Gender Identity and the Presumption of Guilt in the Public Discourse - Essay Example

? Gender identity and the presumption of guilt in the public dis Gender identity and the presumption of guilt in the public discourse 1. Introduction There are two ways in which to define and discuss gender. The first is very simple. Either one is biologically a female or a male, except for the few exceptions where mutations cause both genders to appear, such as when hermaphrodite anomalies occur; therefore, the biological differences are factually clear. From a sociological point of view, however, being male or female is a construct of socialization within which those who align themselves with either gender find context for their role within society. This will affect the way in which criminality is ascribed, the influences of gender creating differences in the way in which the system will treat one gender in compared to another. When someone defies their gender, primarily a woman, and commits a crime that is outside of how her gender is defined, it sets society on a rampage. Even more so, if she does not publicly display enough emotion about a traumatic event in her life she can be condemned for the crime at the center of the event without the evidence supporting this eventuality. 2. Criminality and stereotypes Women have always been seen as the more passive sex, their role within society dominated by their inability to gain the physical strength that men had the capacity to gain. In the nineteenth century, especially, women from the perspectives of the Victorian aesthetics were vulnerable and needed to be taken care of by men. There were two spheres of influence that divided the sexes: men belonged in the public sphere where women belonged in the domestic sphere. The passive nature of a woman meant that she was incapable of making adult decisions (Davidson and Laydor 1994). Therefore, as the twentieth century began to emerge and the rise of feminism began to change that point of view, the foundational idea of how women were framed remained based upon the connotation of innocence and demure passivity that had previously been the standard. The way in which men and women interact, even when it concerns violent behaviours, is also framed by social premises that stereotype and define interaction. According to Elder (1991), stereotypes about gender are also bound up in stereotypes about race, thus creating not only a disharmony of gender relations, but of race relations. The pervasive idea of the black male aggressor against the white female victim creates an idea that there is a male archetype that represents violence with a female archetype which represents victim. The concept of the ‘other’ in which inhuman attributes are connoted upon the genders in relationship to their gender can be seen in most societies. Elder (1991) goes on to discuss that in the Australian society there is the same type of connotation upon the Asian male, which puts him within the framework of the ’other’, not understood and dehumanized. Asian men are seen as a threat to the social grouping of white females through drugs and sexuality, a departure from the similar threat seen in the United States and Britain of the black male, although the black male represents a threat more often associated with violence (Elder 1991). Therefore, it can be shown that gender relationships are also complicated by race relationships, the individual parts of the whole complicated by the belief in stereotypes that ’define’ social positions within society. The objectification of men, women, and race all provide for definitions that create foundations for how society will view an event that takes place. Under this scenario, when a man commits a violent crime against a woman, it will be viewed, first on the basis of gender, and then on the basis of race. A white woman who is beaten by a white man will be viewed with slightly less threat than a white woman that is beaten by a black man. Where the stereotypes impact the public view on an event, the way in which it is treated through publicity, trial, and in punishment will be impacted (Elder 1991). When a woman defies the public stereotype of her passive nature, it can result in two distinct paths of public belief. The first path of belief will be to deny her responsibility in the action and to find a way to make her to be a victim of the circumstances that pushed her to act. The other way in which a woman can be seen in light of an action is to demonize her and make her into a monster, her defiance of her gender role a public disgrace and an anomaly within the public concepts of public understanding on behaviour (Morris 2009). In both cases, she is dehumanized and objectified, rather than discussed in terms of actual motives and consequences. The why of her behaviour becomes part of a discourse on her gender in terms of how she fits into the public view of properly allocated gender definitions. 2.1 Violence against women There is a good reason why crimes committed by women put the public into a state of confusion, the public understanding of gender is shaken and challenged in a way that is often irreconcilable. Most often, women are the victims of violence, especially in the domestic space, and are therefore, considered to be vulnerable in all spaces within society. Because defence is limited against men in most cases, women are more often victimized than are men. The statistics on violence against women are alarming, suggesting that the stereotype is justified. According to the Domestic Violence, Forced Marriage and “Honour” Based Violence report done in 2008, half of all women are the victims of domestic violence in their lifetime. Morris (2009, p. 415), states that 90% of all domestic violence is perpetrated by males. This is subject to social stereotyping