Compassion and Katrina: Reasserting violent White masculinity after the storm

"Compassion" and Katrina: Reasserting ViolentWhite Masculinity after the Storm

erf Co/or-gdo Boi</ds.t-

After many disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, gender-based violenceincreases. To contribute to a communicative and feminist politicsof humanitarian aid, this project analyzes how talk around disastersreinforces intersectional hierarchies of difference that legitimate gender-based violence. I offer a close reading of post-Katrina speeches fromNew Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, President George W. Bush, and then-Senator Barack Obama. Together, the speeches reify a hegemonic whitemasculinity that is predicated on an ability to be violent and to controlor own one's environment, relationships, and belongings. The discursivelogic of these speeches reasserts the gentleness and "compassion" ofthat violence. In so doing, the speeches deflect attention from seriousdiscussions about social justice that could have occurred after the storm.I argue that talk about disasters, including Katrina, is one site wherenational identities are negotiated through reference to race, gender, andclass. A feminist politics of humanitarian aid should attend to the violentundertones of these discussions.

Keywords: gender-based violence, intersectionality. Hurricane Katrina,whiteness

Following Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, leading political figures and the mediamade extensive comments about the storm and its aftermath. Based on close readingsof three speeches delivered by important political figures in the six months followingthe storm, I pursue the following questions: In what ways do discussions followingKatrina both obfuscate and illuminate the gendered, raced, and classed ways in whichthe storm and responses to it affected New Orleans? How do property and ownershipfigure as central organizing concepts in this conversation? By exploring these queries,I seek to illuminate the discursive elements of an apparatus (Foucault, 1980) thatlegitimates gender-based violence.

This line of inquiry is important for two reasons. First, we know that gender-basedviolence is prevalent following disasters and that it has numerous detrimental effects.'Fisher (2010) argues that disasters exacerbate already present vulnerabilities based ongender. After Katrina, incidents of gender-based violence increased from 4.6/100,000to 16.3/100,000 per day (Anastario, Shehab, & Lawry, 2009). Several nonprofitorganizations, including the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, reported ten

Spring 2011 Volume 34.1 \\

Kate Lockwood Harris

times the number of incidents of sexual assault than did official and police reports(Burnett, 2005). Many scholars show similar evidence of increases in gender-basedviolence after disasters other than Katrina (Dobson, 1994; Enarson & Fordham, 2001;Fothergill, 1999; Delaney & Shrader, 2000; Refugees International, 2010). Those whoexperience intimate partner violence after disasters are more at risk for PTSD andother psychological problems than others who survive disasters (Rosborough, Chan,& Parmar, 2009). Further, Enarson (1999) suggests that providers such as shelters andcrisis centers experience increased demands for services following disasters. Reducingand preventing these increases in gender-based violence after disasters should be acentral goal of feminist responses to humanitarian crises.

Second, if a conscientious, feminist politics of humanitarian aid should attend tothe problematically gendered, raced, and classed elements of disasters and crises,then that politics must interrogate the discourse of disasters. Talk is one site where

problematic power relationships

{'TTi'iS / ' ô ' ec? ' t-eVe-oJs So/yie o-f are generated, maintained, andt/r^ dodLd /anûa^& thai, cj/ot^s challenged. This project revealsf>aJa?^.aHe^ ¡dâS to sta^J //, -Tcr- «ome of the coded language thatô/-« trcâUâ on^s, a^d ¡t ^"°^« palatable ideas to stand

, , , ~^ . / • I in for more troubling ones, andztacss tne. loa/s //? cohcn tac&. . . . ° , . ,

, / / J. /^ It traces the ways in which race,y ^ class, gender, and nationality are

rê ¡^¿ticâte^d //, eo^^tsatlo^S imbricated in conversations thatthat /"r^fí^É^t/y -Ta./ to frequently fail to acknowledgeacJ::/ioe^/edê oh topple, ujith or grapple with the complexitytJis c<=>/^/y/i°><ity o-f di-ffereticê.. of difference. Understanding

the discursive logics thatlegitimate and normalize this violence is important as scholars and other stakeholdersconsider the ways in which feminisms can and should inform responses—especiallycommunicative responses—to humanitarian crises.Within the field of communication, scholarship on risk, crisis, and disaster is focusedmostly on normative questions about how best to talk about disasters in order to enableeifective responses (Fischhoff, 1995; Morgan, Fischhoff, Bostrom & Atman, 2002). Thisproject complements this important work by adding insights that start from differentassumptions. Instead of asking, "How can communication be most effective?" I moveaway from an instrumental and transmissive approach toward a constitutive approachin order to ask, "What are the effects of communication?" My critical orientation makespower and difference central objects of study and illustrates how communicationsustains problematic, hierarchical relationships. This approach extends recent criticaldisaster scholarship (Joye, 2009, 2010; Perera, 2010; Rojecki, 2009; Roy, 2005) byadding an explicitly feminist, intersectional, and communicative lens.I argue that the three speeches I consider reinforce a hegemonic white masculinitythat is predicated on the ability to be violent and to control or own one's environment,relationships, and belongings. In public readings of Katrina, the storm turned one

