Gendering Violence

Jane F. Gilgun

Laura McLeod

Gilgun, Jane F., & Laura McLeod (1999). Gendering violence. Studies in Symbolic

Interactionism, 22, 167-193.

Reprinted with permission from Elsevier http://www.elsevier.com

Jane F. Gilgun is professor, School of Social Work, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, \ USA

jgilgun@umn.edu. Laura McLeod at the time of this writing was a PhD student, department of

anthropology, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

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GENDERING VIOLENCE

Tim trained fatherless, prepubescent boys to initiate sex and believed he was participating

in mutual relationships. He fantasized about soft skin, hairlessness, and love and marriage with

these boys. That he was their social worker and manipulated them with rapt attentiveness,

camping trips, and marijuana rarely entered into his thinking. Don's ambition was to be a great

lover, and, in his rapes, he ordered his victims to act as if they enjoyed it. Though he knew his

rape behaviors were terrifying and humiliating, his victims' experiences were not the point.

Their task was to make him feel like a man. Defining his victims as "loose," he believed that

rape would not be a big thing for them, anyway.

In these accounts, the two men defined who their victims were, acted on their definitions,

and conveyed a certitude that they were entitled to enact these extremes of hegemonic

masculinity. They invoked, reshaped, and enacted cultural themes and practices that were both

idiosyncratic and recognizable as part of Western culture (cf, Denzin, 1995). Their accounts

contain numerous illustrations of the intersection of culture and individual agency. In this paper,

we sought to identify particularizations of culture in the men's discourse on the violence they had

perpetrated. We also experimented with writing ourselves into the analysis. This research

"broke our hearts" (Behar, 1996), and we attempted to show that we were not detached observers

but deeply upset by the accounts of violence we had struggled to understand.

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GENDER AND VIOLENCE

The gendered nature of violence is self-evident: Men are disproportionately represented

as perpetrators of all forms of violent acts (Johnson, 1995; Kruttschnitt, 1994). Feminists have

taken the lead in placing gender at the center of discussions of violence (cf., Brownmiller,1975;

MacKinnon, 1994; Miedzian, 1991; Pence & Paymar, 1993; Rush, 1980; Sanday, 1990; Scully,

1990). For feminists, power and control are the core of male violence. Gender informs power

relationships and regulates behaviors within and across race and class (Flax, 1987). For other

segments of society, violence as primarily a male phenomenon is taken-for-granted and not

problematized (Messerschmidt, 1993; Miedzian, 1991). The intersection of violence, gender,

and power is not investigated and thus is marginalized. In this paper, we put the spotlight on

gender and violence. We do so by examining the discourse of two white, upper middle class

men who were convicted of criminal sexual conduct. In the analysis of these accounts, we

examined how these two men invoked, shaped, and enacted several discourses that we identified

as gendered and hegemonic.

Doing Gender

Besides the feminist writings cited earlier, our analysis drew upon concepts of "doing

gender" (West & Zimmerman, 1987) and hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1987, 1990, 1995;

Donaldson, 1993; Stacey, 1993). Notions of doing gender derive partially from

ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism, frameworks that focus on human agency within

larger social and cultural contexts. (See Holstein & Gubrium, 1994, on ethnomethology and

LaRossa & Reitzes, 1993, on symbolic interactionism.) When persons "do gender," they engage

in on-going interactional processes in which they invoke, construct, and enact polarized images

of the two genders. For West and Zimmerman, these polarizations devalue women and place

men in dominant positions.

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Doing gender often involves gender as display, displays that can range from domineering

to egalitarian. Gender as display posits that persons enact gender-linked behaviors to meet

situational contingencies (Thorne, 1993). Individual enactments of gender are termed

genderisms (Goffman, 1977) and build on Cooley's (1902/1956) notion of the looking-glass self.

Situated, individual genderisms reflect, reshape, and intersect with larger, more generalized

cultural images, beliefs, scripts, and practices. These behaviors are observed by others and by

the self, and, in many cases, persons judge themselves and others as adequate or inadequate on

the basis of gender-linked behaviors. These culturally-based systems of meanings and practices,

therefore, are both descriptive and prescriptive for individuals in particular situations (Deaux &

Kite, 1987; Deaux & Major, 1987).

Hegemony

As a pivotal concept in Gramsci's (1971) Prison Notebooks, hegemony as originally

formulated, in the words of Donaldson (1993), is about "the winning and holding of power" and

"how the ruling class establishes and maintains its domination," often through destroying other

social groups (p. 645). Hegemony involves the impositions of definitions of situations,

impositions that control the terms under which events and issues are discussed and interpreted

and that construct ideals and standards for making moral judgments (Donaldson, l993). Not

every member of ruling classes participates in such activities, but they all benefit. These

impositions are done in ways that make them appear "normal" and "natural" to major segments

of the population, including those who are subjugated.

Hegemonic Masculinity

Notions of hegemony are embedded in social structural thinking and thus can be

considered unsuitable for the analysis of individual agency and situated contingencies. The

notion of hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1987, 1993, 1995; Donaldson, 1993), however, has

much in common with concepts of doing gender and thus may be a bridge concept between
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structural theories and interactionist thinking. While noting the diversity among types of

masculinities, Connell (1995) defined hegemonic masculinity "as the configuration of gender

practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of the

patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the

subordination of women" (p. 77). Donaldson (1993) shared this view and included other ideas

such as women as "potential sexual objects for men while men are negated as sexual objects for

women" and women as providers of sexual validation for heterosexual men (p. 645).

