UC San Diego

Since its 19th century inception, photography has altered the image of law, changing how we make legal judgments and the role of seeing in the discovery of justice. Using the electronically networked domestic violence courtroom as a case study, this dissertation explores how the image came to remediate the function of traditional legal paperwork. The domestic violence trial emerged nationally primarily in the 1980s -90s and operates according to a special choreography of legal rhetoric and image display. In cases of domestic abuse, digital evidence proves decisive in criminal conviction rates. Drawing upon literatures in critical legal studies, visual culture and science and technology studies, the dissertation argues that the production of images of battered women signals an invitation of battered women into humanity. Yet, this body of photography simultaneously discloses itself as a racial project through the historical evacuation of women of color from social science and police investigations of domestic violence. State photography of battered women institutionally emerges in an attempt to normalize the diverse and contradictory language and feelings that battered women display in clinical milieus. Through trial observations conducted at the San Diego County Superior Courthouse, I examine how color, feeling and display screen animate the psychic transformations constitutive of spectatorship among juries and law professionals. The dissertation proposes that this body of photography arose from of misalignments between feminist political struggles around agency and embodiment and state legal reforms. Domestic abuse trials and persons whose evidentiary photos of biological damage accumulate as stored data modernize our conceptions of citizenship, knowledge and law