This article examines the emergence of a medical condition increasingly cited as a cause of death in fatality inquiries in Canada: excited delirium. Beyond concerns arising from the association between excited delirium and police use of electrical weapons known as Tasers, one common concern about the medical condition is whether or not it is "real." Bypassing strictly realist or purely constructivist accounts, this article uses the conceptual language of historical ontology and science and technology studies to investigate how excited delirium is enacted in medico-legal sites. Contributing to sociologies of death and dying and category formation, it attends to the textually mediated practices of legal and medical experts in the United States and Canada that enact excited delirium as a coherent medical condition.
This article employs some of the theoretical and methodological tools devised by Michel Foucault to explore the political rationale suggested by the proliferation and use of a class of weapons collectively referred to as ‘non-lethal’. The invention and continued use of non-lethal weapons has been treated in existing literature as an ethical crisis. This article connects the emergence of non-lethal weaponry to the mobilization of a sense of ethical crisis concerning the humane treatment of civilians and combatants in conflicts in the United States and beyond. Policies related to non-lethal weaponry, along with the practices that they engender, are also explored in relation to the notion of ‘partial citizenship’. Offering a contribution to the genealogy of non-lethal weapons, this article traces their involvement in the policing by US military agents of a variety of sites, actors, and contexts outside of the theater of war.
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