Furthermore, within hegemonic masculinity, there exists the notion of subjugated

masculinities, based on a type of heterosexuality that builds on the subjugation of homosexual

men. Other social groups can be subordinated and marginalized along lines of race and class.

Researchers widely recognize the limitations of strictly social structural interpretations of

human action. Connell (1995) aligned his perspectives on hegemonic masculinity with recent

trends that view gender as constructed in everyday interaction. As he noted, research with such

foci provide opportunities to explore "the making and remaking" (p. 35) of hegemonic

masculinities that are linked to broad social trends and social structures. Pyke's (1996) analysis

of "class-based masculinities" is an example of approaches that show reciprocities between

"interpersonal powering processes" and "broader relations of class and gender" (p. 527).

Interpersonal violence is concomitant with hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995; Pyke,

1996). Violence can enforce and maintain dominance. While most men do not engage in

interpersonal violence, those who do usually invoke discourses of hegemonic masculinities and

thus not only feel justified but believe they are within their rights. In the words of Connell

(1995), "an ideology of supremacy" gives them authorization (p. 83).

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HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY AND DOING MASCULINITY

From our points of view, hegemonic masculinity is only one type of masculinity. There

are many other ways to do masculinity and to be masculine besides hegemonic, and many of

these challenge hegemonic masculinity. Men pick from a wide array of prescriptions, and they

use different discourses at different times, depending upon their interpretations of situations. As

Swidler (1986) noted, culture provides its members with a veritable grab bag of possibilities for

being and doing. Besides hegemonic discourses, there are many others related to masculinity,

including protectors, breadwinners, feminists, nerds, sissies, warriors, heroes, and lovers. Thus,

enactments of gender can be playful and egalitarian, without also being an assertion of

superiority and domination. Gendered meanings, in the words of Thorne (l993), "are deeply

embedded in many of the discourses we draw on to make sense of the world" (p. 105).

Discourses of masculinity encode sets of values, images, myths, stories, expectations, and rules

that are available to men to guide them in defining their rights, privileges, and roles as men.

As feminists, our concern is for the subordination of women, along with our concern for

other groups subordinated by hegemonic practices, such as girls and boys, persons of color, and

subordinated masculinities. Notions of hegemony, hegemonic masculinity, the doing of gender,

and gender as display inform our research. We view the violence we analyzed for this paper as

forms of "doing gender" that enact and particularize the core ideas of hegemony and hegemonic

masculinity. Rather than viewing hegemonic masculinity as only the subordination of women

and a means for heterosexual men to obtain sexual satisfaction from women, for this paper, we

view hegemonic masculinity as encompassing the general ideas about hegemony, and we apply

them to the doing of gender. In our analysis of interpersonal violence, we therefore "gender" the

core ideas of structural hegemony.

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Thus, for example, imposing definitions of situations and other qualities ascribed to

structural hegemony is important to our analysis. In addition, we assume that some men

experience hegemony and hegemonic masculinity as part of the natural order and that they have

a sense of entitlement to act hegemonically to the point of being violent. We also assume that

some persons view themes from within hegemonic masculinity to be standards by which they

judge their behaviors and the behaviors of others. When their behaviors fall short of these

standards, they may redefine situations to meet these perceived standards, or they may redefine

the standards in order to experience concordance between what they want and what they believe

are standards of the larger culture. Gender is thus constructed and culture is created within

situated contingencies.

Moral, Emancipatory, and Emotional Dimensions of our Research

In our analysis, we join other feminist researchers in acknowledging the moral,

emancipatory, and emotional dimensions of research (Cook & Fonow, 1991). Briefly, our moral

stance is based on a commitment to social justice and human equality. We believe the behaviors

of the men we researched violate the moral precepts of care and justice, two fundamental

categories of moral philosophy (Gilgun, 1995; Gilligan, 1982; Manning, 1992; Noddings, 1984).

Further, we seek to contribute to emancipatory social movements whose purposes are the

transformations of cultures that help perpetuate interpersonal violence and other forms of

injustice and lack of care. As Stacey (1993) and Connell (1995) stated, a liberatory feminism is

based upon the unravelling of oppressive masculinities. Our goal is to invoke and contribute to

discourses that challenge and undermine hegemonic thinking and behaviors.

In preparing to write this paper, our emotions were deeply stirred as we struggled to

understand the accounts of men who had committed violent acts. As women and members of a

class oppressed by male violence, we often identified with the victims of these men, and we may

even have been victimized at times by their words. Jane, the first author, experienced feelings of
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fear and vulnerability that she slowly learned to manage over the course of more than ten years

of conducting research on violent men. To this day, she occasionally walks into her home

wondering if a violent man has broken in and will be sitting in her living room waiting for her.

The second author, Laura, was part of the project for almost two years. In a paper for one

of her graduate classes, she wrote, "My readings of the transcripts about rapes and murders of

women and girls brought out my vulnerabilities in very unexpected ways, making me feel

permeable, without boundaries" (McLeod, 1995). Both of us developed deep insight into the

phenomenology of victimization.

