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The Politics of Social Intimacy

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The Politics of Social Intimacy THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL INTIMACY: REGULATING GENDERED AND RACIAL VIOLENCE by LINDSEY MARIE SMITH UTZ MCKNIGHT, COMMITTEE CHAIR DANIEL LEVINE RICHARD FORDING DANA PATTON STEPHANIE FISHEL A DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science in the Graduate School of The University of Alabama TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA 2018 Copyright Lindsey Marie Smith 2018 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT This project explores the constructions of gender, intimacy, and race and the ways these issues are informed by history and the law. The idea of consent, while originally described in texts as a legal concept between citizens, transformed into a way to navigate intimate relationships in the private sphere. This muddied the ways women and men were understood to form relationships and the limits of those relationships. In the same ways that gender was arbitrated through legal language, race is often ensnared in the same processes and institutions. Tolerance has been offered as one approach, but instead of mitigating this violence, it has more firmly entrenched it into the democratic process. Hannah Arendt’s description of the social frames an understanding of intimacy and narratives. Arendt’s work critically creates a space for the category of the social, something found around but outside of the public and private. Instead of working to make the private seen as a sphere for political action, I will focus on the potential of the social as a method of political action. While Arendt has obvious racial bias, I will use her own response to anti-semitism to develop a different approach to Black politics that allow for identity-based responses. Lauren Berlant’s Intimate Publics addresses the potential for coalition building in the social. Using the sorority system as a way of teasing out notions of femininity, discipline, sexual violence, and intimacy, I will describe the ways that a woman subject is produced and how this then works to shape our notions of race. Women’s identities, particularly white women, are constructed through an association with race and sexuality, by unpacking this development, its possible to see how this is socially and institutionally enforced. Part of this enforcement will focus on the narratives of sexual violence. Rape is an issue that not only ii confronts legal questions, but also the nature of a woman’s ability to participate in democracy. Tying this together will be the importance of political theory. This serves to define the contemporary issues, solutions that have been offered and new potential approaches to intimate violence. ‘ iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am so grateful to have had the support and feedback from committee members, colleagues, and various faculty members who have helped me with this project. My husband, Nathan, has provided support and strength and space whenever I needed it. I am particularly grateful to Utz McKnight, the chairman of my dissertation, for his knowledge, patience, and commitment to my project. He always challenged me to read and write more. He informed my pedagogy and is the motivation behind the completion of this dissertation. iv CONTENTS ABSTRACT…………………………………………….………………………………………..ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………….………..……….………………………iv INTRODUCTION AND ON THE TOLERATION OF RACE AND GENDER…………...……1 POLITICAL ACTION IN THE SOCIAL………………………………………..……………...45 SOCIAL INTIMATE PUBLICS…………………………………………..……………….……87 POLITICS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE ………………..…………………………..……….…..134 CONTEMPORARY ISSUES …………..……………………………………………….……..165 CLOSING……………………………………………………………………………………....203 REFERENCES……………………………………………………..………….………….……206 v INTRODUCTION AND ON THE TOLERATION OF RACE AND GENDER All of my life I have been training to be a woman, not just any woman, but the best woman. It was in mind when I quit softball, I was about to be the age when people started calling girls lesbians if they kept playing. In my seventh grade English class I pretended to not know the answers to the questions, desperately trying to be one of the “cute” girls. The first time I bought a straightener for my hair with my own money, I inched closer to perfecting my femininity. My rejection of countless potential partners because of their race brought me even closer to an idealized womanhood, one that was clothed in whiteness so deeply that the two could not be unlinked or recognizable in distinction. This dissertation brings me, through those moments, the ways that my most intimate life was shaped by agreements, codes of behavior, violence, and whiteness. The theme throughout it all was the triviality of my lived experience while these experiences were simultaneously assigned arbitrary meanings. The dramatic moment when I called my grandmother to check me out of school because I had started my period was “typical girl behavior” while the overwhelming shame and mockery that happened every time a girl bled through her pants at school was signified and acknowledged as a moral failure. The vanity of a crush, the fleeting and fickle love of a woman, is the source of jokes in film and literature. Yet, the intense response to loving someone outside of your race, even if just a crush, is a defining moment, something that reveals something about your character. These constant experiences of a juxtaposed life blurred the lines of intimacy. My thoughts, desires, and emotions were unimportant, yet could somehow also indicate some intrinsic flaw. Learning to negotiate this delicate balance nearly drives you crazy, it certainly makes your neurotic. 1 To explore these personal experiences of gender construction and intimacy more deeply, the first Chapter will address the construction of gender and the way it is informed by law. Our understanding of consent is bound up in a practice of contract law. The idea of consent, while originally described in texts as a legal concept between citizens, transformed into a way to navigate intimate relationships in the private sphere. This muddied the ways women and men were understood to form relationships and the limits of those relationships. In the same ways that gender was arbitrated through legal language, race is often ensured in the same processes and institutions. These methods have not worked and leave the citizenry to develop a new politics. In this chapter, I will discuss the ways that tolerance was offered as an approach and has failed. Instead of mitigating this violence, it has more firmly entrenched it into the democratic process, leaving a search for something new while, at the same time, purporting a “success” in moving forward with regard to race and gender. The second Chapter will build on our understanding of gender and race by holding it in conversation with the work of Hannah Arendt. I will expand Arendt’s description of the social as a way to bridge the first and third chapter in terms of developing the potential for intimacy and narratives. Arendt’s work critically creates a space for the category of the social, something found around but outside of the public and private. Instead of working to make the private seen as a sphere for political action, I will focus on the potential of the social as a method of political action. Next, I will include a discussion on Arendt’s controversial work “Reflections on Little Rock.” While Arendt has obvious racial bias, I will use her own response to anti-semitism to develop a different approach to Black politics that allow for identity-based responses. The third Chapter explores Lauren Berlant’s Intimate Publics to address the potential for coalition building in the social. Using the sorority system as a way of teasing out notions of 2 femininity, discipline, sexual violence, and intimacy, I will describe the ways that a woman subject is produced and how this then works to shape our notions of race. Women’s identities, particularly white women, are constructed through an association with race and sexuality, by unpacking this development, its possible to see how this is socially and institutionally enforced. The fourth Chapter redefines our understanding and the narratives of sexual violence. Recent conversations around sexual harassment and sexual violence have appeared to shift public thinking and show support to women. I will interrogate the concept of progress further to point out that the normal experiences of violence in the day to day lives of women that go unnoticed or are trivialized, leading to an impossibility of actually being able to discuss moments of acute violence. This chapter questions the constructions of a woman’s identity as it relates to sexual violence. I will discuss the ways that violence against women has become normalized and embedded within the democratic process. Rape is an issue that not only confronts legal questions, but also the nature of a woman’s ability to participate in democracy. It is an act of violence that is uniquely gendered, and yet it is often relegated to the private sphere and outside of the space of political action. Using thinkers like Carole Patemen, I will explore the notion of consent in sexual violence and the ways it relates to contract theory. I will discuss the way that classical thinkers, like Rousseau, construct a woman’s identity and the unique ways this is tied to education. Finally, I will use examples from my experience as a rape response advocate at the crisis center in Birmingham, Alabama to extrapolate these ideas out into social norms as well as legal and institutional processes. Through an exploration of the purpose of women in relation to men and politics, I hope to address the problem that without interrogation of these issues, the ability for women to participate in democracy does not exist. 3 Finally, the fifth Chapter will discuss the work that is required of political theorists. It is necessary to rethink the canon, how it is taught and constructed. Political theorists must do the difficult work to build a better description of those whose voices have been historically marginalized.
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