Embodied Exhibits: Toward a Feminist Geographic Courtroom Ethnography

Caroline Faria, Sarah Klosterkamp, Rebecca Maria Torres and Jayme Walenta

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2020, vol. 110, issue 4, 1095-1113

Abstract: Courtroom ethnographies are very rare in English-, German-, and Spanish-language legal geography. Yet courtrooms are dense spaces through which legal subjects, spaces, and instruments are performed, created, disciplined, and managed. In this article, we develop a feminist geographic ethnography of the court. This approach attends to the affective, intimate, and bodily politics of courtroom subjects, spaces, and moments, connecting these with wider structural processes of legal, sociocultural, political, and economic life. To develop this approach, we draw collaboratively on our work on immigrant detention hearings, corporate fraud, antiterrorist trials, and our conversations and reflections together as feminist geographers. We use four embodied exhibits—the file cabinet, the legal pad, the cloakroom ticket, and the cell phone—to make manifest four elements of our feminist methodology. These integrate grounded data sets, embodied transcriptions, global intimate analyses of legal power, and antithetical-activist scholarship. We assert that feminist courtroom ethnographies offer vital and deeply geographical insights into the spatial work of power in and through the legal system, connecting everyday legal goings-on and the transscalar structural machinations of state violence. Key Words: courtroom ethnography, feminist geography, feminist methodology, legal geography, political geography.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24694452.2019.1680233 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:110:y:2020:i:4:p:1095-1113

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/raag21

DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2019.1680233

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of the American Association of Geographers is currently edited by Jennifer Cassidento

More articles in Annals of the American Association of Geographers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().