Women's Studies 2260 Chapter Notes - Chapter Gotell: Cross-Examination, Neoliberalism, False Memory Syndrome
30 Jan 2020
School
Department
Course
Professor
gotell
Monday, November 11, 2019
2:00 AM
● Yet, as I will argue, a new form of site-specific silence is being established in which sexual
violence becomes unhinged from gendered, and other relations of, social power, removed
from the terrain of the social and the political, and increasingly contained within the
individualized frame of criminal law
● As I argue in this chapter, developments within law cannot be disarticulated from the
broader political, economic, and social context. The sexual assault law reform efforts of the
1990s that engaged feminists in consultative relationships with the federal government
coincided with both the elaboration of neo-liberalism as a new norm of governance and the
emergence of a backlash to feminist understandings of sexualized violence.
Neo-Liberalism and the Context of Judicial Discourses
● Now preoccupied with the rights and treatment of decontextualized and individualized
“victims,” new policy discourses avoided systemic constructions linking “crime” to context,
signaling the disappearance of gendered policy discourses of sexual violence
● through the sexual assault trial, we can observe the endless repetition of
heteronormativity’s key scripts: the assertion and reassertion of an active, uncontrollable
male sexuality and a passive female sexuality; the incredibility of sexual coercion; and the
construction of women (and children) as more emotional, less rational, and less reliable than
men
● Rape law focuses on white women
● Scrutinizing judicial discourses reveals both the shifting terms upon which the “good victim”
is defined and a changing set of justifications for disqualifying claims of sexual violence.
Woven through- out is a new normative vision of sexuality built upon the risk-avoiding,
“responsibilized” sexual citizen
● Cross examination = reduces victim to sexualized body
● robing diverse private records for evidence of inconsistency in order to create the
appearance of faulty memories and motives to lie has provided the key mechanism of
attacking complainants since the 1990s.
● By limiting section 276 to the eradication of “discriminatory generalizations” based upon
“the twin myths,” the court set the stage for an extremely narrow reading – that sexual
history evidence may be used to support specific, but not general, inferences on issues of
consent and credibility.
● To interpret section 276 in terms of impermissible “general” rationales and permissible
“specific” rationales potentially eviscerates its protections.
● The admission of sexual history evidence to show inconsistencies or to rebut prosecution
evidence has, of course, long been a feature of sexual history jurisprudence
● Decisions on the admissibility of sexual history evidence, for example, rely heavily on
concepts of “humiliation” and “embarrassment” and often assess the potential harm using a
scale of sexual activity that ranks evidence of penetration as the most serious threat to
privacy.
