Masculinity and Mass Violence
The ‘Intimate Enemy’ We Refuse to Name
August 19, 2012
By Elizabeth Drescher
On July 20, 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 US since Columbine”—a list of nearly 30 shooting sprees with lethal results. Ne’er-do-wells who merely wounded didn’t make the cut. Thus, not included on the list was a shooting spree in an Alabama bar with a multiple arson warm-up just two days earlier. There, enraged after having been fired from his job—only the latest in a string of personal and financial calamities—Nathan Van Wilkins fired into a bar from across the street, wounding or otherwise injuring 17 people but not killing anyone.
Likewise, the non-fatal, apparently gang-related shootings of four girls in a Chicago park on July 11 was omitted. The shooter or shooters there have not been apprehended, but Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel offered a warning that, as I will discuss shortly, hardly helps matters for those of us who are concerned about what seems to be a growing tide of mass violence. “Take your stuff to the alley,” Emanuel was quoted as saying. “Don’t touch the children of the city of Chicago. Don’t get near them.”
- snip -
Others have seen religious intolerance as a central feature in many recent mass killings. Mark Juergensmeyer recently 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 links 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 suggests 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.”
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/sexandgender/6283/masculinity_and_mass_violence/
