Law and Order: Images, Meanings, Myths

by Valverde; Mariana

• ISBN13: 9781904385349
• ISBN10: 1904385346
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2006-05-01
• Publisher: Cavendish Pub Ltd

Summary

In an innovative departure from the much-studied field of 'crime in the media', this lively book focuses its attention on the forces of law and order -- how they visualize and represent danger and criminality, and how they represent themselves as authorities. After two chapters covering basic terms and tools in the study of culture and representation, the book covers such topics as the history of justice-system methods for visualizing criminality, from fingerprinting to DNA; the emergence of a 'forensic gaze' that begins with Edgar Allan Poe and Sherlock Holmes and culminates in the American television show Crime Scene Investigation; and the rise of ways of seeing urban space that constantly divide the city into 'good' and 'bad' areas. The final chapter uses some recent conflicts regarding the legal admissibility of 'gruesome pictures' to reflect on the importance of the visual in our everyday experiences both of safety and of danger.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction	1
2 Social Semiotics: the Basics	17
3 Representations and their Social Effects: a Template	31
4 Science and the Semiotics of Deviance	59
5 The Authority of the Detective and the Birth of the Forensic Gaze	77
6 From the Hard-Boiled Detective to the Pre-Crime Unit: American Representations of Justice	91
7 The Invention of the Psycho Killer and the Rise and Fall of the Welfare State	115
8 Chronotopes of Crime: Perceptions of Danger in Urban Space	133
9 'Gruesome' Pictures: Images and their Effects in Criminal Justice Practice	153
Bibliography	165
Index	169