JEANNIE SUK, “AT HOME IN THE LAW: HOW THE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE REVOLUTION IS TRANSFORMING PRIVACY” (2009)

Abstract

Suk reverse-engineers the home, deconstructing and reassembling the idea of home in a way that, in turn, makes the home newly strange and strangely familiar. The author investigates the powerful feeling elicited by these simultaneous but contradictory emotions: the "uncanny." The uncanny appears and reappears at seemingly every turn, including several of the author's explorations not addressed in this Note, and in my own critical contributions: in the superstranger; the superpublic; the superprivate; the transformation of home to house; and centrally, and possibly most uncannily, the home as violence. While the uncanny is powerfully descriptive of the feelings of parties involved, and a rhetorical device of the law and its actors, the uncanny also applies to the experience of reading the book itself. Professor Jeannie Suk's work is an unsettling, thought-provoking, and cannily revealing series of looks at the preoccupations of the law, the home, and all of us, their physical and cultural inhabitants and creators.