Normalising death in the time of a pandemic

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1232

Keywords:

COVID-19, death, registration, normal, excess, muerte, registro, exceso

Abstract

This paper examines a tension in the time of a pandemic between governmental representations of death as an anomaly and techniques for normalising death as an inevitable outcome of life. It contends that the technology of registering a death during the COVID-19 pandemic is conditioned upon differentiating between the normal and the pathological, standards and variations, and average and excess. Indeed, death registration depends on the creation of a new universal nomenclature for ascertaining death causation, which excludes various circumstances of a person’s life in order to stabilise SARS-CoV-2 as a normative category for classification. The paper thus reveals how during a pandemic, registration can been utilised to pathologise specific kinds of death, while unproblematically reifying the concept of a normal death. It argues that what the COVID-19 pandemic exposes, particularly though the productive tension between the rhetoric of death as both an anomaly and inevitable, is that normalising technologies are inextricable from how a panoply of institutions determine what deaths should be counted at all.

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Author Biography

Dr Marc Trabsky, La Trobe University

Dr Marc Trabsky is a Senior Lecturer at La Trobe Law School and Director of the Centre for Health, Law and Society, La Trobe University. He writes in the intersections of legal theory, history and the humanities. His research examines the theoretical, historical and institutional arrangements of law and death. His first book, Law and the Dead: Technology, Relations and Institutions (Routledge, 2019), was awarded the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize for 2019.

La Trobe Law School, La Trobe University, 3086, Victoria, Australia. Email address: M.Trabsky@latrobe.edu.au 

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Published

30-11-2021 — Updated on 01-06-2022

How to Cite

Trabsky, M. (2022) “Normalising death in the time of a pandemic”, Oñati Socio-Legal Series, 12(3), pp. 540–555. doi: 10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1232.