12 Women & Language

"Compassion" and Katrina

masculine mode of securing identity—domination through an ability to destroy—against men and their property. Given that the "natural" disaster seemed to be outsidethe control of people, discourses about the storm had to account for the emasculatingsense of vulnerability left in Katrina's wake. To do so, they reassert the legitimacy,necessity, and even the gentleness of white masculine violence.

Framing "Compassion" and Katrina

Although many public conversations about "natural" disasters often ignore or denyhuman influence, I highlight the socio-political elements of these crises. I drawextensively upon the work of a variety of scholars who problematize the relationshipsamong disasters, nature, and civilization as I read the speeches considered here.Steinberg (2000) argues that "The concept of'natural' disaster developed when those inpower in disaster-stricken cities sought to normalize calamity in their quest to restoreorder, that is, to restore property values and the economy to their upward trajectory"(pp. xix-xx). Like Steinberg, I call attention to the ways in which complex systems ofpolitics and economies are imphcated in an inherently power-laden disaster discourse.

Recognizing that the concept "nature" is often deployed in order to deny the socialelements of disaster, environmental communication scholars pose a series of questionsabout the effects of discursively mediated relationships among organisms, bothhuman and non-human, and their surroundings. Depoe (2007) and Killingsworth(2007) ask how we can and should understand distinctions between humans and theirenvironments. Are people separate from the worlds they inhabit? In what ways can theideal/material distinction be productively disrupted (Rogers, 1998)? How do variousdiscursive constructions of "environment" produce logics of ecology? In my analysis oftalk about Katrina, I draw upon these reflexive efforts to resist an a-historic, a-socialunderstanding of the concepts that produce relational ecosystems and other livingbeings. I do so as part of an effort to question the "epistemological and representationalhistories that define our categories of suffering and disaster" (Perera, 2010, p. 42),epistemologies and histories that support troubling power imbalances.

These efforts to problematize nature are in concert with the ecofeminist argumentthat parallel mechanisms of subordination organize exploitative domination of bothhuman and extra-human others. In her foundational text. Merchant (1989) tracesa historic shift from conceptualizing the environment and universe primarily as anorganism to conceptualizing them as a mechanism. The metaphor of machine, sheargues, privileges an understanding of both women and nature as passive objects tobe controlled. Nature becomes feminine. Similarly, Mies and Shiva (1993) trace thelinks among technical rationality, subordination, and aggression as they emerge inviolence against women, warfare, and domination of land. Together these authorsposit that multiple forms of oppression, violence, and degradation are overlapping andinterconnected. Violence to human bodies, the violence of displacement and racism,and violence to the environment are not distinct.

Spring 2011 Volume 34.1 13


Because I adopt ecofeminist assumptions about the contiguity of multiple forms ofviolence, my definition of gender-based violence broadly considers violation, both ofhuman bodies and other entities including the environment. This conceptualizationdraws upon Smith's (2005) approach to gender-based violence that includes not onlysexual assault and intimate partner violence, but also a plethora of materially anddiscursively violent practices that elevate some groups while denigrating others.

I also draw upon this tradition of scholarship when I argue that hegemonic whitemasculinity is predicated upon violence and aggression. I am not talking about anindividual male's violent acts, but about a system of ideas that ties the abstract notion ofmasculinity to aggression and physical forcefulness, a notion that is often written ontomale bodies in cultures that reward and value particular performances of masculinity.Kheel (2008) links masculinity, aggression, and the transcendence or dominationof nature. Kimmel and Mahler (2003), Katz (2006), and Messner (2002) similarlydemonstrate relationships between prioritized versions of masculinity and violentlyphysical prowess. These scholars inform my understanding of the cultural valuation ofcharacteristics associated with masculinity.

