Language ideology is a concept developed in linguistic anthropology to explain the ways in which ideas about the definition and functions of language can become linked with social discourses and identities. In Entextualizing Domestic Violence, Jennifer Andrus demonstrates how language ideologies that are circulated in the Anglo-American law of evidence draw on and create indexical links to social discourses, affecting speakers whose utterances are used as evidence in legal situations. Andrus addresses more specifically the tendency of such a language ideology to create the potential to speak for, appropriate, and ignore the speech of women who have been victims of domestic violence. In addition to identifying specific linguistic strategies employed in legal situations, she analyzes assumptions about language circulated and animated in the legal text and talk used to evaluate spoken evidence, and describes the consequences of the language ideology when it is co-articulated with discourses about gender and domestic violence. The book focuses on the pair of rules concerning hearsay and its exceptions in the Anglo-American law of evidence. Andrus considers legal discourses, including statutes, precedents, their application in trials, and the relationship between such legal discourses and social discourses about domestic violence. Using discourse analysis, she demonstrates the ways legal metadiscourses about hearsay are articulated with social discourses about domestic violence, and the impact of this powerful co-articulation on the individual whose speech is legally appropriated.
Andrus approaches legal rules and language ideology both diachronically and synchronically in this book, which will be an important addition to ongoing research and discussion on the role legal appropriation of speech may have in perpetuating the voicelessness of victims in the legal treatment of domestic violence.
Acknowledgements Note on trial citation format Introduction: Language Ideology in the Hearsay Doctrine and the Modern Excited Utterance Exception to Hearsay Chapter 1: Legal Discourse of Domestic Violence: Language Ideology and Trustworthiness Part I: Anglo-American Law and the In/admissibility of Hearsay Chapter 2: Legal Empiricism in/and the Language Ideology of Hearsay Chapter 3: Social Discourses about Domestic Violence and Hearsay: Interdiscursivity and Indexicality in the US Supreme Court Part II: The Excited Utterance Exception in US v. Hadley Chapter 4: Making the Excited Utterance Legally Intelligible: Shifting Audiences, Contexts, and Speakers Chapter 5: The Attribution and Disattribution of Discursive Agency in the Excited Utterance Exception to Hearsay Chapter 6: Conclusions: Language Ideology and the Legal Accounting for Domestic Violence
Jennifer Andrus is an assistant professor of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah, where she teaches courses on rhetorical theory, discourse analysis, and legal rhetoric. Her current research is on domestic violence and the Anglo-American law of evidence, and the ways in which metadiscourses and text production constrain discursive agency. She has publications in Technical Communication Quarterly, Discourse and Society, Language in Society, and College Composition and Communication.
Reviews for Entextualizing Domestic Violence: Language Ideology and Violence Against Women in the Anglo-American Hearsay Principle
"""[T]his book is rich with information and extremely interesting. This is an incredibly complex topic; Andrus has to negotiate and explicate the connections between notions of gender and power, legal discourse and ideology, and language ideology. The topic often lends itself to a meta-discourse (language about language about language), and thus must be a thorny argument to develop and express. Andrus manages it well; this book is clear and relatively easy to understand. While it may be especially appealing to those researchers studying legal discourse, or those working in discourse around domestic violence, the book may be accessible and edifying for anyone who is interested in the myriad connections between language, social institutions and ideology"" --Discourse & Society"
