Embodied exhibits: Towards a feminist geographic courtroom ethnography

Faria C., Klosterkamp S., Torres R., Walenta J.

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, socio-cultural, political and economic life. To develop this approach, we draw collaboratively on our work on immigrant detention hearings, corporate fraud, anti-terrorist 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 datasets, 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 trans- scalar structural machinations of state violence.