Mother, Monster, Mrs, I:A critical evaluation of gendered naming strategies in English sentencing remarks of women who kill

In this article, we take a novel approach to analysing English sentencing remarks in cases of women who kill. We apply computational, quantitative, and qualitative methods from corpus linguistics to analyse recurrent patterns in a collection of English Crown Court sentencing remarks from 2012 to 2015, where a female defendant was convicted of a homicide offence. We detail the ways in which women who kill are referred to by judges in the sentencing remarks, providing frequency information on pronominal, nominative, and categorising naming strategies. In discussion of the various patterns of preference both across and within these categories (e.g. pronoun vs. nomination, title + surname vs. forename + surname), we remark upon the identities constructed through the references provided. In so doing, we: (1) quantify the extent to which members of the judiciary invoke patriarchal values and gender stereotypes within their sentencing remarks to construct female defendants, and (2) identify particular identities and narratives that emerge within sentencing remarks for women who kill. We find that judges refer to women who kill in a number of ways that systematically create dichotomous narratives of degraded victims or dehumanised monsters. We also identify marked absences in naming strategies, notably: physical identification normally associated with narrativization of women’s experiences; and the first person pronoun, reflecting omissions of women’s own voices and narratives of their lived experiences in the courtroom

Law and the language of identity : discourse in the William Kennedy Smith rape trial

ix, 267 p. ; 25 cm

She Does Not Flee the House: A Multimodal Poetics of Space, Path, and Motion in Opening Statement

This paper shows how an attorney’s multimodal narrative transforms an opening statement into an argument about the credibility of the main prosecution witness. The defense attorney integrates speech, gestures, and exhibits to shape motion events and spatial images into relevant objects of evidentiary knowledge, creating inconsistencies in the witness’s account under the auspices of merely showing the jury locations and movements in the defendant’s home. We demonstrate how the encoding of motion events percolates in and through a polyrhythmic and multidimensional poetic format to naturalize gender ideologies – cultural expectations governing victim identity – in the social construction of rape’s legal facticity

Gesture's community: Social organization in multimodal conduct

This article analyzes the multimodal integration of gesture, talk, and sociocultural context. More specifically, I investigate how forms of Gemeinschaft/ Gesellshaft community are embodied in the concrete details of multimodal form—in the iconic interplay of multimodal practice and symbolic forms of social organization.Using a focus group interview of community policing training, I show how criss-crossing laminations of participation emerge through novel gestural configurations like multimodal quotation and pragmatic beats to not only pace the rhythm of speech but simultaneously plot the spatial coordinates of social organization. In the course of events, we see how speakers integrate gesture, gaze, and postural orientation into the stream of their utterances to project rhythmically infused meanings of communal identity, social solidarity, and cultural opposition