due to the ‘justifications’ that appear as part of the discourse on the topic. Violence is seen as a way to keep women under control and maintain the dominance of the male gender within society. Attitudes that tolerate violence allow for it to continue existing with less than enthusiastic response from the state (Great Britain 2008, p. 140). A pervasive social construct of the unequal nature of male to female politics provides a framework in which maintaining the dominance of the male has often led to the use of violence in order to maintain gender positions within society. Isuhara (2003, p. 97) states explicitly that domestic violence is derived “from the still unequal power between men and women both in society and in their intimate relationships”. Men use both their physical power and their still more dominant position in the public sphere to control women in order to contain gender positions. 3. Expected gender roles of emotion Two cases in which the problem of the perception of the reactions of women in regard to the event of their children going missing can be seen in the cases of Lindy Chamberlain and Kate McCann. In both cases, the public perception of the reactions of the women caused problems in the focus of the investigations about the disappearances of their children (Chamberlain 2008). The way in which women are expected to react to the disappearance of their children is through open emotional displays; however, this emotional availability of public grief is not always an essential component of the tools with which a woman will cope. This creates a feeding frenzy by the public regarding her duplicity in the event, thus diverting the focus from the truth. In the case of Lindy Chamberlain, her child was taken from a tent in the Australian outback. Despite all kinds of evidence to support the idea that her child was taken by a dingo, the focus of the investigation became centered on Lindy as she was unable to publicly display her emotions about the event. Chamberlain states in her own version of the events “Damned by police hostility ‘forensic discoveries’ and an increasingly hysterical public, I was jailed for murdering my own daughter, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary” (Chamberlain 2008). Chamberlain compares herself to Kate McCann, whose child was abducted from a hotel when she had been left so that they could go to breakfast while she remained sleeping. The frenzy of the public for an answer focused the investigation on Kate, her unemotional presence in the public eye disconcerting enough to have the focus shifted her rather than to the facts of the case. Chamberlain (2008) states “at the heart of it, there is a woman who has failed to play the emotive, feminine role scripted for her in this terrible soap opera”. The public expects their drama and when the emotional context of a public appearance by a woman who has suffered a tragedy does not meet that level of drama, then the public will turn on her rather than focus on the truth. According to Driscoll (2007), Kate McCann was targeted for her attention to her own grooming, for the composure she presented to the public, and for Kate’s ’endless supply of summer tops’. The implication was that Kate was not behaving in a way the denoted grief, her jog the next day and her lack of emotionality in the public eye odd enough that she must have been somehow responsible for the disappearance of her child. This lack of pubic drama created a gap between what was expected and what was experienced, thus demonizing her responses in such a way to suggest she was responsible for the weight of the crime. Chamberlain experienced the same sort of problems, her life dissected and her lack of public appeal problematic as the search for the truth lead investigators away from the evidence to focus on the object of public criticism. Because she failed to publicly display enough emotion, Chamberlain was convicted of the murder of her child, despite the evidence that showed that her child had been taken by a wild animal. According to Doka and Martin (2010, p. 151) “her failure to grieve in a prescribed manner was considered strong evidence of guilt”. Therefore, in absence of irrefutable proof, emotion is considered to be an indicator of guilt or innocence, thus providing social context for the truth that is immaterial to the realities of the truth. Chamberlain was found guilty because she hid her emotions about the loss of her child. Where the truth is that even if she was glad for the loss of her child (an emotional state that was not true) - it would not have changed whether or not her child had been taken by a wild animal. However, because people, and especially women, are tried by the public according to their perception of that woman, the consideration of guilt is implied by the way in which she appropriately or inappropriately expresses herself. 3.1 Women as the perceived expressive gender Women are considered to be the more expressive side of the balance of genders and when a woman fails to fulfil this concept, the public does not find her to be sympathetic. The problem with trying to defy convention in the general context in which men are women are perceived is that gender stereotypes cross cultures and defy geographic location in providing a difference in the way in which men and women are viewed (Lippa 2005, p. 114). Therefore, it is very difficult to break the stereotype and to find a way in which to view men and women as human first, then as gender associated. When the personality of a person is missing, the general public tends to rely upon gender specific identifications which allows for assumptions that may not be true. When put into direct relationship with activity that is primarily associated with the male gender, athletics, the differences in men and women