Cultural norms surrounding heterosexuality have been shown to influence legal and popular understandings of rape. In particular, Nicola Gavey (2005) has proposed that normative ideas about men’s aggressive, hard-to-control sexuality and women’s passive, acquiescing sexuality operate as a ‘cultural scaffold’ for rape – they provide a sense-making framework that allows rape to be understood as ‘just sex’. This paper, a case study of the 2013 Steubenville (Ohio, USA) rape trial, attempts to show how the digital communication evidence in the trial, especially the photographic evidence, was able to unsettle some of these discourses surrounding heterosex. Following work by Crispin Thurlow (2017) on semiotic ideologies, I argue that the special status assigned to the digital images by the trial participants, relative to the linguistic representations, had significant consequences for the outcome of the trial. Crucially, it brought into stark relief the problematic nature of the defense’s claim that passivity and silence on the part of the complainant was tantamount to consent.

Susan Ehrlich is Professor Emerita and Senior Scholar at York University, Toronto, Canada.  She has worked extensively on language, sexual violence and the law and is presently working on a project that investigates intertextual practices in the legal system, demonstrating how such an investigation can shed light on broader patterns of social inequalities. Her book publications include Discursive Constructions of Consent in the Legal Process (Oxford, 2016, co-edited with D. Eades and J. Ainsworth), The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality (Blackwell, 2014, co-edited with M. Meyerhoff and J. Holmes) and Representing Rape (Routledge, 2001).  She is currently co-editor of the journal, Language in Society, with Tommaso Milani.