She Does Not Flee the House: A Multimodal Poetics of Space, Path, and Motion in Opening Statement

This paper shows how an attorney’s multimodal narrative transforms an opening statement into an argument about the credibility of the main prosecution witness. The defense attorney integrates speech, gestures, and exhibits to shape motion events and spatial images into relevant objects of evidentiary knowledge, creating inconsistencies in the witness’s account under the auspices of merely showing the jury locations and movements in the defendant’s home. We demonstrate how the encoding of motion events percolates in and through a polyrhythmic and multidimensional poetic format to naturalize gender ideologies – cultural expectations governing victim identity – in the social construction of rape’s legal facticity.