Humanities Gayle Salomon 4/20/2015

This lecture is drawn from a book I am completing on about the murder of Larry/Latisha King, a gender-transgressive 15-year-old who was shot and killed in an Oxnard, California junior high school by classmate Brandon McInerney. McInerney was 14 at the time of the killing and was charged as an adult in the subsequent murder trial. In this case, bodily movement marked by the style of queer gender becomes a target of homophobic and transphobic aggression through first being read as constituting an act of aggression. In this book, I am exploring about how phenomenologies of the body might help illuminate what happened when the murder case went to trial. I argue that a phenomenology of walking illustrates how Latisha's gender was read, and use phenomenological description to unpack the performance of gender in the courtroom, exploring how queer gender was mimetically enacted through the bodies of the attorneys during the trial.