ICYMI: Charles on Panic in "The Project": Critical Queer Studies and the Matthew Shepard Murder @CaseyCharles67

ICYMI: Casey Charles, College of Humanities and Sciences, University of Montana, has published Panic in "The Project": Critical Queer Studies and the Matthew Shepard Murder, at 18 Law & Literature 225 (2006). Published online December 19, 2013. Here is the abstract.

Adopting a critical queer studies approach, this essay revisits the Matthew Shepard murder in relation to a recent attempt by ABC’s 20 ⁄ 20 to recast the case as a drug crime rather than a hate crime. The network’s devaluation of homophobia in the case points to abiding flaws in the law of unwanted sexual advance, including the homosexual panic defense that defendants McKinney and Henderson pleaded in the Shepard case. The persistence of the panic defense in trial practice is indicative of a larger set of social myths about gay men, myths that emerge in The Laramie Project. This play’s indebtedness to Aristotelian tragedy aligns it with a cathartic and contained form of cultural panic that is analogous to and may in fact reinforce the legal doctrine. These discursive intersections between media, law, and theatre in turn demonstrate how ideological fictions continue to influence legal practice.