Book Launch: Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication

On 28 April 2022, SHaME presented the official book launch of Associate Prof Sameena Mulla and Associate Prof Heather Hlavka’s ‘Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication’ (New York University Press). Heather and Sameena were joined in conversation by host Prof Joanna Bourke and guests Assistant Prof April Petillo, Dr Gethin Rees, and Prof M Gabriela Torres.

On 28 April 2022, SHaME presented the official book launch of Associate Prof Sameena Mulla and Associate Prof Heather Hlavka‘s Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication (New York University Press). Heather and Sameena were joined in conversation by host Professor Joanna Bourke (Principal Investigator at SHaME) and guests Assistant Prof April Petillo (Northern Arizona University), Dr Gethin Rees (Newcastle University), and Prof M Gabriela Torres (Wheaton College).

The official book launch for Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication featured introductory comments from the authors, reflections from Assistant Prof April Petillo, Dr Gethin Rees, and Prof M Gabriela Torres (Wheaton College, and an open panel discussion chaired by Prof Joanna Bourke, including questions from a globally diverse audience of criminal justice practitioners, academics, survivor-activists and interested members of the public. The discussion covered a wide range of topics including statecraft and carcerality, gender-based violence in US asylum courts, forensic medical evidence and broader cultural ideas about sexual violence survivors, and much more.

You can watch a recording of the event below:

 

RESOURCES:

If you order the book directly from NYU Press, you can receive 30% off and free shipping by using the discount code HLAVKA30-FM.

For more background, you can read Prof Joanna Bourke’s book review on the SHaME Blog.

 

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES:

Sameena Mulla is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. She is the author of The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses and Sexual Assault Intervention, for which she was awarded the Margaret Mead Award by the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology.

 

 

Heather R. Hlavka is Associate Professor of Criminology and Law Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI. Her work appears in Gender & Society, Law & Society Review, Violence Against Women, Law and Social Inquiry, and Journal of Child Sexual Abuse.

 

 

April Petillo is an Assistant Professor of Public Sociology at Northern Arizona University. She concentrates on gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, political status, and culture, weaving together Native American/Indigenous, comparative/critical ethnic, sociolegal, critical trafficking, feminist, and queer studies. April mainly focuses on exploitation originating in settler-colonial and conquest logics and how targeted communities embody and harness resistant joy. Her primary projects highlight legally encoded racial politics and multifaceted coalition-building. April has published articles in FrontiersFeminist Anthropology, and Women’s Studies in Communication and written chapters for Applying Anthropology to Gender-Based Violence: Global Responses, Local Practices (2015), Negotiating Patriarchy and Gender in Africa: Discourses, Practices, and Policies (with Jan Eggars, 2021) and Applying Anthropology to General Education: Reshaping Colleges and Universities for the 21st Century (Rutledge, 2022). With Heather Hlavka, April co-edited Researching Gender-Based Violence: Embodied and Intersectional Approaches (New York University Press, August 2022). Her future work includes articulating “slaving culture” as a statecraft byproduct of state-produced racial violence and continuing to articulate Arrivantcy as decolonial, coalitional naming, and claiming praxis.

 

Gethin Rees is a Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University.  He is interested in the use of medicine in the criminal justice system.  He is currently the Principal Investigator on an Economic and Social Research Council (UK) Standard Grant titled ‘What is equivalence in police custody healthcare?’, exploring the delivery of healthcare in police custody suites in England.  Previously he explored the performance of the forensic medical intervention in sexual assault cases in Scotland; England and Ontario, Canada and is continuing this work as a Co-I (alongside Andrea Quinlan, Lesley McMillan and Deborah White) on a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Connection Grant (Canada) ‘Inaccessible Care: An international forum on sexual assault services in rural Canada and Scotland’.  In this project, forensic and victim support service professionals working in rural environments will be brought together with academics to explore how best to support each other as well as victim-survivors.

 

M. Gabriela Torres is a cultural anthropologist that specializes in the study of the violence– particularly gender based violence– and state formation. At Wheaton College she serves as Associate Provost for Academic Administration and Faculty Affairs.
She has written widely on sexual violence, sexual harassment in academe, feminisms, as well as gender based violence claims in U.S. asylum. Her co-edited volumes, Marital Rape: Consent, Marriage and Social Change in Global Context, and Sexual Violence in Intimacy: Implications for Research and Policy in Global Health, offer unique insight into the global problem of sexual violence. Her recent co-authored article, Rules Matter: How can professional associations re-map intra-community norms around sexual violence? appears in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Her leadership has been recognized by an American Anthropological Association Leadership Fellowship and Gender Equity Award, and funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Marion and Jasper Whitting Foundation, NEH, CDC, NSF, and the School for Advanced
Research.

 

Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is the Principal Investigator of the SHaME project. She is the prize-winning author of fifteen books, as well as over 100 articles in academic journals. Among others, she is the author of Rape: A History from the 1860s to the Present (2007), What it Means To Be Human: Reflections from 1791 to the Present (2011), and The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (2014). Reaktion Books will publish Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence in July 2022. Her books have been translated into Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, and Greek. She is a frequent contributor to TV and radio shows, and a regular correspondent for newspapers.