Drawing on over 400 legal decisions and other documentary materials, 40 semi-structured interviews with legal and scientific actors, and hundreds of hours of multi-sited ethnographic observation, I offer a fine-grained analysis of how expert evaluative practices become institutionalized in legal settings and result in divergent understandings of sexuality within the law. In the case of sex offenders, forensic psychologists offer largely essentialist explanations of sexual deviance drawn from technologies meant to read the body, such as polygraphs and penile plethysmographs. By contrast, asylum advocates put forward more constructionist accounts of sexuality that are sensitive to sexuality’s social determinants. The juxtaposition of these cases is illuminating because of the rapid shifts in cultural conceptions of both homosexuality and sexual assault that occurred during roughly the same period beginning in the 1970s. “Ruling Sexuality” unpacks the institutional processes undergirding these changes in social understandings of sexuality, showing that these cultural shifts are anchored by institutional practices and highlighting the ways by which legal and scientific organizations and networks refract cultural currents to either create social change or reinforce hegemonic structures. Part 1 analyzes how competing networks of expertise formed in the domains of sex offender and LGBTQ asylum law and articulated with already existing legal infrastructures to form unique ways of knowing sexuality in each area, what I call “epistemic logics.” These ways of knowing sexuality were not, however, inevitable developments. My dissertation shows that the processes of establishing expertise regarding sexuality required considerable political work. Part 2 considers how epistemic logics affect what counts as empirical evidence of sexuality in legal proceedings and demonstrates how competing social scientific views of sexuality result in different forms of evidence predominating in each legal arena and ultimately result in divergent interpretations of sexuality. Finally, Part 3 shows that approaches to risk assessment (part of both asylum and sex offender hearings) reinforce particular ways of understanding sexuality and that sexual subjects in these arenas are constituted vis-�-vis their relationship to risk. In sum, “Ruling Sexuality” shows that how we know sexuality determines how we govern it. Understanding the knowledge practices employed by the state allows us to better comprehend the functioning of state power, including how it structures norms of citizenship and creates exclusionary boundaries based on sexuality, gender, and other social categories, and importantly, to recognize that “the state” is not uniform but that these processes vary across the many institutions of the state.

Last modified

• 06/23/2019

Creator

• Stefan Vogler

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-b7k3-z221

Subject

• Sociology

Keyword

• science
• classification
• knowledge
• law
• sexuality

Date created

• 2018-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright