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Stories That Kill: Masculinity And Capital Prosecutors' Closing Arguments, Pamela A. Wilkins
Stories That Kill: Masculinity And Capital Prosecutors' Closing Arguments, Pamela A. Wilkins
Cleveland State Law Review
The American death penalty is a punishment by, for, and about men: Both historically and today, most capital prosecutors are men, most capital defendants are men, and killing itself is strongly coded male. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—the overwhelming maleness of the institution of capital punishment, the subject of masculinity is largely absent from legal discourse about the death penalty. This Article addresses that gap in the legal discourse by applying the insights of masculinities theory, an offshoot of feminist theory, to capital prosecutors’ closing arguments. This Article hypothesizes that capital prosecutors’ masculinity is strongly influenced both by white Southern …
Disguising Empire: Racialized Masculinity And The Civilizing Of Iraq, Nancy Ehrenreich
Disguising Empire: Racialized Masculinity And The Civilizing Of Iraq, Nancy Ehrenreich
Cleveland State Law Review
I will argue here that the rhetoric used by the Bush administration (and the media) to sell U.S. military aggression to the American public has played upon the gender insecurities and racial biases of the population. To be more specific, it has reinforced a racialized national sense of masculinity by playing on the association of maleness with violent domination of people of color - domination seen as laudable because it is undertaken "for their own good." In so doing, it has also reinforced the message that the way for people of color in this country to become true "Americans" is …
Love And Architecture: Race, Nation, And Gender Performances Inside And Outside The State, Angela P. Harris
Love And Architecture: Race, Nation, And Gender Performances Inside And Outside The State, Angela P. Harris
Cleveland State Law Review
In this essay, I will use the metaphor of "performance" to describe the complicated interplay of power and identity. Each of the essays in this Cluster, I suggest, is concerned with some facet of identity performance within the power fields of gender, race, and nation. Perry calls our attention to how skin color, though typically subsumed by "race" in legal discourse, is a resource for performing identity that in fact complicates our understanding of racial subordination. Nancy Ehrenreich and Nicholas Espiritu are concerned with how states mobilize individual and collective race and gender performances as a way of inciting and …