Sexual Violence, Intersectionality, and the "Forensic Gaze"

• In Event: Hidden in Plain Sight: Criminological Apparatuses as Public Secrets

Abstract

Since their inception, rape kits have been framed as a powerful technoscientific mode for bringing perpetrators to justice and have become a popular site of sexual violence activism. Yet paradoxically, rape kits have a minimal impact on the disposition of charged cases. In recent years, African American historians have articulated sexual violence as a "citizenship project"-referring to how authorities and authoritative discourses target some populations as potential citizens and acts upon them-and there have been important contributions from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in understanding how the rape kit, and forensic evidence more broadly, follows prescribed social, criminal, and forensic scripts. In this project, I put these insights in conversation to propose the rape kit can be understood as a biopolitical citizenship project connected to historic constructions of race, gender, power, and civil rights. I argue rape kits power a "forensic gaze" that materializes both victimhood and a biocitizenship using the episteme of traditional gendered and raced narratives of legitimate sexual violence. In effect, appeals to the importance and necessity of the rape kit masks how criminological interpretations of sexual violence remains connected to the performative compliance of racially gendered norms.

Author

• Renee Shelby, Georgia Institute of Technology