New Books In Gender Studies

Scholars Heather Hlavka (Marquette University) and Sameena Mulla (Emory University) have written a new book that examines and interrogates the place and space of the courtroom, the use of expertise, especially scientific expertise, in the adjudicative process, and how this all intersects with race and gender in cases of sexual assault. Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication (NYU Press, 2021) is the result of a long-term ethnographic study of sexual assault cases in the city of Milwaukee, and how those cases, as they come through the legal system, re-animate cultural narratives and re-inscribe the authority associated with law courts and the legal system itself. A key focus of the research was in examining the ways in which medicolegal and forensic evidence was used in the trial process, and how the reliance on these scientific resources and those who narrate and explain these dimensions of evidence and information are often set in contrast with the experiences of the vict