Kelli Moore

1994-1998            B.A. Psychology, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA

Work in Progress

My current work examines the communicative practices between legal actors, institutions and interpretive communities as they make presumably collective decisions about how to remedy crimes of gender animus. This interdisciplinary work  situates such violence within a larger constellation of historical cultural, political and economic machinations.  Taking Congressional and Supreme Court testimony regarding the 1998 Violence Against Women Act as my point of departure, I trace contemporary cultural and institutional discourses on wife-beating to Enlightenment and Evangelical Christian political settlements. Cultural artifacts and systems of knowledge from the early modern period (didactic poetry, charivaris, politics of touch, women’s associations, commonplaces, diaries, drawings, court documents etc.) are compared to contemporary art and legal practices of photography and th! e management and circulation of images of domestic violence victims. I am particularly interested in the production of these digital images as evidence photography and the activities they engender to protect their status as ‘evidence.’