the "othering" of perpetrators
Jul. 27th, 2005 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentiaThe 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
feminist
"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
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Re: Let's put something in further perspective
Date: 2005-07-27 10:54 pm (UTC)That said, I've known several people who actually were raped/molested by their ministers.
Re: Let's put something in further perspective
Date: 2005-07-28 12:09 am (UTC)LB
Re: Let's put something in further perspective
Date: 2005-07-28 11:54 pm (UTC)