Cultural norms surrounding heterosexuality have been shown to influence legal and popular understandings of rape. In particular, Nicola Gavey 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 social media evidence in the trial, especially the photographic evidence, was able to unsettle some of these discourses surrounding heterosex. Following work by Webb Keane and Crispin Thurlow 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 defence’s claim that passivity and silence on the part of the complainant was tantamount to consent.

中文翻译：

---

“嗯，我看到了图片”：Steubenville 强奸案审判中的符号意识形态和女性性行为规范概念的不安

围绕异性恋的文化规范已被证明会影响法律和大众对强奸的理解。尤其是，尼古拉·盖维 (Nicola Gavey) 提出，关于男性咄咄逼人、难以控制的性行为和女性被动、默许性行为的规范观念，可以作为强奸的“文化脚手架”——它们提供了一个意义构建框架，允许将强奸理解为'只是性'。本文是对 2013 年斯图本维尔（美国俄亥俄州）强奸案审判的案例研究，试图展示审判中的社交媒体证据，尤其是照片证据，如何能够扰乱有关异性恋的一些话语。根据 Webb Keane 和 Crispin Thurlow 关于符号意识形态的工作，我认为试验参与者赋予数字图像的特殊地位，相对于语言表征，对审判结果产生了重大影响。至关重要的是，它使辩方声称申诉人的被动和沉默等同于同意的主张的问题性质得到了明显的缓解。