ABSTRACT
79One key theoretical contribution of feminist legal thought is the demystification of legal objectivity as conceptualized in nineteenth nineteenth century discourses of liberal legalism and the various ways in which juridical logics draw on gendered dichotomies in determinations of what constitutes truth. Of particular interest is the categorization of emotion as antithetical to the fact-finding process. This distrust is based in deeply rooted binaries of Western thought, which position emotion in opposition to reason. The conflation of emotion with the irrational locates it squarely in the realm of the body and the feminine, a relegation that feminist scholars argue impacts the capacity of women’s testimony to be seen as truthful in trials of gender-based violence, particularly domestic assault. Given that domestic violence is itself a crime marked by emotionality, how does the law respond to emotions and the body once evoked and mediated through images of injuries in domestic violence prosecutions? Does seeing imagery of domestic violence – an act that mandates the introduction of emotion in the trial process – deconstruct the relation between emotion, reason, truth and the victim’s own landscape of understanding the violence she has experienced? This chapter explores these questions through examining the use and affect of visual evidence, particularly photographs of injuries, in trials of domestic violence. Drawing on case law and a deep, unconventional study of the particularly egregious case of State of West Virginia vs. Peter Lizon, this chapter revisits the insights of feminist legal theorists to examine the law’s response to images, the assessments of the emotions they evoke, and their role in the truth finding process. The core argument suggests that images collected of domestic violence victim’s battered bodies become ‘data doubles’, virtual replicas of the flesh and blood victim. The relative docility of the image serves as a correction to the willful (Ahmad, 2004) acts of the human originator the images are meant to replace. These images convey a particular emotional script of domestic violence that serves juridical needs even as it can and does run counter to the emotional script of the victim herself. Following an unconventional methodology, this chapter is written in collaboration with the victim in Lizon, Stephanie Hoffeler, as a form of reflexive willfulness that reinserts the victim’s own emotional landscape contra the emotional juridical scripts presented, through images of Hoffeler’s own battered body, in the course of three separate legal proceedings.