When drawing upon scholarship on hegemonic masculinity, I also attend to theintersectional status of masculinities. Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) argue thathegemonic masculinity is not "normal in the statistical sense; only a minority of menmight enact it" (p. 832). Thus the concept points not only to a valuation of masculinityover femininity, but also to "hierarchy among men" based on gender, race, and class(Connell, 2002, p. 90). The perceived relationships between violence and masculinitythus depend on the ways in which each concept is attached to race. Collins (2005)says, "Western social thought associates Blackness with an imagined uncivilized, wildsexuality and uses this association as one lynchpin of racial difference" (p. 27). Thistroubling association of blackness and uncontrolled sexuality is deployed as part of aracist logic that is reinforced by fears of black men's sexual prédation of white women,a fear that makes white men's historic violence toward African American men andwomen less noticeable if not invisible. Attention to these intersectional categories iscentral to feminist projects that interrogate the "economic, political, cultural, psychic,subjective and experiential" production of difference (Brah & Phoenix, 2004, p. 76).When I speak of violence, then, my analysis foregrounds the relational aspects of race,class, sexuality, and gender.

I also attend to the ways in which, in the context of globalization, national and stateidentities are derived, in part, from these hierarchical categories of difference. Miesand Shiva (1993) argue that tensions between globalization and national self-interestrequire state use of violence and coercion, a cycle that keeps alive the violent origins ofthe state. Violence not only preserves exploitative and unbalanced global relations ofcolonization, but also mutates diversity "into duality, into the experience of exclusion,of being 'in' or 'out'" (p. 112). Similarly, Kitch (2009) argues that political entities relyon "a concept of alterity, a sense of 'we vs. they,' with continual reference to variousdefinitions of others that are different from one's own national self" (p. 166). Kitchshows how, in the United States, intertwined racial and sexual ideologies feminize

14 Women & Language


minority men and exclude those who depart from a white, masculine norm. As I readthese speeches, I draw upon these scholars to inform my concern with the historicallyspecific production of national identity through logics of exclusion predicated uponrace, gender, and class.

Anaiyzing "Compassion" and Katrina

Many public figures gave speeches about Katrina during the six months that followedthe hurricane. Of these, I selected three: one given by then-Senator and presidentialcandidate, Barack Obama, on September 6,2005; another by George W. Bush, then theU.S. President, on September 15,2005; and a third, given by Ray Nagin, Mayor of NewOrleans, on January 16,2006, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I selected these speeches forthe noteworthy status of the speakers and because each speech received a reasonableamount of attention after it was delivered.

As I read, I draw from critical discourse analysis (CDA) and consider each of thespeeches to be both a spoken text and an instance of discursive, social practice(Fairclough, 1993). According to Fairclough and Wodak (1997), "The key claim ofCDA is that major social and political processes and movements . . . have a partlylinguistic-discursive character" (p. 271). I adopt the CDA assumption that discourseis a form of social action that does ideological work and sustains relations of power(Fairclough & Wodak, 1997).

Additionally, my analysis of these speeches draws broadly from feminist scholars whoargue, "It is through discourse that material power is exercised and that power relationsare established and perpetuated" (Gavey, 1989, p. 464). Building upon this claim aboutthe relationships between discourse and power. Clair (1994) states:

There exist multiple choices with regard to how we talk, act, and react to oureveryday experiences. How we choose to format our discourse reflects andcreates social reality. A discursive formation is selected from the alternatives,not always apparent, which both develops and is developed around certainnotions of social reality. These discursive formations may in turn limit one'sability to see other discursive alternatives. . . . Discursive formations canbecome dominant, coexistent, or marginalized, (p. 237)

My analysis thus allows me to trace the logics that underwrite these discursive movesand, in so doing, to highlight their contingency and malleability.

To argue that these three speeches are part of a common discursive logic is not tosuggest that they deploy identical devices; I do not argue that their themes are usedin the same ways. The words* effects, their interpretations, and the ways in whichthey circulate are multiple. At times the speeches contradict one another, at othertimes they resonate. This complexity is characteristic of the study of discourse inwhich constellations of ideas intersect with and challenge one another. To analyze thediscursive threads in these three speeches and to interrogate their meanings is not to



arrive at the only story one could tell, to arrive at the reading of the speeches, or toarrive at the truth. Rather, it is to offer one coherent analysis among many possibilities.As I worked toward an analysis of these three speeches, I also read a variety of storiesin the media and other public addresses about Katrina. I checked for and foundsimilarity and resonance with those sources and the themes I highlight in the speechesconsidered in this analysis. I do not, however, argue that the analysis here can be usedto point toward identical logics in other disasters. Rather, I suggest that this analysismoves toward particularizability, or a resonance with other cases that produces "bothconfirmation and/or new understandings of experiences and phenomena" (Butler-Kisber, 2010, p. 15). In the next section, I detail the themes that organize the discursivelogic of compassion and Katrina.

