COMING of AGE in the AGE of SCHOOL SHOOTINGS by Alyssa D. Anderson BA, Willamette University
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VIOLENCE AND THE REPERTOIRE: COMING OF AGE IN THE AGE OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS By Alyssa D. Anderson B.A., Willamette University, 2010 M.A. New York University, 2013 M.A. Brown University, 2015 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of American Studies at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2019 © Copyright 2019 by Alyssa Anderson This dissertation by Alyssa Anderson is accepted in its present form by the Department of American Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date____________________ _____________________________________________ Professor Beverly Haviland, Director Recommended to the Graduate School Date____________________ _____________________________________________ Professor Steve Lubar, Reader Date____________________ _____________________________________________ Professor Monica Muñoz Martinez, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date____________________ _____________________________________________ Andrew Campbell, Dean of Graduate School iii CIRRICULUMN VITAE Alyssa Anderson was born in Austin, Texas before moving to Colorado Springs, Colorado at the age of 13. She attended Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, where she received a B.A. in Rhetoric and Media Studies in 2010. In the Spring of 2009, while spending a semester abroad in Grahamstown, South Africa, she received a Carson Undergraduate Research Grant to study representations of the country’s tumultuous past in its various history museums. The resulting paper, “Remembering to Forget: The Construction of Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa” laid the framework for much of her future interest in social memory. In 2011 she joined the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she continued her research under the guidance of Dr. Marita Sturken. She attended Dr. Sturken’s summer course, “The Politics of Memory,” in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the summer of 2012. After the class concluded, Alyssa stayed for an additional two months conducting fieldwork for her Master’s thesis, “The Stuff Memories are Made of: Mapping Intimacies in National Memory,” before graduating with he MA in 2013. With a developing interest in the overlap of memory and material culture, Alyssa pursued a Masters in Public Humanities as part of the PhD in American Studies at Brown, completing the MA program in 2015. Alyssa is the founder and previous facilitator of a Mellon Graduate Student Workshop entitled “Memory, Identity, and the Public Sphere,” bringing together graduate students from across disciplines whose work focuses on memory in order to converse, debate, and reevaluate critical texts in the field. She is also a former Exhibitions Intern at the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum, working behind the scenes prior to the Museum’s opening in 2014, and a former Exhibitions Assistant at Brown University’s John Hay Library. iv Alyssa has designed and taught three courses while at Brown: “Social Memory and the 1960’s: From Nixon to Nostalgia,” a writing-focused first and second year seminar; “The Trouble with History Class: Movies, Music, and the Politics of Memory," a summer course for advanced high school students; and “Memory and Forgetting in Popular Culture,” an upper-level seminar focused on the production and consumption of history. She was a Teaching Consultant for the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning from 2016-2018, and has been an Associate at the Brown Writing Center since 2015. Alyssa is the recipient of the 2018-2019 Deans Faculty Fellowship, and will be a Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at Brown University in Spring 2019. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS When I began this project in 2016, the most recent school shooting—at Sandy Hook Elementary—was already shrinking into America’s rearview mirror. While I have always believed this work would provide important insight into trauma, vulnerability, and cultural memory, I had no idea of the sudden urgency it would develop as another wave of shootings would—once again—dramatically change public understanding of these attacks. Completing this dissertation has been, at various moments, infuriating, galvanizing, and exhausting. I owe a great deal to a great number of people who have helped me with it along the way. First of all, I must extend my endless gratitude towards the best dissertation committee I could have asked for. Thank you to Steve Lubar, who initially gave me the for this case study and who helped me develop it into a coherent set of chapters. Thank you to Monica Martinez for always challenging me to push my critiques further, and for helping me feel empowered to take on such a daunting subject. Last and certainly not least, thank you to Beverly Haviland who has championed this project—and my research—from the beginning of my time at Brown. She has been an invaluable resource and mentor, reading more drafts of this work than I’m sure she cares to remember, and helping me become a powerful writer. Thank you all for trusting me with this project. I am also deeply indebted to my colleagues at Brown: Nell Lake, for helping me clarify my research questions; Anni Pullagura for her critical eye and wonderful feedback; the Memory, Identity, and the Public Sphere Mellon writing group for reading many drafts of chapters 2 and 3, and to Miriam Rothenberg in particular for her insight into the wild world of Fanfiction. To my wonderful cohort, Felicia Bevel, Elizabeth Rule, Kate Duffy, Emily Contois, and Suzanne Enzerink (and honorary member Jonathan Cortez)—thank you for being an unstoppable force of support and encouragement, for all the late nights and early mornings, and, of course, for fending off The Norwood Ghost. I would also be remiss in not vi acknowledging the role our department manager, Jeff “The Guy Who Gets Stuff Done” Cabral, has had in my success at Brown. Jeff, thank you for always answering my “silly” questions, for finding conference funds when there were none, and for always championing the graduate students in American Studies. We are lucky to have such a humble and knowledgeable administrator—the excellent puns are just a bonus. Finally, I am deeply indebted to my friends and family outside the academy who have gone through this process with me. Thank you for your patience when I fell off the grid for weeks at a time, when I showed up for “vacation” with a suitcase full of books, and for (at least trying) to understand the weird life that is academia. Thank you to my mom for being my original champion, for letting pursue my own crazy path, and for teaching me grit. And finally, a huge thank you Patrick Gilbride for his unwavering support, and for riding this crazy wave with me with all the calmness of a (Narragansett) clam. I couldn’t have done this without you all. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………iii Curriculum Vitae…………..……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….iv Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….vi Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter One………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………....13 Making a School Shooter Chapter Two………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….58 Reimagining the Unimaginable Chapter Three………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………83 Legacies of Violence and the Transformation of U.S. Schools Chapter Four…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…………112 Performing the Memory of School Shootings Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………143 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 The AntConc home screen……………………………………………………………………………………………………….28 Figure 2 Default Word List for Columbine data set ……………………………………………………………………………….29 Figure 3 Wordlist produced with stoplist and lemma list loaded……………………………………………………………31 Figure 4 Keywords list……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………33 Figure 5 Describing Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold………………………………………………………………………………….34 Figure 6 Collocates of “Harris” within a 10L-10R window……………………………………………………………………...36 Figure 7 Collocates of “Klebold” within a 10L-10R window…………………………………………………………………….37 Figure 8 Top results for NRA in Concordance tool………………………………………….………………………………………38 Figure 9 Clusters beginning with “parents”……………………………………………………………………………………………40 Figure 10 Clusters ending in “parents”…………………………………………………………………………………………………..40 Figure 11 N-Gram results for clusters of 10 words………………………………………………………………………………...41 Figure 12 Klebod and Harris in the cover of TIME ………………………………………………………………………………….82 Figure 13 Results of SHPMC survey………………………………………………………………………………………………………..92 Figure 14 Floor plan of new Sandy Hook School…………………………………………………………………………………..104 ix INTRODUCTION “A lot of the evidence was mundane, like notebooks and CDs from Harris' and Klebold's homes. One of Eric's computers was there, along with Dylan's report on Charles Manson. But there was some very chilling stuff…One table was filled with nothing but victims' clothing, contained in paper bags marked with biohazard stickers. There were also two large boxes simply labeled ‘Autopsy.’ I'm not entirely sure what was in them…”1 On February 25th, 2004, the Jefferson County, Colorado Police Department did something unprecedented—for two days, in two huge rooms at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds, they laid bare thousands of pieces of criminal evidence for public viewing.2 It had been nearly five years since 18-year-