Jennifer Hamilton/Case of the Genetic Ancestor

Project 2: The Case of the Genetic Ancestor: Genomics, Legal Subjectivity, and Race in America
In this project, I am especially interested in the potential for scientific knowledge to impact the standing of legal subjects. For instance, scholars of law and legal history have compellingly demonstrated that the development of legal institutions and practices is intimately bound with the cultural and political economy of race, racism, and colonialism. In a recent manuscript, “The Case of the Genetic Ancestor,” I pick up these themes by juxtaposing two seemingly distant legal disputes—African American slavery reparations litigation and current conflicts over “tribal disenrollment” among recognized Indian tribes in the U.S.— in order to discuss the ways in which genetic technologies are being deployed in legal contexts. More specifically, I critically examine the use of genetic ancestry tracing—a relatively new but widely available commercial practice that purports to link individual genotypes to genetic ancestries roughly defined as African, European, Asian and Amerindian—as a way to establish (or to contest) particular legal conceptions of history, injury, identity, and personhood. I hypothesize that genetic ancestry tracing, with its attendant conceptions of biogenetic kinship, is being used to produce new configurations of politically and legally cognizable affiliation within a broader political economy of recognition. Further, I seek to provide a broader historical and political context for the ways in which legal rights and identities are differently constituted with appeal to race, genetics, kinship, and culture, and to discuss how these latter categories are implicated in contemporary attempts to grapple with law’s colonial legacies.

During Summer/Fall 2009, I will conduct ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in support of this project. I have been granted a Whiting Fellowship to investigate genetic ancestry tracing technologies and their relationship to law in the United States. Ultimately, this work will form the basis of my next book manuscript, tentatively titled, The Case of the Genetic Ancestor: Law, Race, and Gender in a Genomic Age; I expect to complete this manuscript during my sabbatical semester in Spring 2011.