Letters to the Editor

• are we missing something ?

  [Read the article: Guilt vs. innocence in the Duke case]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  We pathologize normalcy, normalize pathology.

  In America a woman is a member of an oppressed and disadvantaged minority, a black woman of a doubly-oppressed minority, a single black woman with a child a negatively stereotyped, doubly-disadvantaged minority. There's no secure future - how she's going to support herself and her child, what kind of life she can attain or offer - so she worries. She finds that it helps to medicate her anxiety with alcohol and muscle relaxants. At some point the stressors overwhelm her ability to cope, so her mind and body shut down for a while. We note ominously that she had a "nervous breakdown". She may, or may not, misidentify her rapists and displace her anger, but she knows she is being raped. She is too much plugged into doxa, to the matrix, to understand that she is being raped every day by the dominant culture that stereotypes her, keeps her down, and denies her the social capital that she sees others born with access to.

  The male athletes pay money to have the women come to perform for them. They crowd around the women closely. Likely, their stares are fixed and their mouths unselfconsciously open, one effect on their brains of the drugs they ingest while they stare, not at the women, but at the women's body parts - their nipples, their genitals, their asses. We are led to understand that these "partyers of the highest order" want the women to insert a broomstick into their vaginas, maybe their anuses, while they stare. When the women refuse, they react angrily, uttering racial slurs. By any legalistic construction of "rape", they may in fact be completely innocent.

  We normalize pathology, pathologize normalcy.

  Permalink Thursday, August 31, 2006 08:38 PM