Rather than acting as if we were kin to the Wizard of Oz, presenting our results in a

disembodied, detached, and seamless voice, we chose to present "close ups" of some of our

emotional reactions to the acts that we struggled to understand, along with our representations of

our informants and our more "detached" analyses. As Bruner (1986) pointed out more than a

decade ago, fieldwork involves "at least two double experiences:" researchers experiencing

themselves, researchers experiencing informants, informants experiencing themselves, and

informants experiencing researchers (p. 14). In our work, we are attempting to report on the first

half of this double consciousness. We consciously, to use Fine's (1994) words, were "unpacking

the hyphen" of the self-other dichotomy; that is, challenging notions of "scientific neutrality,

universal truths, and researcher dispassion" (p. 70). We created a multi-vocal text that

experiments with writing that attempts to differentiate our representations of informants from our

representations of ourselves. When we speak in our own voices, we state which of us is

speaking; we did not have identical personal reactions to the men's words. Our representations

of ourselves as women with emotion is a form of experimental writing (Richardson, 1994, 1997)

that is part of feminist and postmodern thinking and practice.

We expect our interpretations and reactions to the men's accounts to be similar in many

respects to those of the audiences who read our work, but some of our responses could appear to
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be idiosyncratic and situated according to our personal histories and status. We also

acknowledge that texts are open, and, therefore, readers' interpretations of our texts may be

different from our own. Further, the interpretations of some readers may appear to be

idiosyncratic to them. It is likely that individual interpretations, like the accounts of the

informants of this study, may seem idiosyncratic but may actually represent enactments and

particularizations of cultural themes and practices. Readers, researchers, and informants may all

be involved in enacting and creating culture.

METHOD

Two residents of a maximum security prison provided life history accounts that included

detailed descriptions of sexual violence against women and boys. Don (not his real name), the

man who raped women, was engaged to be married and sexually active with his fiancee at the

time of his arrest for rape. He confessed to seven rapes, was convicted of five, and sentenced to

almost 30 years in prison. He was born and raised in the midwest. Tim (not his real name), the

man who molested boys, was married, sexually active with his wife, and the stepfather of two

boys at the time of his arrest. He molested more than 20 boys and was sentenced to about 20

years in prison. He was born and raised in the southwest.

Both informants were white, in their early thirties, and from upper middle class, two-

parent, never-divorced families whose fathers held executive positions and whose mothers were

professionals. Both graduated from exclusive, private colleges. Tim was a human service

professional with a master's degree in social work, and Don managed a small business. Neither

informant was chemically dependent nor did they have histories of mental illness or of being

sexually abused themselves. Thus, both men were from the powerful upper classes, and they did

not have identities usually associated with violent men. (For contrast, see Scully's [1990]

description of her sample of male rapists.)

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We chose these two men for our analysis because of their demographic and personal

characteristics. In their cases, family history, social class, race, marital status, diminished

capacity because of untreated mental illness, and chemical use cannot be proposed as

explanations for their violence. On the other hand, their status gave them clear access to

hegemonic discourses of privilege. Don's developmental history is available in Gilgun (1996),

and related research on a larger sample is in Gilgun (in press, 1990, 1991, 1994, 1995), Gilgun

and Connor (1989), and Gilgun and Reiser (1990).

The first author (Jane) did life history interviews of Tim for about 20 hours over 11

interviews and of Don for about 14 hours in 12 interviews. Life history research offers the

possibility of examining individual lives and interpretations within the contexts of social,

cultural, and historical themes and practices (Denzin, 1989a, 1989b). As a prime research

method of the Chicago School of Sociology, a seat of interactionist theorizing, life histories are a

method of choice for examining the doing of gender. Connell (1995) also used a life history

method in his research on masculinities.

In the present research, the general areas covered included family history, history of peer

relationships, history of romantic relationships, sexual history, histories of violence experienced

as well as perpetrated, and relationships with others in such contexts as school, sports, and jobs.

Multiple interviews were conducted because of the scope of the research and the sensitive nature

of the topic. Details of the interview process are in Gilgun (1996).

I (Jane) tape-recorded the interviews, and they were transcribed verbatim, including the

timing of pauses. The second author (Laura) and Jane read the transcripts many times, discussed

them, identified and read research and theory on doing gender, social constructions of

masculinity, hegemonic masculinity, masculinity and violence, feminist analyses of violence,

and cultural studies and then tried to make sense of the data all over again. The data were so

emotionally evocative that we spent a great deal of time working through our personal responses.
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Almost two years went by before we found we had any facility in articulating the meanings of

the discourses we identified in the informants' accounts. Their way of thinking was for the most

part outside our frames of reference. As we struggled through these interpretive processes, we

made notes of our responses.

FINDINGS: VIOLENCE AND GENDERED MEANINGS

Tim and Don constructed their accounts of their violent behaviors from the cultural

themes and practices of hegemony and hegemonic masculinity. Most compelling to us were

being entitled to take what they wanted and of defining persons and situations as they wished.

These men invoked several other discourses besides hegemonic in describing their sexually

assaultive behaviors. In so doing, they redefined situations to suit themselves. Overall, the

discourses they invoked served hegemonic ends. We also found that the men experienced chills,

thrills, and intense emotional gratification as they imposed their wills on smaller, physically

weaker persons. Such subjective aspects of hegemonic masculinity were not part of our initial

conceptual framework.

