Bodies of Evidence

A free book version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Bodies of Evidence disrupts popular understandings of the rape kit by examining it as a complex assemblage of practices and protocols that stands at the uneasy nexus of law and medicine. Jaimie Morse traces how this assemblage was championed as a rights project in medicine, moving from the margins to the center of health care responses to sexual violence through new clinical standards of care, first in the United States and then in global humanitarian medicine. Drawing on archival research, interviews with experts and activists, and fieldwork at international meetings, the book chronicles a novel process of legal mobilization in medicine and interrogates the existential meanings and stakes of rape kits, their associated practices, and their underlying assumptions and expectations for survivors of sexual violence.