Feminist In/Visibilities: Questions of Consent when Policing Domestic Violence with Photographic Evidence

Abstract

US feminist grassroots organising of the 1960s positioned its critique of domestic violence within a social analysis of class, race, sexuality and gender. In subsequent decades, feminist organising largely shifted to service provision which brought collusion with state entities and police in the quest to criminalise domestic violence. Criminalisation introduced a demand for corroborative evidence including the use of photographs to ‘prove’ violence as enacted on victims’ bodies. Through a consideration of the history of domestic violence photography and ethnographic data gathered with women residing in a domestic violence shelter, I explore how domestic violence photographs can reinforce entrenched gendered and racialised inequities and engender new ones. In many states, evidence-based prosecution does not rely on victim testimony and can be used without the consent of the harmed person. Rather than simply a mechanism of state control, however, the meaning and utility of evidentiary photographs remain unstable. Ethnographic data suggest that photographs and videos of domestic violence reverberate within and beyond the logics of state violence. I argue that photographic consent emerges as a vector to consider alternatives to criminal prosecution via policing.