being and nonbeing. They thus function as thinking aids of material conditions, as well as ‘projective anticipations’ of how we might be or relate differently.
Corpses teeter on the edges of the life-death-nexus, especially before they are disposed of; and they make visceral the relation between the human body and the soil, water, or atmosphere into which they inevitably dissolve. The canon of IHRL figures the corpse with their absences and their confinement to a relation with living bodies. As a figuration, the corpse helps us bring together core tensions in debates on the stretchiness of the human of IHRL; the conceptions of agency and autonomy within these debates; and they bring intimately close the dyad of human-nonhuman by bringing the nonhuman into the human body.
Corporal Reflections
‘“We’ve been dreaming every day of the moment we could recover the martyrs, honor them, and bury them,” said Ola Abu Naser, a 30-year-old survivor. “Every day we felt as if they were calling us, saying: “We are here.”’ (NPR, 6 May 2026)
I find unconvincing the argument that our uncertainty about what the dead can and cannot experience is too great for us to respond under our existing legal regimes. When it comes to how we should treat our dead with dignity post-mortem, I want to – and think it essential for us to– heed the feminist posthumanist call to ‘move beyond the limit of ‘seeing’ as the only sense useful to the international lawyer: there is touch, taste, smell, hearing and more.’[6] The dead might very well be calling out to us – perhaps we must learn to listen.
Whether this should neatly translate into the inclusion of the corpse in IHRL as a (partial) subject is not a question I can answer here. Nonetheless, what this question makes evident is that it must necessarily be approached with an understanding of how dead bodies are produced; the histories (of resistance) inscribed upon them; and the implications of insisting on a radically relational mode of becoming that ties these bodies to the natural world. This, of course, ties into foundational debates over whether IHRL may ever function as a tool for liberation.
I have tried, instead, to point to some of the ways in which the corpse challenges an IHRL regime that relies on their abjection. As it stands, when I think with the dead, I intend to listen to their silences.
Amira Fretz is PhD Fellow at Leiden University
References
Matilda Arvidsson and Emily Jones (eds), International Law and Posthuman Theory (Routledge 2024)
Paul B Perciado, ‘Feminism is not a Humanism’ in An Apartment on Uranus (Fitzcarraldo Editions 2021)
Rachelle Joy Chadwick, ‘Visceral Acts: Gestationality as Feminist Figuration’, Signs: Journal of Culture and Society 48 (1) (2022)
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU Press 2020)
[1] To name a few, the body is read as a site of resistance in feminist theory, notably feminist body politics; in critical theory, with the disciplining of the body; in black feminist philosophy, with self-definition acting as resistance to the regulation of the Black female body into a racial archetype; and in crip and critical disability approaches that warn of the potential dangers of romanticizing the idea of the body as resistance.
[2] I use the gender neutral ‘they’ to refer to ‘the corpse’ in the singular.
[3] Paul B Perciado, ‘Feminism is not a Humanism’ in An Apartment on Uranus (Fitzcarraldo Editions 2021), 101
[4] Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU Press 2020), 3
[5] Rachelle Joy Chadwick, ‘Visceral Acts: Gestationality as Feminist Figuration’, Signs: Journal of Culture and Society 48 (1) (2022), 229, 232
[6] Arvidsson M and E Jones (eds), International Law and Posthuman Theory (Routledge 2024), 47