Book Review: Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication

With this impressively detailed ethnography, Hlavka and Mulla walk us through the processes, both before and after adjudication, that re(forge) the sexual, gender, and racial inequalities that produce sexual violence in the first place. They ask the reader to question our definitions of violence – and justice – to understand how the carceral system makes visible certain acts, perpetrators, and victims of violence at the expense of obscuring others. In doing so, they demonstrate how “the process of adjudication is itself a reproduction of violence” (40) to highlight the human costs of participation in sexual assault trials. They explain how the everyday routines and record-keeping practices of the court system fix discourses of race, sexuality, and gender as part of the permanent public record and with enduring consequences. This has the additional consequence of privileging certain forms of knowledge and knowledge-bearers as more authoritative and valuable on the topic of sexual violence. This ambitious text is the result of over four years of ethnographic and archival data collection in the Milwaukee County courthouse. The authors utilized a mixed-method, collaborative qualitative research approach that involved daily observations in the courthouse, beginning in May 2013, and totaling 688 court hearings and appearances. As feminist ethnographers, the authors are attentive to the intersection of race, sexuality, gender, and class throughout the text, beginning with their methodological reflections in the introduction. They center the methodological and ethical practice of witnessing violence, bearing witness to the manifold and complex consequences of intimate, interpersonal lives on individuals and their communities. As part of this practice, they reject the possibility of liberatory transformative potentials in criminal justice processes. Instead, they claim, through this research they bear witness to the role of sexual assault adjudication in reproducing social inequalities and violence. As they note, they were doing ethnography in their home community, which was (and continues to be) experiencing a crisis of mass incarceration. As feminist researchers, Hlavka and Mulla reflect not just on the definition of violence, but also the victim as ontological subject, finding that both lead necessarily to deep interrogation of the temporality, spatiality, and durability of victim status. They find the visibility and durability of victim status is stratified by race, gender, and sexuality and, through medical records and court archives, these stratifications endure as public record. The task of bearing witness is one that Hlavka and Mulla share with their readers through the structure of the book. The chapters proceed through the stages of a criminal trial from jury selection to sentencing to make visible the operations of the courtroom. While the authors organized the text in this manner to make more legible the complexities of these processes, at times the effect was confusing. Yet, this effect too is reflective of the experience for victims, defendants, and their families. In Chapter 1, we begin, as trials do, with the process of jury selection. In this process, Hlavka and Mulla argue, the “nomos of sexual assault” is reproduced, which they have defined as “the cultural contexts of rape and sexual assault as epistemological objects embedded with interpretive commitments that privilege legal interpretations as they are intertwined with the medicalization of the harm of rape” (41). Juries are educated and selected into certain understandings of sexual violence, race, gender, and sexuality through methods that privilege legal fictions of neutrality and authoritative knowledge. 1120669 SREXXX10.1177/23326492221120669Sociology of Race and EthnicityBook Review book-review2022