"Just Grab Them:" Don's Sense of Entitlement

Both informants constructed themselves as entitled to having sex with others without

including others in their decisions. For instance, Don said about his rapes, "if I can't get them

this way [through mutual consent] then the other way to get them is, you know, to just grab

them." Drawing from cultural images of "loose" women for whom rape supposedly has no

meaning, his narrative is permeated with an "ideology of supremacy" (Connell, 1995, p. 83) and

constructions of women as sexual objects for men (Donaldson, 1993). The following shows Don

defining who the women were and what rape meant to them. He is imposing ideologies about

women who are "loose sexually." This is hegemonic masculinity in action.

Um, and if I take the right person, you know, it's not going to make a difference anyway.

You know, because, like I said before, you know, the women I was, was raping were, you
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know, they'd been in that bar looking for guys anyway....You know, all my victims were,

you know, they, my set up was that they'd been out in bars or loose sexually, kinds of

people. So they had it coming, or they, you know, it didn't matter to them. So, so, you

know, this wouldn't be a big, big thing to happen to them.

After Don's statement that rape would not be "a big, big thing" to the women, I (Jane)

was speechless for 20 seconds. When I finally was able to speak, I asked Don how he knew the

women were loose. His answer revealed more of his hegemonic thinking:

J:(10 sec) Yeah. (10 sec) Well, how did you know that they were at bars and were

loose? What...[interrupted].

D:Well, I mean, I didn't actually know that.

J:Oh.

D:I, I knew, I knew that because that's the kind of people that were out at that time of

night.

J:Okay. So you would be looking at what time of night?

D:Yeah.

J:What, what time of night would you be out?

D:Well generally the, and this, this is another thing that doesn't make

sense because there was all kinds of times that I was out.

J:Oh.

D:But,

J: (Laugh)

D:Um, (5 sec) generally it would be late, like you know, midnight, one

o'clock, two o'clock in the morning, that kind of thing. But you know I

was out in, in the winter time sometimes after it got dark, you know, or

not right after it got dark but maybe at seven-thirty or eight o'clock,
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or something.

Jane: My laugh was inappropriate but it arose out of an enormous sense of incongruity

and perhaps hysteria. Here is this guy who looked so small to me sitting here making one-sided,

hegemonic constructions of women who deserve to be raped and this same guy and guys like him

terrorize women routinely. In some instances, they ruin the lives of women. He seems unable to

understand the significance of what he did, what meanings his words and behaviors might have

for women in general and his victims in particular. Based on our extensive conversations, I

think he was so focused on himself that he was not able to step outside of his own frame of

reference. In fact, he had a frame of reference that was outside of mine: the frame of reference

of hegemonic masculinity. As we spoke, he seemed to hunched over, forehead wrinkled, working

very hard to explain to me how he thought about his rapes. I was working hard to understand

him.

Laura: They had it coming. They deserved to be raped because he decided who they

were, what they were doing. I'll punish them for not doing what they're supposed to be doing as

women.

Jane: Yes, for not being "virtuous" women. He has no idea who they were. He told me

he wouldn't recognize any of his victims if they walked into the room. Yet, he's taking on a God-

like function of naming them. He's constructing these women, creating them in images he

chooses, independent of them. This is hegemony.

Ironically, Don could not see the holes in his own thinking. He had no basis except

ideological for concluding that the women he raped were loose, and he never arrived at the

conclusion that no one "deserves" to be raped, no matter what. To serve his own agenda, he

chose a hegemonic ideology from a grab bag of possible ways of constructing women who drive

their cars after dark.

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Don's views, however, may not be as extreme as we would like to believe. Many of the

rapists in Scully's (1990) research also invoked negative cultural stereotypes and thus

constructed the women in ways that may have helped them to rape: the women were

seductresses, really wanted sex, and were not nice girls anyway. Although feminists have long

challenged myths that portray rape victims as deserving of rape, as for example, when they

hitchhike, get drunk, go to bars alone, or are prostitutes, these myths continued to be invoked and

enacted.

"Payback:" Tim's Hegemonic Sense of Entitlement

As a social worker, Tim had easy access to boys. Part of his job was to link boys with

mentors. Boys he found attractive he assigned to himself. This is how he constructed these boys

and his relationship to them:

...when I see children, people that are vulnerable and in need, you know, that I have

concern and a desire to help and take care of this person, to give him what he needs

materially or emotionally, and that somehow that either gets expressed sexually; it

certainly arouses sexual feelings in me. Maybe it's that I feel that that's my payback for

taking care of others, that I in turn get sex.

Jane: As a researcher, I might use reflexivity to ask myself, how do I express empathy?

Well, I try to connect with how I feel in similar situations.

Laura: Then share that experience/emotion with a friend or loved one or "object of

empathy" to let that person know that she is not alone in her experience.

Jane: Sharing similar human experience. Then, I ask myself, if I feel empathic toward

someone who is in pain, do I use my power?

Laura: Age, structural location, gender, supervisory position, etc. to initiate a sexual

encounter with that person?

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Jane: No. More specifically, if a young person were in emotional distress, would I

express my empathy with that person

Laura: by making a sexual encounter happen?

Laura and Jane: No.

For Tim, boys are sexual objects. Not only did he feel entitled to act on his eroticized

constructions of these boys, but he also used discourses of market exchange to rationalize his

entitlement. Sex with boys is the exchange or currency for paying him back for his "care" of

them. Tim's doing of gender shows that children--boys and girls--are potential sexual objects for

men who enact hegemonic masculinities. The huge numbers of children who are sexually

abused support this observation.

