Caroline Braunmühl Livres

The book explores the negotiation of "cultural evidence" in criminal trials, examining the roles of attorneys, witnesses, and defendants. It critiques the debate over the "cultural defense," highlighting its roots in colonialist and patriarchal narratives. The author argues that this controversy has historically marginalized minorities and women, revealing underlying biases that have influenced legal practices and perceptions of cultural identity in the justice system.

Dualistic thinking has been questioned by some writers associated with the material, ontological, and affective turns. Yet, these and other writers linked to the ›turns‹ have themselves reproduced dualistic theorizing. Caroline Braunmühl also shows that there are dualistic patterns in significant contributions to queer theory as well as Foucauldian diagnoses of the present. From a perspective sympathetic to the critical efforts made by poststructuralist and related theorists, she analyzes works by Sara Ahmed, Karen Barad, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Michel Foucault, and others. The book suggests specific alternatives to dualistic as well as identitarian ways of framing conceptual pairs such as matter/mind, affect/discourse and negativity/affirmation.