ABSTRACT
Contemporary feminist critiques of the law have often cited the rape trial as embodying all that is problematic about the legal system for women. From the revictimization of rape victims to the legitimization of normative views of female and male sexuality, the discriminatory qualities of rape trials have led some feminist legal theorists to conclude that `judicial rape' can be more damaging than an actual rape, `masquerading' as it does `under the name of justice' (Lees 1996: 36). For Smart (1989: 161), the rape trial is illustrative of the law's juridogenic potential: frequently the harms produced by the so-called remedy are as bad as the original abuse. Documenting the capacity of cross-examining lawyers to dominate and revictimize rape victims, or to perform `rape of the second kind' (Matoesian 1995: 676), work by Conley and O'Barr (1998) and Matoesian (1993) has convincingly demonstrated the pivotal role of `talk' in achieving such effects. Yet, this book shows that perhaps more insidious ± and thus resistant to challenge ± in the sexual assault adjudication proceedings analysed here was not the power of `talk' to revictimize victims but rather its role in de®ning and delimiting the meanings that came to be attached to the events and subjects under scrutiny. `Seeing' the events and participants in question was not a transparent process, but one made opaque and partial by a range of culturallyand institutionally-authorized linguistic practices. Indeed, the overarching interpretive framework that I argue structured these proceedings was so seamless in its coverage that subaltern (i.e., victims') understandings of the events were rendered unrecognizable or imperceptible. Thus, departing from previous linguistic scholarship on rape trials, this book ascribes a largely constitutive role to language. That is, in analysing the language of sexual assault adjudication processes, I attempt to give empirical substance to theoretical claims about the primacy of discourse in constructing and constituting social realities.