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Don: “Act Like You Enjoy it”

Both men wanted evidence that their victims enjoyed the sexual violence perpetrated

against them. Gender thus became a display that they enacted and that they forced on the

victims. Don displayed gender--his hegemonic masculinity--by intimidating women into acting

as if they enjoyed being raped. Tim displayed hegemonic masculinity despite his self-

presentation of being a "cool" guy who was participating in mutual, egalitarian relationships with

boys he often compared to women.

Both men were uncomfortable with viewing themselves as sexual predators. They

quickly dispatched thoughts that their behaviors were abusive, and they redefined situations

more in conformance with egalitarian standards. Exemplifying Cooley's (1902/1956) notion of

the looking-glass self, they modified their constructions of situations but not their behaviors in

response to their understandings of standards of moral conduct and their wanting to avoid taking

on stigmatized identities.

For instance, Don told his victims, "Act like you enjoy it." Then he

Um, you know, ah, made them kiss me, ah things, you know, that were, you know, make

it seem more, you know, normal and consenting, or something like that. You know, that

was the idea (3 sec) ah, have, like having them undress themselves, rather than my doing

it, was part of, you know, a big part of it. Um (12 sec) I guess that, the, the whole thing

was the, you know, that I wasn't, I was trying to make it so that I wasn't forcing them to

do anything,you know, but that was the idea....I don't know if it's right to say I wanted her

to enjoy it but at least I wanted her to act like she did. (4 sec) It's, it's like, you know, I

wanted to make it so that it wasn't a rape, you know, that it was a sexual kind of thing.

Laura: I've been haunted by Don's statement, "Act like you enjoy it." Every time it hits

my nerves--"Act like you enjoy it. I don't care who you are, how you feel, what this might do to

you. I don't care how terrified you are. I just want a display. Your performance--that's enough
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for me--a superficial facade of pleasure that will allow me to see this as normal and consenting,

whatever that might be." Would that display of enjoyment make rape less violent for Don? Does

he care? Where does he get these models for "normalcy"--from porn? He knew this was rape.

He wants the woman to be responsible for making it not seem like rape. Where is his

responsibility to respect the moral code that condemns rape? The desire for the display is a real

thing for him. He's still going to rape her whether or not she puts on the display.

Jane: Don was a devote of porn. He stole Playboy from his father when he was a young

teenager and then in high school stole hard core porn from the desk drawers of offices he

cleaned as a part-time job. He laughed when he said no one ever complained. He found the

porn highly sexually arousing, the impetus for prolonged, daily masturbation where he imagined

raping women.

Not only did Don impose his definitions of situations on the women he victimized, but he

also intimidated them into living up to his definitions. In so doing, he displayed extremes of

hegemonic masculinity that had to have been highly destructive to his victims. In attempting to

create scenarios where rape was not rape, he also constructed a sticky web of self-deception that

ultimately led to decades of imprisonment. Don's self-deception, however, has much in common

with some of the rapists in Scully's (1990) study. These men stated that some of their victims

eventually relaxed and enjoyed themselves, or were irresistible drawn to them; e.g., to the men

who were raping them.

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Tim: Boys as Consenting Women

Many of Tim's statements echo Don's in terms of wanting the relationship to appear

"normal" and consenting, even to the point of seeing in his own mind the boys as adult and

women and the relationships as mutual. These constructions were "gender benders" and "age-

benders," re-shaping the meanings of gender and age, in this case, to suit how Tim wanted to see

himself in relationship to these boys. These "benders" undercut and contradicted his depiction of

the boys as "trained," like animals, perhaps. Viewing oneself as training another human being is

a hegemonic social position. The following statement is imbued with the contradictory,

hegemonic discourses that he invoked.

I'd train them to the point where they knew when certain things were a certain way, that it

was time to be sexual. With a couple of my victims, I had them trained so well that they

would initiate it, and then that further reinforced my belief that they wanted to be doing it

and that I was more or less participating in a mutual relationship with another adult,

whom I saw more as a woman almost than a man in a lot of ways because of the female

characteristics: the skin, the lack of hair, whatever, just the softness.

Tim told me (Jane) that when boys had body hair and other adult male characteristics, they were

"much less of a turn on." As the above quote illustrated, Tim's hegemonic sense of entitlement

was so strong that he invoked and often distorted language from other discourses:

heterosexuality, egalitarianism, and homophobia, with no acknowledgement of the duplicity he

was practicing. His homophobia is suggested in wanting to see the boys as women and his

avoidance of the term "boy" and his preference for the generic term "children." It may be that he

believed his own constructions, as contradictory as they are.

Laura: He really thought this stuff through and made all kinds of efforts to replicate the

model of a mutual, man-woman sexual/romantic relationship.

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Jane: He had the power and the sense of entitlement to train them, and he also had

access to their case files, and this was a power as well, a diabolical power, where he knew what

was lacking in their lives.

Laura: "Train" them--he sounds like he's talking about a dog. Dogs and women and

children--all become sexual objects who ought to do what Tim wants them to do for him.

Dispatching Thoughts of Being Abusive

Although both men wanted to believe that their violence actually were consenting

relationships between equals, they did have bursts of insight that their behaviors were abusive.

Don said:

Anytime I thought of rape per se as, as rape, then I would feel, you know, guilt and

shame and, and all that kind of stuff. And so I tried not to think about, you know, rape.

(18 sec) Try to think of (13 sec), yeah, just whenever I thought of, you know, rape in

those terms it just, I felt uncomfortable, you know, and, or, if somebody else talked about

it.

