‘Well, I saw the picture’
semiotic ideologies and the unsettling of normative conceptions of female sexuality in the Steubenville rape trial
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.35019Keywords:
sexual violence, rape trials, multimodality, normative heterosexuality, semiotic ideologiesAbstract
Cultural norms surrounding heterosexuality have been shown to influence legal and popular understandings of rape. In particular, Nicola Gavey has proposed that normative ideas about men’s aggressive, hard-to-control sexuality and women’s passive, acquiescing sexuality operate as a ‘cultural scaffold’ for rape – they provide a sense-making framework that allows rape to be understood as ‘just sex’. This paper, a case study of the 2013 Steubenville (Ohio, USA) rape trial, attempts to show how the social media evidence in the trial, especially the photographic evidence, was able to unsettle some of these discourses surrounding heterosex. Following work by Webb Keane and Crispin Thurlow on semiotic ideologies, I argue that the special status assigned to the digital images by the trial participants, relative to the linguistic representations, had significant consequences for the outcome of the trial. Crucially, it brought into stark relief the problematic nature of the defence’s claim that passivity and silence on the part of the complainant was tantamount to consent.
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Powell, A. (2015) Seeking rape justice: formal and informal responses to sexual violence through technosocial counter-publics. Theoretical Criminology 19: 571–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480615576271
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Sontag, S. (1971) On Photography. London: Penguin.
Thurlow, C. (2017) ‘Forget about the words’? Tracking the language, media and semiotic ideologies of digital discourse: The case of sexting. Discourse, Context and Media 20: 10–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2017.06.008
Torresi, I. (2016) The photographic image: Truth or sign? In A. Wagner and R. K. Sherwin (eds) Law, Culture and Visual Studies 125–41. Dordrecht: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9322-6_6
Wagner, A. and Sherwin, R. K. (eds) (2014) Law, Culture and Visual Studies. Dordrecht: Springer.
Alani, H. (2017) Judge drops rape case against USC student, citing video evidence. New York Times, 5 August. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2017/08/05/us/usc-rape-case-dropped-video-evidence.html.
Anderson, I. and Doherty, K. (2008) Accounting for Rape: Psychology, Feminism and Discourse Analysis in the Study of Sexual Violence. London: Routledge.
Barthes, R. (1977) Image – Music – Text. London: Fontana.
Bauman, R. and Briggs, C. (1990) Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59–88. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.19.1.59
Boux, H. and Daum, C. (2015) At the intersection of social media and rape culture: how Facebook postings, texting and other communications challenge the ‘real’ rape myth in the criminal justice system. Journal of Law, Technology and Policy 1: 149–86.
Burt, M. and Estep, R. (1981) Who is a victim? Definitional problems in sexual victimisation. Victimology, 6: 15–28.
Cameron, D. and Kulick, D. (2003) Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cameron, D. and Kulick, D. (eds) 2006. The Language and Sexuality Reader. London: Routledge.
Clark, K. (1992) The linguistics of blame: representations of women in The Sun’s reporting of crimes of sexual violence. In M. Toolan (ed.) Language, Text and Context 208–24. London: Routledge.
Ehrlich, S. (2001) Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent. London: Routledge.
Ehrlich, S. (2007) Legal discourse and the cultural intelligibility of gendered meanings. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11: 452–77. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2007.00333.x
Gavey, N. (2005) Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape. London: Routledge.
Goodwin, C. and Goodwin, M. H. (1997) Contested vision: the discursive constitution of Rodney King. In B. L. Gunarsson, P. Linell and B. Nordbert (eds) The Construction of Professional Discourse 292–316. New York: Longman.
Hoffmeister, T. (2014) Social Media in the Courtroom: A New Era for Criminal Justice? Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.
Iedema, R. (2001) Resemiotization. Semiotica 37: 23–40.
Jones, R. (2009) Dancing, skating and sex: action and text in the digital age. Journal of Applied Linguistics 6: 283–302.
Jones, R. and Li, N. (2016) Evidentiary video and ‘professional vision’ in the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement. Journal of Language and Politics 15: 567–88. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.15.5.04jon
Keane, W. (2003) Semiotics and the social analysis of material things. Language and Communication 23: 403–25.
Kulick, D. (2014) Language and desire. In S. Ehrlich, M. Meyerhoff and J. Holmes (eds) The Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality, 2nd edition 68–84. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118584248.ch3
Lees, S. (1996) Carnal Knowledge: Rape on Trial. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Leppanen, S., Kytola, S., Jousmaki, H., Peuronen, S. and Westinen, E. (2014) Entextualization and resemiotization as resources for identification in social media. In P. Seargent and C. Tagg (eds) The Language of Social Media 112–36. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137029317_6
Ley, T. (2013) ‘She is so raped right now’: partygoer jokes about the Steubenville accuser the night of the alleged rape. Deadspin, 2 January. Retrieved from http://deadspin.com/5972527/she-is-so-raped-right-now-former-student-jokes-about-the-steubenville-accuser-the-night-of-the-alleged-rape.
Matoesian, G. (2001) Law and the Language of Identity: Discourse in the William Kennedy Smith Rape Trial. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mnookin, J. (1998) The image of truth: photographic evidence and the power of analogy. Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 10(1): article 1.
Powell, A. (2015) Seeking rape justice: formal and informal responses to sexual violence through technosocial counter-publics. Theoretical Criminology 19: 571–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480615576271
Schiffrin, D. (1987) Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sherwin, R. K. (2014) Introduction: Law, culture and visual studies. In A. Wagner and R. K. Sherwin (eds) Law, Culture and Visual Studies xxxiii–xIi. Dordrecht: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9322-6
Sontag, S. (1971) On Photography. London: Penguin.
Thurlow, C. (2017) ‘Forget about the words’? Tracking the language, media and semiotic ideologies of digital discourse: The case of sexting. Discourse, Context and Media 20: 10–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2017.06.008
Torresi, I. (2016) The photographic image: Truth or sign? In A. Wagner and R. K. Sherwin (eds) Law, Culture and Visual Studies 125–41. Dordrecht: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9322-6_6
Wagner, A. and Sherwin, R. K. (eds) (2014) Law, Culture and Visual Studies. Dordrecht: Springer.
Published
2019-07-31
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Ehrlich, S. (2019). ‘Well, I saw the picture’: semiotic ideologies and the unsettling of normative conceptions of female sexuality in the Steubenville rape trial. Gender and Language, 13(2), 251-269. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.35019
