Gender, violence, race, and criminal justice.

• Author: Harris, Angela P.

INTRODUCTION

One early morning in August 1997, New York City police officer Charles Schwarz forcibly held down a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima in a bathroom in the 70th Precinct while Schwarz's fellow officer Justin Volpe rammed a broken broomstick into Louima's rectum, rupturing his bladder and his colon, and then jammed it into his mouth.(1) Approximately twenty officers were working in the area while Louima was attacked, but no one came forward during the attack or demanded medical attention for Louima. "Instead, Louima was left to wait nearly three hours, bleeding in a holding cell, until an officer was assigned to accompany the paramedics to the hospital."(2) Meanwhile, officers saw Volpe brandishing a feces-stained stick around the stationhouse and bragging about how he had humiliated Louima. Four officers eventually came forward to report what had happened, but many suspected they did so only because of a widening federal investigation.(3)

In the end, Officer Volpe confessed and pleaded guilty to a civil rights violation; Officer Schwarz was convicted of violating Louima's civil rights. Three other officers--two accused of beating Louima in a police car before he got to the stationhouse and one, their supervisor, accused of trying to cover up the beating--were acquitted.(4) Volpe said that he sodomized Louima because he mistakenly believed that Louima had punched him during a disturbance at a nightclub; as it turned out, the assailant at the nightclub was actually Louima's cousin.(5)

U.S. Attorney Zachary Carter called the attack "the most depraved act that's ever been reported or committed by a police officer or police officers against another human being."(6) No one, however, suggested psychiatric help for Volpe and Schwarz or wondered why rape with a broken broomstick was a logical response to a punch. No one questioned their sexual orientation.(7)

The racial meanings of incidents of police brutality such as the Louima beating and torture have been well explored.(8) Less well explored have been the charged gender relations among men that make intelligible the manner of the Louima attack as well as its target. The attack on Louima can be understood not only as an act of racial violence but also as a racial attack accomplished through a peculiarly male language of sexual violence.(9) On other occasions, the charged gender relations among men have made it possible for racial hostilities to be temporarily transcended by gender loyalty: the loyalty, for instance, to the "boys in blue" that protected Volpe and Schwarz for so long. In these and other ways, gender violence sometimes creates and sometimes shatters racial community.

Feminist legal theorists, of course, are well familiar with the concept of "gender violence," but for the most part they have focused only on violence against women.(10) Feminist and queer theorists working in the area of sexual harassment law have recently demonstrated, however, that the concept of "sex-based" aggression is difficult, if not impossible, to confine to the heterosexual, cross-sex context in which it began.(11) Similarly, gender violence does not produce only female victims; indeed, since most victims of violent crime are male, it may be that more men than women suffer from gender violence. This does not mean that the traditional feminist focus on violence against women is wrong; the gender system operates precisely to disempower women as a class. But this recognition should not obscure the fact that hierarchies of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender itself also mark out groups of men as vulnerable to the violence of other men. Exploration of the violence in the criminal justice system--the violence of both private and public actors--begins to reveal the extent to which masculine identity is shaped by relations of repulsion and desire between men. That Volpe would sodomize Louima, when to be a heterosexual man is precisely to be terrified of homosexuality, presents a puzzle that is best understood not by reading Louima as symbolically female but by recognizing the powerful feelings men have for other men. These feelings, in turn, are shaped by cultural fantasies of race, nation, and sexuality.(12) In this Commentary, then, I want to suggest that investigations of violence and community, including investigations of racial violence, are incomplete without paying attention to gender violence among men.

In Part I, drawing on literature in sociology, I argue that the cultural structures of masculinity in the contemporary Anglo-American world divide men along familiar lines of race and class. The result, however, is not simply that some men are more powerful than others. Men disempowered by racial or class status develop alternative rebellious ways of proving their manhood; at the same time, "dominant" men may envy "subordinate" men, and rebellious men may long to be accepted into the mainstream. In addition to these complex relationships with one another, all men experience the pressure not to be women and not to be "faggots." The instability of masculine identity in the face of all these pressures makes violence in defense of self-identity a constant possibility.

