‘Supposing That Truth Is a Woman, What Then?’: The Lie Detector, the Love Machine, and the Logic of Fantasy (2019)
One of the consequences of the public outcry over the 1929 St Valentine’s Day massacre was the establishment of a Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory at Northwestern University. The photogenic ‘Lie Detector Man’, Leonarde Keeler, was the laboratory’s poster boy, and his instrument the jewel in the crown of forensic science. The press often depicted Keeler gazing at a female suspect attached to his ‘sweat box’, a galvanometer electrode in her hand, a sphygmomanometer cuff on her arm and a rubber pneumograph tube strapped across her breasts. Keeler’s fascination with the deceptive charms of the female body was one he shared with his fellow lie detector pioneers, all of whom met their wives – and in William Marston’s case, his mistress too – through their engagement with the instrument. Marston employed his own ‘Love Meter’, as the press dubbed it, to prove that ‘brunettes react far more violently to amatory stimuli than blondes’. In this article, I draw on the psychoanalytic concepts of fantasy and pleasure to argue that the female body played a pivotal role in establishing the lie detector’s reputation as an infallible and benign mechanical technology of truth.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Lombroso, Cesare;
Ferrero, Guglielmo;
(2004)
Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman
(/isis/citation/CBB000471273/)
Book
McClive, Cathy;
Pellegrin, Nicole;
(2010)
Femmes en fleurs, femmes en corps: sang, santé, sexualités du Moyen Âge aux Lumières
(/isis/citation/CBB001250927/)
Article
Zine Magubane;
(2001)
Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the "Hottentot Venus"
(/isis/citation/CBB082813749/)
Article
Kieval, Hillel J.;
(2012)
The Rules of the Game: Forensic Medicine and the Language of Science in the Structuring of Modern Ritual Murder Trials
(/isis/citation/CBB001320015/)
Book
Alison Adam;
(2016)
A History of Forensic Science: British Beginnings in the Twentieth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB610315011/)
Article
Karallus, Christine;
(2005)
Zwischen Kriminalistik und Justiz. Zur Konjunktur der Fotografie als Evindenzstrategie
(/isis/citation/CBB000670819/)
Article
Burney, Ian;
(2013)
Our Environment in Miniature: Dust and the Early Twentieth-Century Forensic Imagination
(/isis/citation/CBB001320021/)
Book
Bunn, Geoffrey C.;
(2012)
The Truth Machine: A Social History of the Lie Detector
(/isis/citation/CBB001210071/)
Thesis
Asen, Daniel;
(2012)
Dead Bodies and Forensic Science: Cultures of Expertise in China, 1800--1949
(/isis/citation/CBB001562783/)
Article
Jessica Lingel;
Heather Jaber;
(2024)
Performance, Spectacle, Affect: The Polygraph’s Sexual Politics
(/isis/citation/CBB463297544/)
Book
Liliosa Azara;
Luca Tedesco;
(2019)
La donna delinquente e la prostituta: L’eredità di Lombroso nella cultura e nella società italiane
(/isis/citation/CBB265080867/)
Chapter
Mary Gibson;
(2019)
Cesare Lombroso and the Gendered Prison
(/isis/citation/CBB059362876/)
Article
Victoria M. Nagy;
Alana J. Piper;
(2020)
The Health and Medical Needs of Victoria's Older Female Prisoners, 1860–1920
(/isis/citation/CBB919561721/)
Chapter
Luca Tedesco;
(2019)
Un parricidio mancato. La ricezione della "Donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale" in Italia tra Otto e Novecento
(/isis/citation/CBB186825209/)
Chapter
Matteo Loconsole;
(2019)
Dalla donna normale alla criminale-nata. La natura femminile nel dialogo tra Paolo Mantegazza e Cesare Lombroso
(/isis/citation/CBB244703956/)
Chapter
Riccardo Cavallo;
(2019)
«Sposa affettuosa, madre sublime e donna delinquente». Socialismo giuridico e criminalità femminile
(/isis/citation/CBB246025070/)
Chapter
Liliosa Azara;
Luca Tedesco;
(2019)
La donna delinquente: teorie lombrosiane e pratiche politico-istituzionali in Italia tra Otto e Novecento
(/isis/citation/CBB305262674/)
Chapter
Annacarla Valeriano;
(2019)
«Avide dello scandalo». La devianza femminile in manicomio
(/isis/citation/CBB606589982/)
Book
Dan Healey;
(2022)
Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939
(/isis/citation/CBB675705188/)
Article
Itty Abraham;
(December 2018)
Prehistory of Aadhaar: Body, Law, and Technology as Postcolonial Assemblage
(/isis/citation/CBB114433718/)
Be the first to comment!