He said with pride that when he read a police report of one his rapes,

...the woman thought that my, you know, that I was very calm and, um, I don't know,

almost reassuring. You know, that I'd said, you know, that I wouldn't hurt them, you

know, if they did what I said.

Don apparently preferred the label "reassuring" over the label "rapist." He wanted to be a

considerate rapist. This view of himself complements his insistence on the women's display of

enjoyment. He, however, showed no insight into the hegemonic qualities of his statements of not

hurting victims if they did what he said and of ordering them to "act like they enjoyed it."

Defining the women he raped as "loose" and for whom being raped won't matter also may be

linked to his dread of seeing himself as a man who rapes.

Tim also dispatched thoughts that he was abusive:

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I wasn't thinking, well, I'm abusing these kids, and I'm victimizing them, and I'm hurting

them for life. I wasn't having any of those. When I would have those kinds of thoughts

or feelings, I'd block them out. I wouldn't let myself think those things.

Rather than seeing himself as exploitive, Tim wanted to believe his own duplicitous

constructions as suggested by his fantasy about marrying one of these boys:

The fantasy would be that I would adopt the kid, or somehow the kid would live with me,

say, in in a big city, and I would have a job, and we would be more or less in a

relationship, just married. If not married, then just lovers or whatever.

He wondered why the boy in the fantasy often was "from another country."

...the reality is a person from another country, another culture, it maybe gave me a little

more permission to take advantage of him and it wasn't quite so bad, so destructive or

something.

Most of the boys Tim victimized were from poor families of American Indian and

Hispanic heritages, cultures different from his own. His fantasy about such boys is embedded in

racist, supremist discourses that give permission to exploit persons who are members of

subjugated groups. This quote, too, suggests that he was aware of the harm he was perpetuating.

Like Tim, Don also called upon discourses that fostered his sense of supremacy and the

denigration of "out" groups when he invoked discourses of the loose woman.

The Thrill of Sexual Hegemony

Both Don and Tim clearly articulated the deep emotional meanings and sense of

excitement that their sexual violence had for them. The subjective meanings of their violence

may be at the heart of why they committed their violent acts. Each man, however, experienced

the excitement in his own way. Don, a high school football player, described the physical

experience of anticipating his rapes:

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Well, nothing, nothing ever gave me the intense kind of feeling. Especially the, there

would be, like, like when I was driving around and I would be thinking about it, maybe

following somebody, I had, you know, like a physical

reaction. I would be shaking, physically shaking, like teeth would chatter, and I couldn't

stop. You know, it wouldn't stop, and I never had that kind of, you know, physical

reaction to, to anything else. I would also get, you know, like butterflies and I can, you

know, relate that to, you know, sports events, you know, before a big game or something.

You know, that feeling but not the, not the physical [meaning, he didn't have an erection

before a big game, but did when he was driving around looking for a woman alone after

dark in her car].

Anticipating rape inflamed Don. His behavior evoked images of man the hunter, man the

questor, man the predator, man the sports hero. This also is gender as display; for Don, the

audience is himself and perhaps an imaginary audience who believed, as he told me (Jane) he

did, that real men have sex whenever they want. The display aspect of his excitement was an

anticipation that he would live up to his gendered, hegemonic ideal of man the sexual conqueror

who has sex with whomever he chooses whenever he wants.

"Making Them Do What They Didn't Want To Do"

Another aspect of Don's excitement was his control in the rape situation itself: he could

make women do what they didn't want to do.

In one case I had the, I made the, the woman perform oral sex on me. I suppose ah, you

know, some of the, I don't know, excitement or whatever, came from ah, knowing that

she didn't, you know, obviously, I knew that she didn't want to do that, but it was, you

know, I was making her do that, and I think, I guess I got some, I got some degree of

satisfaction from, ah, you know, that they, and all of them, knowing that I was making

them do what they didn't want to do....

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Jane: Hearing this, I was furious. I could imagine being one of his victims and

experiencing the helplessness and humiliation of having to perform oral sex on him. I could feel

and taste his penis. Particularly infuriating was my belief that in so humiliating me he would be

fulfilling a ridiculous fantasy--that of a man who can have sex with whomever he wanted when

he wanted it. To me, "real" men negotiate and are not destroyed by having to negotiate--and

having to wait sometimes.

Jane and Laura: The women probably were terrified and knew the man who was raping

them had the physical strength to kill them. Inducing such terror is no mark of a man. Don took

advantage of his physical strength to force smaller, weaker persons to perform a humiliating

physical act. This is not such a big feat.

The thrill of controlling others may be a major theme in the experiences of men who

commit violent acts. Groth and Birnbaum (1979) reported this phenomenon many years ago, and

I (Jane) also found this in a sample of child molesters (Gilgun, 1994).

Molestation as Romance

Although excitement and emotional meanings were present, Tim's romantic descriptions

of his experience of molesting boys contrasted with Don's graphic depiction of his rapes. The

following quotes from Tim's account illustrate the contrast.

It think it was closeness, caring, loving, warmth, gentleness, all those things I felt with

my victims, caressing.

When I was with my victim sexually, it was a very fulfilling experience. It was the most

exciting, good feeling I could have.

I felt a lot of excitement, felt like I wanted to be with them. They wanted to be with me.

There was some mutual excitement. There was some sexual excitement. There was also
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just some--it was fun. I was relaxing. It was a lot better than relationships I had with

women.