can be seen in context of the greater public perceptions. According to Worell (2001, p. 1095), men are typically more oriented to competitiveness and winning where women are more goal oriented and interested in general achievement where sporting activities are concerned. The indication is that men are more interested in the outcome where women are more interested in the path to the outcome. This can be translated into the social context as it is observed that women are perceived to be more interested in the content and meaning of an event than the focus on the specific event. In other words, how an event makes an impact on the emotional life of a woman and her family and how it affects the overall state of the family is the expected reaction of an event by the public. Aggressive or cold reactions by men are received as normal, however, as they are emotional connections with the event itself rather than the context of the event (Worell 2001). 4. Foucault and gender According to Andrew et al (2005, p. 62), Freudian theory proposes that gender identity and sexual orientation are formed together. Foucault proposes that gender is not only a construct of body differences, but of the way in which clothing work, body norms and so forth go into the construction of a gender identity. It is the heterosexual ideas of conformity that most affect the designated characteristics and identities of the genders. Whether or not sexual orientation follows these constructs is somewhat immaterial as it is the prescribed attributes that are imbued through socialization that have the greatest impact on gender identity. While this subject can be divided by the behaviours of homosexual stereotypes that defy gender conventions, the defiance is either not recognized and discarded as immaterial to the innocence or guilt of an individual in the public scrutiny of an event, or is embraced and defined by what is considered normal for that stereotype (Andrew 2005). In some ways, homosexuality can relieve the public from imposing identifying characteristics upon a woman as her lesbianism is considered an ‘other’ that does not fit into any prescribed gender identity that is understood from an overall sociological point of view. If a woman is not in the position of being dominated by a male presence, then society is unclear as to how to recognize attributes of femininity. Foucault, according to Andrew et al (2005, p. 62), sues the example of the 19th century woman Alexina who falls in love with Sara while in a convent. However, Alexina is a hermaphrodite and when she reveals both her love and her nature to priests and doctors, she was made to embrace the male gender and switch her orientation where behaviour and clothing were concerned. Foucault’s idea was that in the embrace of the love she felt with Sara, she was in a state of non-gender identity and when it was revealed society had to impose some sort of structure upon the relationship. 5. Conclusion While there are a great number of problems with this concept, the basic construct of the analogy is that an ‘otherness’ of gender identity is not readily accepted by the public, thus it must be regulated into a normalcy so that it can be identified and judged. Without this sense of normalcy, the public has no perspective from which to judge what they have been presented with as truth. In the case of Chamberlain, her inability to publicly express her feelings led to her incarceration which was defined by public opinion rather than by the facts of the case. In the case of McCann, she was publicly reviled for having continued with normal activities while her child was missing. Because she did not behave with the expressiveness that would be expected with this sort of loss, her guilt was suggested in the loss of the child. The concept of a gender identity that does not include what is considered to be normal reactions leads to the public turning their sympathy to accusations when someone does not behave as expected. References Anderson, Kristen L. and Debra Umberson. 2001. Gendering violence: Masculinity and power in men’s accounts of domestic violence. Gender & Society. Vol. 15, pp. 358-380. Andrew, Barbara S., Jean Clare Keller, and Lisa H. Schwartzman. 2005. Feminist interventions in ethics and politics: feminist ethics and social theory. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Chamberlain, Lindy. 15 September 2008. Madeleine: “Dingo baby” mother recognises police hostility, ‘forensic’ discoveries, and hysterical public. Mail Online. Davidson, Julia O’Connell and Derek Laydor. 1994. Methods Sex and Madness. London: Routledge. Doka, Kenneth and Terry L. Martin. 2010. Grieving beyond gender: Understanding the way men and women grieve. London: Francis and Taylor, Inc. Driscoll, Margarette. 21 October 2007. Too serene for sympathy. The Sunday Times Online. Accessed from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/n ews/world/euro pe/article2702285.ece Elder, Catriona. Racializing reports of men’s violence against women in the media. Soothill, Keith, and Sylvia Walby. 1991. Sex crime in the news. London: Routledge. Great Britain. 2008. Domestic violence, forced marriage and "honour"-based violence: sixth report of session 2007-08. London: TSO. Izuhara, Misa. 2003. Comparing social policies: exploring new perspectives in Britain and Japan. Bristol: Policy Press. Lippa, Richard A. 2005. Gender, nature and nurture. London: Taylor and Francis, Inc. Morris, Anne. 3 November 2009. Gendered dynamics of abuse and violence in families: Considering the abusive household gender regime. Child Abuse Review. Vol. 18, pp. 414-427. Wiley Interscience. Worell, Judith. 2001. Encyclopedia of women and gender: sex similarities and differences and the impact of society on gender. 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