Legal regulations of the body produce and seek to protect specific imaginations of the body in an idealized form—that is, not only what a body is but also what it ought to be. In this article, we apply a queer criminological approach to interrogate the regulation of the body-that-ought-to-be that has animated two legal interventions regarding body modification: the criminalization of female genital cutting (FGC), often described in law as female genital mutilation (FGM), and the regulation of gender-affirming manual hormone use. By analyzing discourses that have circulated in Australian law regarding both practices, we show how the legitimacy of a given body modification has been tied to that modification’s potential to either threaten or affirm a body’s capacity to produce intelligible gender. We contend, on this basis, that the body that the law has sought to protect in these instances is a body that is not queer.

身体的法律规定以理想化的形式产生并寻求保护身体的特定想象——也就是说，不仅身体是什么，而且它应该是什么。在这篇文章中，我们应用一种奇怪的犯罪学方法来审问应该成为的身体的调节这引发了两项关于身体改造的法律干预：将女性生殖器切割 (FGC) 定为刑事犯罪，在法律中通常将其描述为女性生殖器切割 (FGM)，以及对性别肯定的人工激素使用进行监管。通过分析在澳大利亚法律中流传的关于这两种做法的话语，我们展示了特定身体改造的合法性如何与该改造威胁或肯定身体产生可理解性别的能力的潜力联系在一起。在此基础上，我们认为，在这些情况下，法律寻求保护的身体并不是酷儿。