While the turn to vulnerability in law responds to a recurrent critique by
feminist scholars on the disembodiment of legal personhood, this article suggests
that the mobilization of vulnerability in the criminal courts does not necessarily
offer female drug mules a direct path to justice. Through an analysis of sentencing
appeals of female drug mules in England and Wales, this article presents a feminist
critique of the dispositif of the person and its relation to vulnerability. Discourses on
drug mules’ vulnerability mobilize the trope of the colonial victim in need of
protection, which is often translated into legal mercy. But mercy is rather an
expression of biopower which inscribes not only fragility onto the bodies of drug
mules by figuring them as exemplar paradigms of colonial subjectivity, but also
reinvigorates the dispositif of gender implicit in the legal person. In this set-up, it
would appear as if law and politics totalize the registers of life, in this case the
contours of vulnerable body. The article suggests we must revisit the image of the
wounded body in order to carve out a space for resistance. Drawing on Elaine
Scarry and Judith Butler, it suggests vulnerable bodies are marked by a semiotic
openness, which renders them subject to appropriation but also able to signify the
precarity produced by the law through their resistance to representation.

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• The Semiotic Fractures of Vulnerable Bodies: Resistance to the Gendering of Legal Subjects