The home the law built: white domesticity and the designs of juvenile dependency law in Los Angeles,California

In juvenile dependency law and the spaces in which it is practiced, race, class, and gender power are produced together. This article examines the design of monitored visitation rooms in a Children’s Court in Los Angeles and argues that the esthetics of domesticity in the courthouse and the body of law practiced inside are built upon and reify a model of white, hetero-patriarchal family that precludes black filiation, both materially and metaphorically. Ultimately, this research provides a framework to understand the relationship between political power and cultural space, between normative domesticity and the punitive structures of law, and between ideologies of whiteness and the devastating experiences of black and nonwhite families in the dependency system.