In Part II, drawing on literature in criminology, I argue that violent acts committed by men, whether these acts break the law or are designed to uphold it, are often a way of demonstrating the perpetrator's manhood. I call this kind of violence "gender violence" and assert that men as well as women may be its victims. I argue as well that traditional practices of law enforcement incorporate or facilitate gender violence, whether it is directed at women, sexual minorities, or racial-ethnic minorities. Yet this violence within policing, though widely deplored, has not been effectively challenged.

In Part III, I argue that this complicity of the criminal justice state with gender violence is wrong because it causes unnecessary suffering and because it blocks our society from exploring possibly more effective ways of pursuing a truly safe society. At the end of the essay, I briefly describe some efforts, both theoretical and practical, to disrupt the convergence of gender violence with law and order.

1. "DOING GENDER": GENDER PERFORMANCE AND THE PRECARIOUS STRUCTURE OF MASCULINE IDENTITY

   Literary theorist Elaine Starry argues that one of the properties of human pain is that its characteristics--its vibrancy, its reality, its certainty--can be transferred away from a human body and onto something else, something that in itself does not appear vibrant, real, or certain.(13) In this sense, pain, and the violence that induces it, is a means of creation, a way of making ideas real, the way bloodless ideas such as property and sovereignty are made real in war and conquest by the presence of actual blood and the mutilation and destruction of human bodies.

   Manliness is one of those ideas that is often made real with violence. Violent acts often carry idiosyncratic moral or emotional meanings to the perpetrator.(14) But violent acts are also, sometimes, the result of the character of masculinity itself as a cultural ideal. In these cases, men use violence or the threat of violence as an affirmative way of proving individual or collective masculinity, or in desperation when they perceive their masculine self-identity to be under attack.

   For some years now, feminist criminologists have insistently called attention to a fact that previously seems to have escaped criminology's notice: Criminals are overwhelmingly male. As criminologist James Messerschmidt observes,

   [a]rrest, self-report, and victimization data all reflect that men and boys both perpetrate more conventional crimes and the more serious of these crimes than do women and girls. Men also have a virtual monopoly on the commission of syndicated, corporate, and political crime.... Indeed, gender has consistently been advanced by criminologists as the strongest predictor of criminal involvement.(15) Men predominate not only in crime but also in criminal justice. Policing, for example, has traditionally been a male occupation. Messerschmidt observes that "until the 1970s, women officers engaged in such `feminine' functions as working primarily with juveniles, women offenders, women victims, vice-squad assignments, and community relations.... Although by the 1970s women were increasingly assigned to routine patrol duty, today [1989] less than 10 percent of all police officers are women."(16) Nearly ten years later, the numbers had not improved significantly. The National Center for Women and Policing (NCWP) found that "[a]mong the largest law enforcement agencies in the country in 1998, women comprise[d] only 13.8% of all sworn law enforcement positions."(17) A similar history and continuing gender asymmetry holds for jobs in corrections.(18)

   Some researchers suspect the cause for this startling sex difference is biological in origin.(19) Sociologists, true to their discipline, are instead interested in the systems of social meaning that link crime with masculinity.(20) The literature on "masculinities" suggests that men are disproportionately violent, at least in part, because being violent is one socially recognized way of being a man.(21) Some background on the major premises of this literature may be useful.

   Sociologists of gender argue that gender is not something one has but, rather, something one does.(22) Moreover, the fact that men are divided by race, ethnicity, religion, class, and sexual orientation means that there is not just one kind of masculinity.(23) Rather, theorists of masculinity speak of relations of alliance, dominance, and subordination among different sorts of masculinity.(24) Indeed, some writers in the field always speak of "masculinities" in the plural to emphasize the point.(25) Thus, though one way of doing masculinity may be "hegemonic" (i.e., dominant) within a friendship network or a social institution, there...