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Feminist activists and scholars have deep ambivalence about the use of culture in legal cases when seeking state intervention in domestic violence (Coleman ; Volpp a). We understand that violence is a gendered phenomenon— that is, inflected by culture (Bhattacharjee ; Dasgupta ; Rudrappa b), yet we are profoundly uncertain about how the state should arbitrate on matters of culture with regard to domestic violence. My own ambivalence regarding culture ’s use in courtrooms arose when I served as an expert witness in Austin, Texas, in , in the defense of a South Asian American woman, Sailaja Hathaway, who had tried to poison her children and herself. For the defense team, Hathaway’s culture was ostensibly one of the reasons for her actions. While I recognized the necessity for using culture in understanding her feelings and state of mind, I was uncertain about what it meant to make cultural arguments in court in such a situationally expedient yet politically uncritical manner. The case that rose to my mind in stark contrast was that of another Texan mother, Andrea Yates. Yates had drowned her five children in the bathtub, and psychological arguments, not culture , were used to explain her homicidal act. Building on my experience of providing cultural testimony in court, I note that given that the United States is a nation of immigrants we are compelled to use culture in understanding the defendant’s state of mind when violence occurs. However, raising culture in the courtroom invariably raises questions on what we mean by immigrant culture, and whether cultural codes are thickly coherent—that is, have universal acceptance and adherence within a particular racial/ethnic group. Moreover, this also raises the question of law’s culture. Stated more specifically, American law, too, has a culture that stands in authoritative judgment over its citizen subjects. I do not just mean the principle of whiteness, but also a law that individualizes and is set up as an adversarial system, demanding that real-life messy stories be narrated in teleological ways, with causal mechanisms in play. 13 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb Law’s Culture and Cultural Difference SHARMILA RUDRAPPA 181 Ch013.qxd 11/3/06 5:13 PM Page 181 I believe that we have to invoke culture in the courtroom, because ignoring difference means keeping silent on law’s own cultures. In addition, the law does not adjudicate on the principle of sameness. Because the defendant’s state of mind, or mens rea, when the violence occurs is considered , psychological and cultural differences are admissible in court. Stated simply, individual difference matters. Not everyone is treated equally because the law attempts to consider each individual in his or her unique circumstances before calibrating and dispensing punishment. I conclude that for immigrant feminists there is no getting away from using culture when negotiating with the state. However , instead of allowing ourselves to be interpellated in ways that fix us, we need to take on law’s culture on our own terms. The Uses of Culture in Negotiating with the State Feminists, especially women-of-color activists and scholars, profess ambivalence about using cultural arguments to justify state intervention into our lives on issues such as domestic violence (Volpp a; Wu ). We agree that our cultures lead to widely varied familial arrangements and relationships; differences manifest themselves in gender norms, ways by which wives and husbands conduct themselves, children are mothered, and the responsibilities and expressions of love between parents and children. Yet, we are in two minds when it comes to allowing the state to use culture in arbitrating on family violence. Let me explain this ambivalence through making the four following observations: First, persons working on domestic violence issues recognize that women too are compelled to violent crimes. Although women are perpetrators of violence, there has been, historically, very little attention given to such crimes. Since the s, however, it has been impossible to ignore women’s violence because of the marked increase in dual arrests as well as women-only arrests for domestic assault (Hirschel and Buzawa ; Martin ; Miller ). Dasgupta () notes, for example, that family violence data from Connecticut indicates that “the percent of male victims increased from % of the total in  to % of the total in ” (). The arrests of women who use violence against their partners have caused concern among advocates, not because they think women are becoming more violent than ever, but because they wonder at the appropriateness of the responses by law enforcement officials and the judicial system. Such concerns have led...

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