Institutional Autopsy

In 1862, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. The Act said that any American willing to settle on 160 acres of public land, live there for five years, and improve the parcel, could file a claim and receive title. Between 1862 and 1976, when the Federal Land Policy and Management Act repealed the homesteading provisions in the contiguous states, the United States distributed approximately 270 million acres of continental North America through this mechanism of the registered claim. The claim, the parcel, the boundary line, the survey marker. That is how the American imagination learned to think about territory.

The Claimed Body argues that the Homestead Act's registered-claim logic did not retire in 1976. It migrated. It now operates on the American body instead of on American land. A hospital claims your birth. A school claims your developmental measurements. An insurer claims your diagnostic history. An employer claims your labor capacity and your drug screens. The state claims your reproductive eligibility and your military eligibility. If the criminal claim succeeds, a prison holds you. At the other end of life, a dying registry claims the moment of your cessation and a funeral corporation claims the disposal of your remains. Operating in the shadow of all of these, a data broker claims an ongoing right to your patterns and sells them forward to whoever will pay.

The homestead did not end. It turned inward.