In the interest of justice: Legal narratives of sex, gender, race and rape in twentieth-century Los Angeles, 1920--1960 (California)

Using a previously untapped wealth of sources from the Los Angeles Superior Court archives, this dissertation explores the narratives of rape employed in sexual assault trials heard before the Los Angeles Superior Court from 1920 to 1960. Through the analysis of 258 case files containing a variety of documents including motions, trial transcripts, sentencing statements, psychiatric exams and letters from character witnesses, I demonstrate the ways in which the stories told about rape both shaped and were shaped by ideologies of race, gender and sexuality. I argue that the introduction of new ideas of sexual modernity fundamentally reshaped the types of narratives employed in the Los Angeles Superior Court. In addition, I illustrate the extent to which the narratives used by court actors mapped to the particular racial landscape of early to mid-twentieth century Los Angeles.; In the first chapter of this dissertation, I set the scene by tracing the evolution of rape law in the United States. I also provide a summary of the development of Los Angeles particular cultural and racial landscape from 1920 to 1960. The other four chapters are divided thematically. Chapters two and four examine the narratives used in the trials of white men. In chapter two, I scrutinize the types of stories told about the alleged victim in the rape trials of white men in which the complaining witness's lack of consent was questioned. Chapter four, in turn, discusses the use of the narrative of the sexual psychopath to explain the actions of white defendants in those rape trials in which the court assumed the victim's lack of consent. In chapters three and five, I examine the rape trials of non-white men. Chapter three considers the types of narratives used in intra-racial rape trials and chapter five looks at the stories of rape told in the trials of non-white men in which the women's accusations were accepted as fact. Both chapters pay careful attention to the ways in which particular racial myths were employed by the court to reinforce Los Angeles's particular social hierarchy.