Law in all of its modalities is intimately involved in the formation of subjectivity. Law sets expectations, shapes the bounds of propriety, creates and constrains possibilities, and disciplines and punishes. This is true whether law is imposed from the outside by authorities such as the state, cultivated as an internal set of norms and practices, or both. This panel examines the role of law in shaping religious subjectivity and the role of religious subjects in shaping and responding to the law. Panelists will explore the role of California's Alien Land Law of 1913 in shaping Asian American Islam; developmental orthodoxies in education and the forming of the American child; the impact of the asylum process on Korean immigrant religious practices and self-understandings; and the effect of school discipline laws that understand disabled children through the frame of deviance. Collectively, this panel interrogates whose futures the law makes possible.
After the passage of the Alien Land Law of 1913 in California, the well known statute excluding Asians from land ownership as “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” South Asian migrant farmers found a variety of contractual loopholes to keep their lands and livelihoods. While scholars have written many social histories of these creative workarounds, this paper attempts to understand how they shaped Asian American religion -- specifically, Asian American Islam. Using archival materials, I examine how this period’s land lease contracts between South Asian migrants, white lawyers, and white business people produced bureaucratic intimacies that were normatively rich and socially complex, shaping these individuals’ deeply personal modes of relating to land, ownership, and the state. The paper will show that, by giving early South Asian Muslim migrants an American secular vocabulary of economics, these legal encounters were crucial in their story of immigrant religious formation.
This paper introduces the concept of "developmental orthodoxy" to analyze how American law governs children's futures by sorting developmental trajectories into orthodox and heretical categories. Through a close reading of Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) alongside Tennessee's 2023 ban on gender-affirming care for minors, I trace how the figure of the child operates in legal reasoning as a site where the state's investment in futurity becomes visible. In Yoder, the Court celebrated Amish parents' right to withdraw children from formal education because their alternative schooling produced "good farmers and good citizens"; in Tennessee, the state overrides parental authority to prevent treatments that "might encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex." Drawing on Lauren Berlant's work on citizenship and futurity and Lee Edelman's concept of reproductive futurism, I argue that both cases reveal the state functioning as arbiter of which children, and which futures, merit legal protection.
How does immigration law shape migrant subjectivities? The paper examines whether and how migrants’ engagement with the asylum institution brings about changes in their religious practices and self-understandings, drawing on ethnographic research among ethnic Korean migrants from China who applied for asylum in the U.S. as Christians. The paper unpacks the black box through which immigration law shapes migrant subjectivities in variable and dynamic ways by focusing on their future-making. Various intermediaries and transnational migrant communities provide competing cultural scripts, creating frictions in migrants’ future-making. Whether and how these frictions are coordinated shape migrants’ self-transformation. The paper demonstrates how the interplay between asylum law, Korean immigrant churches, and transnational migrant communities shaped whether Korean Chinese migrants applied for asylum as Christians, how they organized the prolonged refugee status determination process, and how they made futures out of it, refusing or embracing Christian conversion as a desirable and plausible future.
This paper examines how contemporary school discipline laws shape the futures of disabled children in the United States. Placing recent policies such as Texas House Bill 6 in conversation with the historical precedent of Buck v. Bell (1927), it argues that legal frameworks governing school discipline can translate disability-related differences into behavioral deviance, legitimizing exclusion in the name of institutional order. While Buck v. Bell sought to regulate the reproductive futures of disabled persons, modern disciplinary regimes increasingly govern their educational futures through suspension, removal, and alternative placements.