The Flowers Are Vexed

This work, at the intersection of feminist jurisprudence, critical race theory, and African American literary studies, challenges the concept of the reasonable man which informs Anglo-American jurisprudence. The argument revolves around a politics of relation that challenges the hierarchies of membership that are an integral part to the development of the American legal order. The chapter draws on Hortense Spillers’s germinal concept of vestibularity (standing at the threshold) as well as Stanley Cavell’s concept of the “passionate utterance” to furnish alternatives to the reasonable man. It concludes with readings of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.