the "othering" of perpetrators

[sophiaserpentia]

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. My first introduction to this was watching the way parents reacted when children asked my ex-wife "why she walked that way" (she has cerebral palsy). The parents reacted with shame and pulled their children away and thereby taught them we don't talk about or acknowledge disability. Historically, people with disabilities have been severely oppressed and rendered invisible -- in some places it was against the law for a person to be seen in public in a wheelchair until the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Less than 30 years ago some people with disabilities were still being forcably sterilized.

This consipiracy of silence around people with disabilities is a way in which they are "othered." Conceptually and linguistically they are non-people. Buildings and housing are designed with only the needs of the able-bodied in mind. It was only 15 years ago (in the United States at least) that as a society we saw fit to acknowledge their need for legal protection to ensure them access to public buildings, schools, or places of employment -- a step towards ending the oppression and the conspiracy of silence. This struggle is still going on.

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

Comments

[stacymckenna.livejournal.com]

a challenge to "the othering of perpetrators" is a challenge to the way self-identity is constructed in our society.

I was just two days ago holding a discussion about "wrong" and "right" with my boyfriend, about the inherent connections with "bad" and "good", how our personally programmed connotations differ, and how it makes communication tough. This concept of challenging self-identity came up. I told him at one point that:

Yes, I am fighting to maintain this self-destructive behavior, because at the root of it is the base assumption of what is right and what is wrong. If I give up this one thing, this one brain process that causes me so much grief, I have to acknowledge/accept that my ENTIRE LIFE has been based on a flawed assumption about right/wrong, good/bad, and that would imply that everything I've EVER DONE could be suddenly "bad", and who wants that?! My understanding of right/wrong as it is tells me which way is up - if you take that from me I am suddenly adrift, anchorless, without reference for whether ANYTHING I do is the right/good thing to do!

(Heaven knows I'm way too much of a control freak to tolerate such a situation!) I think the concept of "othering" that you describe, and the way people cling to it, is closely related...

Let's put something in further perspective

[trannyboi-lb.livejournal.com]

a majority of convicted child molestors when asked to state their religious preference invariable say "Christian." and in point of fact, if you review the information of molestation cases in this country you will see that many of them are perpretated by ministers or religious leaders in the same "religion", so that leads me to conclude that it is alright for the leadership of said religion to do as they please but not for the laity thus it is a "do as I say, not as I do" approach. Considering that Jesus was totally against this type of thinking and I could cite many examples attributed to him from the New Testament, I find it quite disturbing that AGAIN people in power believe that they are above the laws, rules and mores that they are supposed to create and uphold for the good of EVERYONE not just those "underneath" them. But there again is part of the problem, just because someone has power does not mean that any of us are beneath them, in fact, they should be "beneath" us and we should have the true control. It is sorta like D/s, in that, the submissive is truly the one with the control in a real Dominant/submissive relationship, that most Doms don't want to acknowledge that is just par for the course in people who supposely have power not understanding the true dynamic.
When I was a Christian, and I went through various and assorted stages of it, I found that I was constantly and consistently judged for something whether it was my looks, my lack of money or my sexual preferences. The thing was that few of the people I encountered in those situations were "goat" enough not to follow the bellwether over the cliff. *Yes, I realize I have used that metaphor twice today but it is so fitting.*
The problem with power in whatever form be it a grand one like being the leader of a nation, a some smaller one like being the leader of a religious sect or an even smaller one like being one of the parents in a family is that most people don't know how to responsibly use it to the benefit of everyone and not just their own selfish desires. It is selfish of parents to train their children to think like they do; most parents don't understand that they are stifling a creative, independent mind every time they show intolerance, xenophobia or hatred but then again, most parents don't care.

LB

Re: Let's put something in further perspective

[trannyboi-lb.livejournal.com]

Also, I hope I didn't come across as Christian bashing because I wasn't...

LB

Re: Let's put something in further perspective

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd say that many of the cases which are prominent in the media, which happen to be ministers or priests. I've not seen any figures on whether or not religious figures are disproportionate among child molesters, but child-molesting ministers/priests certainly seem to take up a disproportionate amount of the media attention. So I'm nervous making generalizations based on the media prominence of certain incidents.

That said, I've known several people who actually were raped/molested by their ministers.

Re: Let's put something in further perspective

[trannyboi-lb.livejournal.com]

Considering that the statistics I saw were compiled several years ago, I am sure that the rash of unfortunate activities within the Catholic church were not on the list. The list was compiled by someone who was curious, had access to the information due to their work in media in their state, and did a "several" state compilation of court cases. Yes, this was a friend of mine at the time. The survey (which was not scientific and which only recorded states considered to be "southern" by national designation) showed that a predominance of the individuals brought up on such charges were either Protestant Ministers of some sort OR lay leaders such as Deacons and Elders. It would be interesting to see if there has been a similar survey done on a more wide-scale basis. Perhaps the Southern Poverty Law Center http://www.splcenter.org/index.jsp has some information, or some other similar organization. If not, it would be an interesting topic to pursue from a sociological standpoint, at least in my opinion. Unfortunately, my interests lie in a total other direction. However, with me, you never know; I might take it up as another one of my weird hobbies. Anyway, I was not trying to bash anyone as I stated, just stating some information that I had access to at one time. Unfortunately, the disk that I had the information on corrupted and I was never able to salvage it. Really wish I had been able to now.

LB

Re: Let's put something in further perspective

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

I would like to read more about that, perhaps I'll do some snooping around google. I did see a while back an essay alleging that Fundamentalist Christianity's "dirty secret" is rampant domestic violence. But then, when feminists started pushing for DV laws a generation ago, after all who was it who fought those laws the hardest?

[aethyrflux.livejournal.com]

If that statement is saltpeter and the othering of perpetrators is charcoal, here's the sulfur that gives the gunpowder:

AHA!
you have revealed another source of your "serpentine" wisdom...
...the charcoal is the fuel, the saltpeter supplies the oxygen, and the sulfur is the catalyst...

amusingly enough, i originally learned the formula for black powder from a fantasy series called The Guardians of the Flame by Joel Rosenberg, "the man who wrote the book" on legally carrying a handgun in Minnesota! He even has a livejournal...

so, to go completely offtopic... in the guardians of the flame... a group of college students get sucked into a fantasy role playing campaign world... they find out quickly that it's not a game anymore when they are in a combat which turns out to be quite deadly... and when they think they have solved all of their problems by remembering the formula for gunpowder, they are confronted with further complications in game theory when one of their group betrays them by sharing the formula for gunpowder with their enemies!

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Hi, found you through ginmar

This is an excellent, excellent essay.

I have to ask, do you have any more writing on this topic?

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Thank you. :)

Not on this specific topic, but you can click on any of the tags for related posts...