Q and A: Loitering or Waiting? On the Interpretation of Gestures

Anna Jayne Kimmelis an assistant professor of dance in the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, housed in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. She talked with GW Today about her research.

Q: Please tell us about your interdisciplinary interest in legal humanities and dance studies.

A: My work applies the methodologies of dance studies to the legal humanities, particularly in scenes where legal frameworks might be deciding on interpretation of the public body. Think about when we decide if someone is obedient or disobedient in protest; if the First Amendment is most applicable to the right to assembly or the right of free speech; or if someone is vaguely loitering or waiting with clear purpose. I think someone with a dance background has a bit more vocabulary to address these scenes with nuance and meaning.

Q: Can you give an example of the kind of vocabulary you're talking about?

A: Absolutely. I am just finishing up an article that's coming out in a law review on City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, a U.S. Supreme Court case in 2024 that addressed the legality of camping in public space. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggests in her dissent, there's quite a bit of ambiguity around what it means to sleep, to close one's eyes, to look at the stars, to rest with a backpack, to sit on a bench. That is a gestural interpretation, and in this article I draw out what it means to read stillness in the law. We can extend from Grants Pass to other scenes where stillness is contested, as in charges of loitering and vagrancy, where stillness becomes this point of anxiety that isn't quite addressed by legal theory.

Q: You've described a pervasive trend in legal decisions to "mask discriminatory aesthetic positions." Can you give an example?

A: I immediately want to point towards the long history of vagrancy lawin the United States, particularly as it emerged in a postbellum tradition as a way to recapture previously enslaved individuals and return them to indentured servitude or indentured labor. And what I'm pointing to in this moment of ambiguity is loitering laws criminalizing being present in a space without purpose. If we look back toward particular instances in which loitering laws were invoked, the descriptions of what the individuals were doing were incredibly vague.

If I am still, against a wall with one shoulder dropped, am I resting and recovering and rejuvenating, or is that a posture of unwellness and unease? Or is it read as anxiety and scare and threat? Those are all aesthetically coded words to me because we're interpreting the visual imprint of the body.

Q: How do you bring the methods of dance studies to legal theory?

A: It's often close readings of scenes playing out, whether through visual imagery, photographs, video analysis or language discussing the body, and understanding where ambiguity and bias enter into the conversation. Legal interpretation is often understood as either formal logic on the one hand or textual analysis on the other. What I hope to point towards is that a different type of interpretation is necessary.

Q: What practical difference would you like to see emerge from analyses like yours?

A: Legal actors, be they attorneys or otherwise, would benefit from a legal education that is more robust or plural in its methodologies, opening up the idea of legal interpretation in the ways that I'm hoping to model and demonstrate.

Q: Please describe your role as an affiliate faculty of the Honey W. Nashman Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service.

A: The center really models what significant scholarship looks like in today's society. It gives space to the idea of the citizen artist, someone whose artwork and artistic practice moves beyond campus and beyond the university space. I've worked in collaboration with artists in confinement from Maine to Arkansas, inviting them in to work virtually with students and think about what collaboration, creative and critical practice can look like across walls.

Q: What has been the most surprising finding in your research?

A: I continue to be surprised by the lack of accountability toward describing gestures. I read these descriptions and I think, oh, this could not pass within a dance context. And yet in a legal tradition it doesn't raise eyebrows.

Kimmel is a co-editor and contributing author of "Performing Law" (Cambridge University Press), released this month. Her forthcoming book, "Legal Moves: Choreographies of Race, Law, and Empire," is due in August from Stanford University Press.