ABSTRACT
Women, communists, gays and sex offenders have all become subjects of suspicion. This chapter draws attention to the ways in which Othering processes contribute to the production of such subjects and, reciprocally, how being a person whose veracity is discredited contributes to being Othered. Sex offenders are one recent example of such a group but there is a long history of subjects of suspicion. Women have long been constructed as the deceptive sex. The construction of women as the deceptive sex is reflected in the undue attention paid to them in the development and use of lie detection methods. In the 1960s polygraph admissibility decisions had already begun to diversify – new arguments were made for the admission or exclusion of lie detector evidence. Towards the end of the 1980s, however, a new strategy, called the 'containment approach', was developed to monitor, manage and treat sexual offenders, which more formally conceived a role for the lie detector.
