Embodied Performances of Forensic Expertise: Epistemic Virtues, Gender, and Emotions in British Forensic Culture 1920-1980

Abstract

Today, it is obvious that the services of scientists and medical practitioners are required to solve a crime. When you watch crime series on television, the presence of a CSI team and pathologist is self-evident, as is their position of authority and significant contribution to solving the crime in most cases. The formal integration of forensic expertise into the British criminal justice system is, however, barely a century old. How did this change occur? How did forensic experts carve out a position of authority and trust? In this thesis, I argue that to understand this change, historians should not limit their view to legal, technological, and institutional developments but also study the embodied performances of forensic experts, such as how they dressed and regulated their emotions. I study how forensic scientists, physicians, and pathologists performed as expert personae in the British criminal justice system over the period from 1920 to 1980, and specifically, what epistemic virtues they embodied to enact this. I follow the perspective of historians who study scholarly personae and argue that ideas about what it meant to be a forensic expert were not only shaped by the academic disciplines in which they worked but also by gender, class, and nationalist norms. Specifically, I show that in the period from 1920 to 1980, British forensic experts embodied the forensic virtues of impartiality, detachment, and objectivity through the fashioning of a masculine, bourgeois, heterosexual, stiff-upper-lipped persona. I emphasise the relevance of these embodied performances by outlining how they influenced the examinations of victims of sexual violence and the murder victims in the Ruxton Case.