Laura: Tim's using these descriptions to cover up the garbage--the using of these boys.

What strikes me is he is not disquieted by the damage he's inflicting. This is a whole lot of

entitlement, above and beyond any cultural prescriptions that condemn sexual violence against

children. He doesn't have to answer to anyone or to any moral code--just address the adrenaline

rush and get on with it. Tim is able to isolate "the sex" from the boys' experience, particularly

the pain he is causing them.

Jane: Don, too, isolated his experience of excitement from the experiences of the victims.

Yet, he also knew his victims suffered, and he enjoyed their suffering and his power to make them

suffer.

Now, after years of trying to understand the kind of satisfaction the two men experienced

in their violent acts--the control, the excitement, the sexual fulfillment--we are still baffled. We

can present instances from their own narratives that illustrate gendered discourses and we can

provide our interpretations, but we cannot enter into their points of view. We do not have

connected knowledge of Don's rapes and Tim's trust-destroying molestations; what we have is a

separate, disconnected knowledge of their experiences (e.g., Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, &

Tarule, 1986). We are, however, deeply connected to our own emotional responses to his

account. Simply, we are horrified, still.

DISCUSSION

This study placed gender at the center of an analysis of the discourse of two men who

committed violent acts: one who raped women he did not know and the other who molested boys

with whom he cultivated relationships. The two men enacted a sense of entitlement, they

constructed their violence as consensual sex, they experienced their violence as emotionally

meaningful, and they invoked supremist ideologies. Our analysis also provided material that
 Gendering
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expands definitions of hegemonic masculinity to include its subjective meanings and ideas

related to subjugation based on age. Finally we experimented with a method for writing

ourselves into the analysis.

We explored instances where two men invoked both violence-supportive and egalitarian

discourses in their descriptions of the violent acts they committed. Don, for example,

constructed his victims as women hanging around in bars, women who deserved to be raped; yet,

he ordered them to act as if they enjoyed it--as if rapes were a mutually-agreed upon sexual acts.

He forced the women to put on a display, so that he would enjoy it and so that he would not have

to face himself and admit that he was raping them. He chose discourses that permitted him to do

gender in ways that were violent and humiliating to victims, such as supremist ideologies that

authorized him to construct the women in denigrating ways. As members of an "out" group,

loose women had little value, and it really didn't matter--not even to them--that he raped them.

As a member of an "in" group, he had the power to define situations as he wished and the power

to enforce his definitions. Enacting hegemonic cultural themes and practices, he believed he was

entitled to do gender as he did.

Tim also drew upon hegemonic discourses that authorized him to act as if he were

entitled to use boys sexually. He sometimes invoked the language of commerce: having sex with

boys was payback for his care of them. At other times, he used the discourse of romantic love,

where he talked as if his molestations were egalitarian relationships with adult woman replete

with tenderness, closeness, caring, gentleness, and warmth. Bending gender to construct boys as

women suggests that he did not want to see himself as a man who has sex with boys, a highly

stigmatized social identity. Like Don, he may have been trying to persuade himself that what he

was doing was just and good--after all, he thought about marrying them, didn't he?

Occasionally, some implications of his abuse of power burst into his awareness, but, he shoved

these thoughts aside and thought again about how good sex with boys felt, how much the boys
 Gendering
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wanted it, and how good he was to and for the boys. His hegemonic construction of his

behaviors, his sense of entitlement to take sex from boys, and the profound pleasure he took in

these boys apparently over-rode any competing discourses of masculinity that countered his

wishes. He, like Don, re-shaped his constructions of what he was doing to conform to more

conventional codes of conduct, such as protector and lover. Tim also invoked racist, supremist

ideologies in trying to explain why he routinely chose boys from non-white cultures.

Redefining Hegemonic Masculinity

This analysis demonstrates the importance of the subjective meanings of hegemonic

doing of gender. Having power and control over others, forcing them or manipulating them into

doing what they do not want to do, and using them for personal satisfaction have profound

emotional charges and could be core motivators for hegemonic, gendered behaviors. Validation

might also be a key subjective dimension, an insight we have built from our own analysis and

from Donaldson's (1993) observation that hegemonic masculinity includes the idea that women

exist to validate men sexually. A major payoff of dominating others could be its subjective

meanings. Both Scully (1990) and Groth and Birnbaum (1979) found emotional satisfaction to

be common in the experiences of rapists. Scully quoted one rapist as reporting, "After rape, I

always felt like I had just conquered something, like I had just ridden the bull at Gilley's" (p.

158).

Kull's (1988) interviews of men involved in the United States military defense industry

shows the wider applicability of the subjective dimensions of hegemony. Commenting on a

viewpoint of one of the interviewees, a viewpoint he found to be typical, Kull said: "It seems that

he was genuinely reporting the emotional gratification derived from maintaining American status

relative to the Soviet Union independent of its security relevance" (p. 224). Thus, a more

comprehensive understanding of hegemonic masculinities, the doing of gender, and of structural

hegemony includes acknowledgment of its subjective dimensions. There has to be reasons for
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dominating others, whether on an interpersonal level or through political means, and subjective

satisfaction could be one of these reasons. Finally, Don and Tim have provided a possible

vocabulary for articulating the emotional meanings of hegemony and doing gender: satisfaction,

payback, enjoyment, pleasurable feelings, excitement, fun, and fulfillment.

