ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how multisensory knowledge from forensic examinations of sexual assault complainants is translated and transformed into the form of a primarily visual legal artifact. In the pages that follow, I describe the forensic sensorium, the mode of sensory interaction, knowledge production, and technique through which forensic nurses investigate and elicit the sensory knowledge and experience of sexual assault victims. Both victims and nurses are primarily, although not exclusively, women. Sexual assault prosecution is particularly vexed by a long history of distrust of women’s testimony (Frohmann 1991; Jordan 2004). Although feminist legal reforms in the US have succeeded in eliminating statutory requirements of corroboration in rape trials (Bevacqua 2000), prosecutorial practice still adheres to such a standard. Exploring how truth claims are produced in the context of forensic intervention lends insight into the modes through which the law navigates the distrust of women’s voices by transforming voice into a knowable forensic object. Thus, the forensic sensorium is the basis upon which (mostly) female practitioners of forensic nursing produce authoritative clinical knowledge about the sexually violated body. I focus on the forensic intervention as a form of knowledge production and sensory experience in a context in which forensic evidence itself has little impact on the outcome of sexual assault prosecutions, or other categories of violent crime, in the US (Sommers and Baskin 2011). 1 It is also through their
initiation into the forensic sensorium that sexual assault victims begin to produce a clinical and legal narrative about their experiences of sexual assault, one that is embodied through their recounting of sensory memories, and made present in the sensory experience of the exam itself. I will demonstrate that within legal practices, the forensic sensorium transmutes sensate and affective experience into clinical and “measurable” evidence that incorporates the emotional and highly subjective narratives of suffering into an objectifi ed legal artifact. This process exemplifi es one way in which “the senses function as semiotic systems of social being, social relationality and social affect in the production of normativity” (Quéma, this volume).
