the "othering" of perpetrators

The most contentious discussions I've been involved with on LJ tend to have this in common: they buck up against the conceptual "othering" of perpetrators. What I mean by this phrase, is that people who rape, persecute, molest children, queer-bash, lynch, or commit other acts of oppression are conceptually and linguistically treated as though they are a remote shadowy group of people, faceless caricatures lurking in dark alleys or hiding beneath white sheets while burning crosses. They are less than civilized, they are "out of control," primitive, brutal.

"Othering" is hard to describe because like many aspects of social stratification there is a conspiracy of silence around it.

Conspiracy of silence means that we learn about oppression not primarily through language but by watching people act and reconstructing the "deep syntax" of social grammar. ( example using the othering of people with disabilities )

There is a lot of talk in critical or feminist literature about the othering of oppressed people. But up to now I haven't read a lot about the othering of perpetrators.

Anyone who's read my journal for a while knows that the most contentious discussions took place after I pointed out that (a) the people who have harrassed me for my religion or sought to restrict my civil rights were Christian, or (b) when I point out that the people who have sexually exploited or assaulted me were men.

As these statements are right there, they do not invite cavil.

If that statement is saltpeter and the othering of perpetrators is charcoal, here's the sulfur that gives the gunpowder: If I say that when I encounter people in public I cannot tell good Christians from bad Christians, or good men from bad men, simply by looking at them, all hell breaks loose. Because THIS is a statement that challenges the conspiracy of silence around the othering of perpetrators.

Inevitably this statement is taken as promotion of intolerance, rather than the depiction of experience. I finally figured out why: it is not the promotion of intolerance, it is the promotion of the concept that any viewpoint other than the "expected generic" viewpoint of straight-white-healthy-wealthy-male counts just as much. I write from the viewpoint of a "queer-fat-trannie other," which means that my statements come to rhetorical discourse from across a divide; the mere act of stating my experience is taken as argument in favor of a specific view. I do not have the privilege of having my articulations taken as value-neutral.

Inevitably my statement is also taken personally, though it is not intended as a personal accusation. Men or Christians have every time jumped to assert that not all men or Christians are like that. I also am sternly reminded that women and non-Christians do heinous things too. I never challenged either of those assertions and agree with them, and know them to be true firsthand.

But these points are thrust at me with such force that I'm inclined to conclude that a challenge to "the othering of perpetrators" is a challenge to the way self-identity is constructed in our society.

We want to feel good about who we are, and we want our self-identity to be pristine. We want to know that there is a solid divide between our self and evil, a barrier that keeps us safe from taint. Carl Jung described a faculty in the unconscious he called the Shadow, onto which is projected our darker impulses so that they seem to come from outside rather than inside our self.

None of us want to acknowledge that we live in a cannibalistic society, so we pretend otherwise. The purpose of ideology -- all ideology -- is to perpetuate othering (of the oppressed and of perpetrators) in the context of oppression.

crossposted to my journal and crossposted to feminist

This can be yours for only $9.99. Underpaid non-unionized serfs are ready to take your order now.

In my last post, I wrote that "I do not have the privilege of having my articulations taken as value-neutral." I added to that, in a comment, "Our silence is presumed, so therefore our speech is assertion."

To illustrate that, imagine public discourse as a microphone. In our culture, that microphone is presumed to be in the hands of someone who is white, male, wealthy, able-bodied, slender, sane, cisgendered, and heterosexual. The "malestream" culture is primed to hear a white male heterosexual voice in neutral terms, even when an agenda is being promoted. At the same time, the culture is primed to hear the voice of a conspicuous "other" in non-neutral terms, assuming that she is promoting an agenda even when she is not.

I use the microphone metaphor because the culture reacts as if a conspicuous "other" who is speaking grabbed the mike away from the malestream voice. "Why does she have the mike? It must be because she wants something."

This is why you see people described as a "feminist author" or an "African-American author" but you never see "white male author." The white male author might be promoting a pro-white pro-male agenda, but he is not called on it the way a feminist or black author is. The pro-white pro-male agenda is presumed; it is value-neutral. It is not an "agenda," even when it is.

The soothing voiceover intones the chant of domination, while we each scramble for our survival.