A sense of entitlement also appears to be a major component of hegemonic masculinity,

larger than our review of the literature had suggested. The discourses on which the two men

drew authorized them to act as if they had a right to do gender as they did. Of particular

significance is their definition of their victims as members of "out" groups: "loose" and children

from other countries. Scully (1990) also found that many of the rapists in her study believed

they were exercising a fundamental right, and they, too, used demeaning terms to refer to

women. Furthermore, Don's and Tim's dehumanization of the women and children they

victimized have analogues not only with more general, culture-wide discourses that stigmatize

and dehumanize women (Schur, 1984) but also are analogous to other tactics of dehumanization

that lead to heinous acts, such as dehumanizing persons of African descent with demeaning

terms, stigmatization of Jews and homosexuals in Nazi Germany, and with the training of

soldiers to view the "enemy" as less than human through the use of dehumanizing terms such as

"gooks," "Japs," and "Cong." Several scholars have concluded that those who direct war deny

the actuality of what they are propagating; they appear to be hooked into winning and into being

superior and in control rather than thinking of the carnage they wreak and their responsibility for

the destruction of the precious social fabric (Miedzian, 1991). In this denial, they are similar to

Don and Tim who constructed their enactments as consenting.

The present analysis also provided data that support an expansion of definitions of

hegemonic masculinity to include age as a category of subjugation along side of gender, class,

and sexual orientation. As Tim's case shows, the definition of hegemonic masculinity can be

expanded to include the subjugation, exploitation, and destruction of children who are not part of
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the dominant culture. A quick glance at the vast child maltreatment literature provides additional

support for the idea that age is a major category of subjugation.

Detachment was Impossible

Our findings have highlighted the centrality of the subjective dimensions of doing gender

and hegemonic masculinity. Parallel to this emphasis on subjectivity is our experimental method

of including our subjective responses to the men's accounts. We began the writing of this paper

wanting to show that detachment in this research was impossible for us. We shared instances

where we were highly engaged emotionally in the two men's discourses, often horrified and

fearful. Willing to risk that readers may interpret our self-presentations as idiosyncratic and

perhaps trivial, we argue that our subjective comments illustrate how researchers are engaged

emotionally and are not detatched; our comments furthermore represent instances of the

intersection of individual agency and culture. We believe that many other women and men share

our responses and thus are participating with us in maintaining and creating discourses of gender

and power that we hope contest and unravel gendered hegemonic ideologies.

We also butted against limits to our subjective understandings. Despite more than a

decade of research on violent men for the first author (Jane) and two years for the second author

(Laura), the satisfaction the men experienced with their sexual violence still baffles us. We

simply cannot enter into their perspectives, but we were highly motivated to report their

representations of themselves. We are like narrators of novels who observe "transforming

events" that "swirl" around the main characters and who emerge bruised but still relatively

unscathed "so the story can be told" (Abrahams, 1986, p. 54).

Limits of Hegemonic Constructions

Tim and Don had the power to construct their molestation and rape scenarios as they

wished, and the consequences of these constructions were devastating to their victims.

Competing standards of conduct encoded in legislation and enforced by police and justice
 Gendering
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systems finally put a limit on their exploitive, assaultive behaviors. Believing their constructions

to be real was not sufficient in their cases to keep them out of prison for decades. Hegemonic

ideologies, however, are major supports for violent acts, and an unknown proportion of persons

who commit such acts never experience sanctions.

Doing and Creating Masculinity

The ability of these two men to mold their constructions of situations to fit what they

wanted to believe, in combination with their actual ability to control particular situations, recalls

Stacey's (l993) despair over ever dismantling and neutralizing hegemonic masculinity. She

observed that as soon as some hegemonic masculinities are undermined and neutralized, new

ones will take their places. For Stacey, a question to be pursued is how can hegemonic men "be

encouraged toward more desirable desires" (p. 713)?

The analysis in this paper supports this view. Individuals who chose to take advantage of

their power over others have seemingly limitless discourses on which to draw, and they can

interpret, transform, and enact these discourses any way they choose. Violence, then, is a

genderism; that is, an enactment on the individual level of cultural themes and practices. When

men commit violent acts, they are both "doing masculinity" and creating it in apparently endless

ways. Emancipatory feminism opposes and seeks to undermine these constructions.

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Brief Biographical Statements

Jane Gilgun is an associate professor, School of Social Work, University of Minnesota, Twin

Cities. She is the first editor of Qualitative Methods in Family Research (1992) (with Kerry

Daly and Gerald Handel) and with Marvin B. Sussman edited The Methods and Methodologies

of Qualitative Family Research (1996). Her research is on the meanings of violence to

perpetrators, how persons overcome risks for adverse developmental outcomes, and the

development of violent behaviors.

Laura McLeod is a doctoral student in anthropology and feminist studies, University of

Minnesota, Twin Cities. She has authored several reports and articles on the economic systems

sustaining American Indians living on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. She

is doing her field work for her dissertation on the White Earth Reservation. Her topic is the

reclamation of traditional methods of harvesting.

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Most of the rapists in Scully's (1990) also distanced themselves from the label "rapist,"

calling their rape behavior as either out of character or appropriate to the situation. They, of

course, defined the situation and to them the women they raped were seductresses, really wanted

sex, were not nice girls anyway, eventually relaxed and enjoyed themselves, or were irresistible

drawn to them; e.g., to the men who were raping them.

??

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