Please join us for a special guest lecture by Sameena Mulla of Marquette University! This research talk is free and open to the public.

Date: April 12, 2017
Time: 2:00 – 3:35 pm
Location: Gerlinger Lounge, Gerlinger Hall

“She Was a Prostitute”:  Trace, Race, and Place in Milwaukee’s Sexual Assault Adjudication

This presentation demonstrates the complicated ways in which attorneys participating in sexual assault adjudication depend upon both the presence and absence of evidence to build their cases. The presentation argues that absence is as palpable and compelling as presence: who speaks, who does not and what is left unsaid are often central to the practices of the trial. This stands in stark contrast to the public imaginary of material evidence that is legible, determinate, and scientifically infallible. In reality, such evidence exists only in the realm of science fiction. It is the human voice and practices of testimony that centrally figure in adjudication outcomes, even in an era in which forensic evidence is commonly available. Interpreting absences and silences require attorneys to turn jurors towards the normative and familiar, often taking an adversarial posture toward the narrative of the victim-witness.

Based on 10 months of ethnographic research in Milwaukee’s felony court system, this presentation focuses on a common defense narrative: that victims are, in fact, prostitutes, and that defendants were clients. These narratives particularly imperil black women, criminalizing their families and their neighborhoods, and objectifying black women’s sartorial and beauty standards. By reading a single case closely, the project demonstrates the contest over interpreting what emerges (and what is left unsaid) in the course of a trial, while also highlighting the structures of anticipation that inform the strategies of all of the trial participants, be they witnesses, prosecutors or defense attorneys.

Sameena Mulla is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI. Her broad areas of research and teaching interest are legal and medical anthropology, expert knowledge, institutional ethnography, and gender and sexuality. Her book, The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses and Sexual Assault Intervention, details the tensions between criminal justice and nursing practices in sexual assault interventions in a Baltimore, MD emergency room. The Society for Medical Anthropology awarded the book an honorable mention in the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize competition. Currently, Mulla is working on two book projects drawing on field research in the Milwaukee County Court System. The first, Of Lemmings, Wolves and Monsters: Sentencing Sex Offenders in the Courtroom Bestiary, is a genealogical analysis of the use of animal and animal-like figures in courtroom speech, probing the evaluation and presence of racialized imaginaries in the fraught context of sexual assault. The second book project, a collaborative ethnography co-authored with a feminist criminologist, Heather Hlavka, examines and interprets the changing practices of contemporary sexual assault adjudication in relation to new forms of expertise and technology. Mulla is serving her second term as co-chair of the Gender-Based Violence Topical Interest Group of the Society for Applied Anthropology.