“We Just Looked At Them As Ordinary People Like We Were:” The Legal Gaze and Women’s Bodies

Abstract

Abstract This Article analyzes the struggles of two female musicians who became caught up in the criminal justice system because they revealed their bodies. Using archival research and personal interviews, I tell the story of punk rocker Wendy O. Williams' 1981-1984 obscenity and police brutality court battles. I also relay the life of Lorien Bourne, a disabled and lesbian rock-n-roller charged with disorderly conduct in Bowling Green, Ohio, in 2006. I examine how legal actors, including courts and jurors, viewed Williams and Bourne using classist, ableist, sexist, and homophobic optics. In so doing, I extend my previous work on legal gazes, or what I have called the legal practice of peering. I end the Article by looking to the women's art and lives as correctives to oppressive manners of legal seeing. PRELUDE: TWO TALES OF FEMALE NUDITY AND THE COURTS prosecutors are the guys doing this for money. These guys are the real whores, (1) Mohawked and leather-clad (2) Plasmatics frontwoman Wendy O. Williams shouted to jurors in the Cleveland Municipal Court (3) in April 1981. They had just rendered a not-guilty verdict on an obscenity charge Williams faced after a sexually explicit January 20 show at the city's Agora club. (4) During the performance, Williams had probably sung her politically uproarious songs while chainsawing a guitar and sledgehammering a television (5)--energetic outrages that proved all the more remarkable since only two nights before she had been beaten and arrested for obscenity by police after a Milwaukee concert. (6) Yet the Cleveland authorities (7) seemed less interested in Williams' Dionysian treatment of property or her out-of-state scandals than in her wearing little over her breasts but shaving cream and fondling her microphone (8) at the Agora. During the trial, Cleveland prosecutor Patrick Roche showed the jury a film of the Plasmatics' show, (9) which revealed Williams' half-nude dancing as well as the cuts and bruises she'd weathered during the January 18 Milwaukee arrest. This was provocative stuff, but the five-man, three-woman jury (10) did not respond to these visuals with disdain. They acquitted her after only three hours. (11) Williams' and the Plasmatics' luck with the courts held throughout 1981. (12) Several months after the Cleveland acquittal, Plasmatics manager Rod Swenson appeared in Milwaukee to face the charges of obstructing justice he had earned when trying to save Williams from the police's January 18 beatings. (13) The defense put on a hugely enlarged photograph of Williams being dogpiled by local police as evidence of Swenson's justification for assaulting the officers who attacked her. (14) Once again, the jury acquitted, and one interviewed juror said that they did so because they saw the Plasmatics as ordinary people just like they were. (15) Three years later, however, Williams' life and legal fate saw a different turn. Now a struggling rock star with an arrest for battery on her record, (16) she traveled with her band back to Milwaukee to sue its police department on a civil rights claim based on her January 18, 1981 arrest. (17) During this trial, the Milwaukee jury was offered two images that hailed from those difficult three days: City Attorney Scott Ritter, who defended the police officers, made sure that the jurors saw a blown-up still photograph of Williams covered in shaving cream, an image that resembled the video (sans bruises) that the Cleveland jurors had studied when deciding that she had not committed obscenity. (18) The plaintiffs' attorney, in turn, submitted the photograph of Williams being attacked by the police officers, which had persuaded the 1981 Milwaukee jury that Rod Swenson had not obstructed justice when he had come to Williams' aid. (19) Yet while those images had helped convince the 1981 Cleveland and Milwaukee jurors of Williams' Cleveland innocence and Milwaukee peril, they now helped induce the jury to find that the Milwaukee officers had not sexually assaulted her, not used excessive force, and not been guilty of violating her civil rights. …