ABSTRACT
In feminist and disability theory, the body became regarded as a 'natural' entity, on to which socially constructed 'understandings' of disability and gender were grafted. Using Teubner's model of autopoietic law as a heuristic device has considerable appeal when seeking to examine law's relation to medicine in the context of the sterilization cases. This analysis of the interaction of law and medicine at the level of discourse and organizational systems has enormous potential for feminist legal scholarship, for it offers important insights into how legal and medical 'thinking' produces sexed identity. Such an analysis of the sterilization cases, developed in this chapter, supports the contention that learning-disabled subjects are represented as failing to conform to those sexed identities that 'matter' in legal, social and cultural life. A renunciation of legal authority in favour of medical knowledge serves to mire legal discourse further in Teubner's 'epistemic trap'.
