Professor Mariana Valverde concludes her most recent book, Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance, with the following: “I look forward to hearing how different types of readers interact with different parts and also different dimensions of this book, as they engage in their own empirical and theoretical work” (181). In the few pages that follow, I take her invitation seriously. I describe what I understand the book’s work to be, sharing my impressions of particular aspects of it. However, Valverde’s monograph, first and foremost, tempts readers to “make with.” It is most productively read as an inspiration, an exhortation, a beguiling to reexamine the operation of the spatiotemporal scales in governance practices and projects of all sorts, and how the mutually making and shaping aspects of space and time simultaneously rely upon and produce different jurisdictional orders and emotional registers. It is a plea for time in space-biased socio-legal studies and for affect in governmentality work that tends to the abstemious (my claims, not hers).

Valverde draws upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s effervescent ideas to develop her framework, while emphasizing that she is proffering neither a theory of governance nor of law. In Chapter 1, she reviews the central concepts from (or associated with) Bakhtin that have shaped her thinking: intertextuality, dialogism, heteroglossia, chronotope, and hybridity. The group of scholars working with Bakhtin’s ideas in relation to things legal is relatively small. Of that group, the overwhelming majority focus on law and literature, law and narrative, or to some extent, language (see Manderson Reference Manderson2012). Valverde opts, instead, to focus our attention on his engaging but underdeveloped notion of the chronotope. In order to help readers grasp the elusive concepts better, she briefly discusses the court (of law) and the single-family detached dwelling as sites of governance, drawing out, in particular, the complex play of space-time.

Chapter 2 situates the analysis in a number of scholarly conversations, gently rebuking certain fields for their respective spatial or temporal biases, and finding allies in the few scholars working on space-time.^{Footnote 1} I would have welcomed a brief discussion of other possible conversations which I see strongly implied in the book; scholars in communication studies and cultural studies, in particular, would benefit from reading Valverde’s text.^{Footnote 2} In Chapter 3, Valverde develops her framework in more detail, before putting it into action in Chapters 4, 5, and 6.

Valverde’s central claim in Chapter 4 is that legal feminist thought in the last twenty years can be productively read, in part, as a shift in scale. The attention of feminist politics and theory has turned from domestic questions of unpaid household labour or the constraints of the marriage contract, strategically tackled through domestic law activism, to concerns with transnational flows, networks, and assemblages and a turn to the international and transnational legal context. I found this chapter fascinating and immediately recommended it to a feminist friend in literary studies who was exploring her hesitations with the wholesale rejection of the second wave feminist political agenda, at the same time that she agreed with many of the reasons for that rejection. Understanding feminist theory’s move away from subjectivity as it is lived at the domestic level of the social as a change in ontological scale is tantalizing, and Valverde’s personal involvement in these debates enriches the analysis at every turn.^{Footnote 3} I know this chapter will spark lively and spirited debate when we take it up as our next text in the feminist legal studies reading group to which I belong.

Chapter 5 is a powerful, creative analysis of the legal discourse of the “honour of the Crown,” and it is this chapter that, for this reader, best illustrates both the utility of the chronotope as an analytic model and the nuance of Valverde’s framework. With sparkling writing and sharp analysis, Valverde rereads a series of Canadian Supreme Court cases addressing Aboriginal legal issues—Haida Nation, Marshall and Manitoba Metis Federation—illustrating the complex ways in which the mystical figure of the “honour of the Crown” has been resurrected to address colonial injustices towards Aboriginal peoples in Canada, while at the same time containing its more radical destabilizing elements.

In Chapter 6, Valverde opts to explore “Chronotopes of Security” through a series of four sites which she frames as more social than legal: the nation state; the crime-free neighbourhood; the safe home; and “the healthy immunized and protected body” of contemporary public health interventions (156). Each site is analyzed to highlight their different social scales and their consequent production of different jurisdictions, although she pays them varying levels of attention. Valverde acknowledges that this is a qualitatively distinct chapter, more of a sketch of possibilities than a sustained analysis.^{Footnote 4} While I appreciate that this approach suggests the ways a particular chronotope can play out very differently (and similarly) in varied socio-cultural locations, in my view the analysis would have been stronger with a greater level of specificity in analyzing source material. This is particularly pertinent here as it is in this chapter that the author pays most explicit attention to mood and affect, which can be challenging to articulate with analytic rigour.

