Are We Ready Now to Look at the Relationship between Masculinity and Mass Violence?
From #Aurora12 to #Orlando16
June 20, 2016 | Four years ago today, just after James Holmes wounded 58 and killed 12 people at the opening of the latest Batman film at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, The Telegraph published a “history of mass shootings in the U.S. since Columbine” — a list of nearly 30 shooting sprees with lethal results. By now, the list has been updated several times, following a trail of bullets and blood from Newtown, to Oak Creek, to Fort Hood, to Charleston, to Colorado Springs and many, many points in between before it screamed into Orlando this week. In the four years since the Aurora shootings, according to an ongoing study by Mother Jones, twenty-three more mass killers have gunned down more than four people, with a total addition to the body count of 211 lives and 217 persons injured.
Neither Senseless Nor Random
Just after the Oak Creek, WI shooting at a Sikh temple that took the lives of 7 and wounded 3 on August 5, 2012, Notre Dame professor Naunihal Singh complained in The New Yorker about the media’s short attention span with regard to the Oak Creek tragedy as compared to the Aurora shootings less than three weeks earlier. Singh found it “hard to escape the conclusion that Oak Creek would have… dominated the news cycle if the shooter had been Muslim and the victims had been white churchgoers.”
Singh was not alone in his seeing the Oak Creek shootings through racial, ethnic, and religious lenses. The shooting was branded a hate crime by Attorney General Eric Holder, and within the small news window that opened in the days immediately after the melee, commentators called Americans to a deeper consideration of the violent effects of racism.
Rinku Sen, writing for Color Lines in the immediate aftermath of the rampage at the Sikh Gurdwara, pointed to a pattern that extends far beyond an individual tragedy, and well past racism understood with reference primarily to the color of the brown-skinned, turban-wearing Other. Rather, she reoriented our vision toward the dominant race of mass killers:
Murderous insanity can infect any community, and maybe that leads people to call these senseless acts of random violence. But of course they are neither senseless nor random, and the vast majority of such incidents here involve white men. Racism holds a terrible logic, for a concept with no grounding whatsoever in science or morality, yet too many white people don’t see any patterns.
Searching for Common Denominators
Certainly, as we marked the one year anniversary of the killings of nine people at prayer with their executioner at Mother Emmanuel church last June 17, the idea of race — of whiteness in particular — as a common denominator in mass violence has gained potency.
Others have seen religious intolerance as a central feature in many mass killings. Mark Juergensmeyer discussed the ways in which certain religious narratives meld seamlessly with notions of violence and war. The image of cosmic, religious war, he notes, can been seen at the center of both Islamist and Christianist acts of terror.
Susan Thistlethwaite linked religion and racism, mapping religiously authorized ideologies of terror from the era of American slavery to present day white supremacy movements. In a lengthy discussion at the Washington Post, she suggested that Christianity has a particular role to play in American constructions of whiteness that make the risks associated with Christian extremism difficult to see, especially by law enforcement. “The face of the ‘intimate enemy’ as a domestic terror threat has now been exposed as a white face,” says Thistlethwaite. “This is a difficult concept, both in theological and in law enforcement terms.”
Religion and homophobia have been closely linked in Orlando. After the shooting, ACLU attorneys called out right-wing, fundamentalist Christianity and associated Republican lawmakers for creating an "anti-queer climate" that fueled the hatred behind the massacre. Some evangelical Christians themselves claimed a measure of moral culpability for biblically-based teachings that condemn LGBTQ+ people, often in physically violent terms. Writing in the Huffington Post, Robert Crawford insisted:
I do not believe that we can use terms like “The Rainbow Jihad” and “The LGBT Agenda”, and then be completely surprised when a person comes to hate gays to such a degree as to do this.
Race, religion, and homophobia are certainly root similarities among many mass shooters in the United States. But there is no shortage of non-white mass killers, many of whom, including of course Omar Mateen, were not Christian:
• Eduardo Sencion, a Mexican American, who killed four and wounded seven people before shooting himself in the head at a Carson City, Nevada restaurant in 2011;
• Seung-Hui Cho, a Christian, Korean American who killed 30 people and wounded 15 at Virginia Tech in 2007 before turning the gun on himself;
• Jiverly Wong, a Buddhist, Vietnamese American who killed 13 people (himself included) and wounded four in Binghamton, New York in 2009;
• John Allen Muhammad, the Islamic, African American “Beltway Sniper,” who, with Jamaica-born partner Lee Boyd Malvo, killed at least 10 people in the Washington DC area through the month of October 2002.
Some of these shooters, regardless of race or religion, had known mental health issues. A substantial number were not previously identified as having psychological problems, but were “driven” to violent rage by financial and relationship crises. So we cannot name any specific cluster of circumstances that prompts such behavior, though we do of course know that ready access to firearms is a factor.
All of which is to say, yes, the intimate enemy, the mass killer we do not want to acknowledge among us, very often has a white face — but not always. He is often racist and homophobic. He is often, but not always, mentally ill. There have been exceedingly rare cases of mass killings by women — the most notable being professor Amy Bishop, who killed three and wounded as many after being denied tenure at the University of Alabama in 2010 and Jennifer San Marco, who “went postal” on seven people before killing herself in Goleta, California in 2006. Most recently, Tashfeen Malik, a Pakistani national, joined her husband Syed Rizwan Farook, a U.S. citizen, in the San Bernardino attack that ended the lives of 14 people wounded 22 more on December 2, 2015.
