Document Type

Essay

Degree Name

Master of Laws

Abstract

This Essay destabilizes a feminist project that seeks to emancipate sexually violated women in the United States through a rhetoric of voice. There is a body of feminist literature that imagines voice as unconstrained self-expression through which sexually violated women resist patriarchal oppression and heal from trauma. When projected onto the courtroom, however, this framework becomes an ideal that the legal process, by its structure, cannot fully accommodate. This Essay presents three claims. First, despite the emergence of a legal promise of “voice” after the enactment of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, feminists should not treat it as the culmination of their project, for lawyers use “voice” in a different way to signify restricted victim participation that is not necessarily vocal. Second, a close reading of Chanel Miller’s memoir Know My Name reveals the inadequacy of both feminist and legal rhetorics of voice to capture what sexual violence survivors actually seek. Third, transforming feminist ideals of voice into legal paradigms — as exemplified by the unprecedented use of an empowering rhetoric of voice by the sentencing judge in People v. Nassar — does not emancipate women but rather collapses meaningful institutional change back into an overemphasis on vocal expression. Ultimately, this Essay argues that a feminist project that seeks to make “voice” law — in the sexually violated woman’s mind as well as the criminal justice system — only leads to a state of emancipatory complacency.

Disciplines

Criminal Law | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Law

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