I have three other engagements to offer which are more fodder for a chat with the author over a coffee than pithy critiques. First, I accept, and agree with, Valverde’s suggestion that the instances in her substantive chapters are not “case studies”; yet she does not offer an alternative language through which to know the implications and knowledge status of the events, figures, tropes, sites, and assemblages which she studies. Indeed, she continues to refer to them as case studies throughout the book. Second, I take the author’s point that hers is no “classification exercise” (23). Valverde is careful not to box in the notoriously slippery concept of the chronotope, while still using it productively. Nevertheless, I was still left with questions. For instance, in the first chapter, we move from the chronotope of “heritage conservation” (14), to “city-wide and regional innovation and economic growth” (14), to the “court,” (15–17), to the “legal chronotope” of the free, rights-bearing individual (20), to the “legal chronotope” of the “single family detached” (21). Are there specific characteristics that make a phenomenon more or less amenable to analysis as a chronotope? Where do the boundaries of the concept, admittedly (and desirably) porous, end? When and in what ways does the adjective “legal” matter when modifying chronotope?^{Footnote 5}

My third comment is the notoriously unfair request: “more, please.” When I first read the words “… emotional and aesthetic aspects of communication and governance are often excluded or ignored in governmentality work,” I literally cried out, “hallelujah”! This was the aspect of the book about which I was most excited but which left me wanting more. Unlike what she does for her other key concepts, Valverde does not draw extensively on the scholarly literature on affect, emotion, or aesthetics.^{Footnote 6} Affect and aesthetics blur in the notion of “mood,” which, while tantalizing, is not as strongly developed as other concepts and not as effectively drawn out in the substantive chapters as jurisdiction and scale, for example.

Regardless of the cogency (or not) of my foregoing observations, and perhaps because of the very characteristics that provoked them, Chronotopes of Law realizes its central goal for this reader. It demanded that I don the glasses of Valverde’s framework and look again at the material grounding my current research into the regulation of touch in pandemic culture. The thought experiment which follows is intended as my thank you to the author and a further exhortation to readers of this journal and her book, to see what happens when we work with Valverde’s framework.^{Footnote 7}

A 2015 flu shot advertisement for Rexall PharmaPlus shows two young men (both white), clad in sports attire sitting against a wall with a basketball; they are smiling and bumping fists. The tagline reads: “Brought the Game. Took home the flu.” In the socio-legal setting of the game, participants are encouraged to curtail their gestural repertoire and regulate their intersubjective physical contact because they are diseaseable, both continually vulnerable to, and inevitably likely carriers of, contagious disease.^{Footnote 8}

While my broader research project takes up the social imaginary of pandemic culture (Gerlach and Hamilton Reference Gerlach and Hamilton2014), untangling a “chronotope of diseaseability” therein enables me to understand the specifically governmental and affective consequences produced at the intersection of the temporal and spatial scales of contemporary disease regulation. The chronotope of diseaseability singles out for analysis the relationships between our hands as autonomous communicative media; social and individual anxiety and comfort in ritualized touch and gesture; the complicated temporality of contamination; and the spatial scale of intersubjective and physical environments, currently understood as always already dirty.^{Footnote 9}

Handwashing posters have become ubiquitous in promiscuous public locations such as the change rooms of sporting facilities and bathrooms in airports and shopping centres, spaces temporally transient.^{Footnote 10} As diseaseable subjects, we are offered temporal instruction: the length of time to wash our hands, the incubation period of the flu, and the length of time a virus can survive on an inanimate surface. At the same time, this temporal guidance is also spatial, characterizing the surfaces and interfaces of our lived environment and our fellow diseaseable subjects as contaminated. It invites us to (re)see our own hands as dirty surfaces to be managed and public spaces as requiring constant prudence through haptic self-regulation. The tangled space-time of diseaseability in pandemic culture produces our hands (severed from the space of our bodies and dislocated from the temporal circuit of our gestural economy) as particular objects/sites of governmental intervention and our selves as anxious subjects, rarely actually afraid, but continually conscious and conscientious of our diseaseable status. Flu shot advertisements on the radio, prohibitions on post-game handshakes in contact sports competitions,^{Footnote 11} teaching children the social norm of coughing into one’s elbow, or the increasing presence of hand sanitizer dispensers in our public built environment have all become newly legible and legitimate governmental techniques and technologies in pandemic culture. The chronotope of diseaseability invests sports governing bodies, employers, public health authorities, and fellow citizens with a hybrid pastoral-legal jurisdiction to look, teach, delimit, and prohibit, rewarding us for our haptic anxiety and our proprioceptic prudence.

I am unable, here, to do justice to the many ways in which a chronotope of diseaseability might illuminate contemporary cultural practices and texts aimed at various types of “handwork” within pandemic culture (see Schiffrin Reference Schiffrin1974) and their affective and jurisdictional implications. I hope that I have at least demonstrated that Valverde’s invitation is enticing and productive, perhaps the most useful compliment one can pay to a book that offers socio-legal scholars a stimulating framework for thinking the time-space, jurisdiction, and mood of governance work.