But by and large the common denominator in mass killing is gender; the intimate enemy is almost always a man.
If God Is Male, Then Male Is God
When I wrote in response to the Aurora shootings four years ago, I noted that the role masculinity — not the biological fact of being male, but the behavioral and ideological markers of maleness that are malleable across time and culture — was routinely left unexplored in commentary on mass shootings. Since then, in a world in which even the most progressive of religious groups struggle to move away from the He-God of patriarchal faith traditions, the idea of masculinity as in itself central to the problem of mass violence has appeared in popular media only very occasionally.
In June of 2012, Michael Kimmel reflected on the Newtown shootings in light of his research for his book, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (Harper 2009). Kimmel concluded that a “sense of entitlement is part of the package deal of American manhood.” He explained that “aggrieved entitlement” — the idea that privileges to which men are, by virtue of gender (and often race), owed have been wrongly taken from them by feminists, LGBT activists, and people of color — demands forceful, often violent redress.
More recently, sociologists Tristan Bridges and Tara Leigh Tober conducted research exploring two critical questions about the connection between masculinity and violence in America: (1) Why is it men who commit mass shootings? and (2) Why do American men commit mass shootings so much more than men anywhere else?
Bridges and Tober find that while “the research does not suggest that men are somehow inherently more violent than women…it suggests that men are likely to turn to violence when they perceive themselves to be otherwise unable to stake a claim to a masculine gender identity” grounded in the assumed privileges Kimmel described and expressed through forms of performative (e.g., sports, rough housing) and real (e.g., sexual harassment, rape) violence. Exploring real and perceived erosions of male privilege — especially white, heterosexual male privilege — as women, people of color, and LBGTQ+ people have advanced socially, economically, and culturally, they conclude that, “mass shootings can be understood as an extremely violent example of a more general issue regarding changes in relations between men and women and historical transformations in gender, race, and class inequality.”
The Sins Of Our Religious Fathers
Whatever the unique complex of psychosocial, religious, financial, moral, political, or other issues that tormented the mass killers more or less continuously populating Twitter feeds and news headlines, they all sought to solve their problems with a particular expression of gun violence that maps easily to particular configurations of masculinity — apparently across classes as well as religious and political backgrounds.
Like pretty much everyone else who’s had anything to say about the American epidemic of mass gun violence, I think we surely must begin to have informed, respectful conversations about regulating access to firearms.
We need to address the crisis in mental health care that has raged since the Reagan Administration as though it had something to do with our everyday lives. Because clearly it does.
Certainly, we need to disabuse ourselves of the illusion many entertained after the election of Barack Obama in 2008, that we now live in a “post-racial era.” We need to talk sensibly and compassionately about systemic racism and the ways in which it poisons the whole nation.
And, those of us concerned in particular with how religious ideologies participate in narratives of domination and violence would do well to explore the masculinist roots of Christianity and other religious traditions, particularly as male authority and normativity are emphasized in more conservative expressions. We need to revisit with open hearts the ways in which the sins of our religious fathers make the resources of our faith traditions available for violent cooptation.
However, if we do all of these things and refuse to look at the role of culturally, politically, socially, and religiously sanctioned and normalized masculinities in racism, misogyny, sexism, and violence, we will do no more than teach the “intimate enemy” better manners to cast aside when frustrations mount, when his mental wiring frays, when the world reveals itself as far less under his control than his guns and his church and his hate broadcast idols have led him to believe.
…we cannot begin to address the culture of violence that is literally exploding all around us without acknowledging that “manning up” in American culture too often involves actions aimed at the subordination of others — women, children, nature — to the will of a man who, it is too often assumed, embodies the will of God.
When an Angry Man Reaches into His Bag…
Of course this focus on masculinity and violence makes many people uncomfortable; particularly men, and perhaps especially those who are not chest-thumping, gun-toting, religiously-motivated, racist extremists. (Though the open misogyny of many presumably liberal “Bernie Bros” this election season makes clear that toxic formations of masculinity are not the exclusive preserve of conservative fundamentalists.) For many women who have a wide range of warm and respectful relationships with wonderful men, tagging cultural constructions of masculinity as factors in this kind of violent rage is troubling. Yet we cannot begin to address the culture of violence that is literally exploding all around us without acknowledging that “manning up” in American culture too often involves actions aimed at the subordination of others — women, children, nature — to the will of a man who, it is too often assumed, embodies the will of God. These often religiously informed, institutionalized, and naturalized versions of masculinity play no small part in the continuum of violence that moves from the domestic sphere to the public arena.
After Orlando, commentators have begun a new round what we can only hope will be productive conversations about the many causes of violence. As this new round of conversations begin, I can’t help but think back to when I was writing four years ago in response to the Aurora blood bath. Just a few days later, a shooting at the Family Research Council offices in Washington, D.C. — this time not lethal, this time with only one victim — prompted The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson to ask about the ways in which incendiary political rhetoric and “the problem of guns” play into escalating violence:
Why, in this country, when an angry man reaches into his bag, is it so easy and common for his fingers to find a gun? (Emphasis added.)
Surely, it’s a vexing and complicated question with no single, simple answer. But a smoking gendered pronoun is in plain sight in almost every one of these cases.
[A version of this article was originally published on Religion Dispatches. It has been updated substantially for publication here. -Ed.]