The Discursive Logic of "Compassion" and Katrina

In the analysis that follows, I outline the following discursive moves. First, in "Whereare the women?," I argue that women are cast as both helpless victims of the stormand the powerful storm itself. In the first case, woman can only incur suffering. In thelatter, woman can only inflict injury and act with violence. Although these portrayalsseem to be contradictory, the tension is resolved through references to race. Second,in "Cleaning the coast," I argue that when women are symbolic agents of whiteness,they are able to inflict violence and harm. Cast as a feminine woman, Katrina ispowerful in her ability to secure hegemonic whiteness. This reference to race resolves

the trouble created by mapping/ / • / .ji I ui stereotypically masculine, , _ violence onto femininity.

nusica. •torCs, acts n- n • «/ • ..i. • iJ y , ' Finally, in Owning the social

compassion ^naóUd ¿y and body," I show how violent,t-&>rrfotce.d through pr'ivH&^&y ^hite, middle-class masculinityor- Via t-e/&r&/ic.e to diS(l¿^tSiV& is figured as compassion, an

att'CM/ccied ajlth ability to dictate who is in^ j/iite.., ptop^fittlsd and who is out by using a

/>iasc.aHnrt\/. system that defines whitenessas property. An ability to beviolent—whether through

physical force, acts of 'compassion' enabled by and reinforced through privilege, orvia reference to discursive exclusion—is articulated with hegemonic, white, propertiedmasculinity.Where Are the Women?: Men As Agents

In each of these speeches, women are cast as those who are worthy of and evokesympathy. Men are portrayed as agents while women are portrayed as those who relyon men's agency. Nagin (2006) specifically addresses black folks, a term that mightreference both men and women, yet his speech figures black folks as male. He says,"We're not taking care of ourselves. We're not taking care of our women. And we'renot taking care of our children" (para. 7). By separating out women and children in

16 Women & Language


this phrase, Nagin shifts the meaning of "ourselves" from the ungendered "black folks"he explicitly addresses to black adult males. He implies that women, together withchildren, need to be cared for. When Nagin says, "We're tired of black folks killing eachother" (para. 9), near the end of his speech, his repeated references that figure "folks"as men, and his many images of black men inflicting violence on other black men,reinforce the idea that feminine folks are not the black folks who do things.

Obama's speech, too, refers to women as objects of sympathy. After describing hisrecent trip to New Orleans and detailing his encounters with people who told storiesof both destruction and hope, Obama says that his conversation with one woman"captured the realities" of the Katrina aftermath. Says Obama (2005), "She told me,'We had nothing before the hurricane. Now we got less than nothing.' We had nothingbefore the hurricane. Now we got less than nothing" (para. 2-3). This phrase becomesthe organizing refrain for the speech. By centering the address on this woman's words,Obama develops a symbolic logic that articulates women with neediness. Likewise,because the only image we have of neediness is attached to a woman, neediness itselfis feminized. When Obama goes on to say, "We will have to assure that . . . theseAmericans are fed, clothed, housed," (2005, para. 4), he evokes the imagery he hasconstructed. Despite the ungendered reference to "Americans" for whom the countrymust provide, the already established associations among neediness and femininityproduce this reading: "We will have to assure that. . . these [American women] arefed, clothed, housed." The femininity of neediness and the neediness of femininityare reinforced through reference to masculinity. Obama's description of necessaryactions—feeding, clothing, housing—evokes a trope of breadwinning, of providing forwomen and children. This trope has long been attached to masculinity and to men whoperform their gender by being able to feed, to cover naked bodies, and to put roofs overheads. Here again, men are those who are not only capable of action, but also called toit. Women are cast as those who need men to provide and protect.

The women in these speeches are worthy of "our" pity. They are figured as those whosuffer from the storm, who incur the storm's injury. Men are figured as those who canovercome the storm, and they are not portrayed as the ones who feel the damagesKatrina inflicted. That Katrina can inflict any damage at all should give us pause.Katrina, both in name and through the use of the pronoun "she" to describe the storm,is female. Elsewhere, nature is repeatedly associated with femininity, as in Bush's (2005)suggestion that citizens of the U.S. have a long history of overcoming nature's capriceand whimsy. These descriptors are attached to traditional notions of womanhood thatfigure females as flighty and irrational. That women are both helpless victims of thestorm and the powerful storm itself may seem contradictory. In one case, woman canonly incur suffering. In the other, woman can only inflict injury and act with violence.These seeming contradictions are resolved through references to race.

Cleaning the Coast: White Entrepreneurs

The city of New Orleans has a complex history rooted in the lives of many generationsof African Americans. This history is so central to the identity of the place that Nagin



(2006) refers to New Orleans as the Chocolate City. Yet Bush (2005) uses the city'snickname, the Crescent City, a reference to the Mississippi River's shape. Where Naginattends to the racial composition of the city. Bush focuses on nature's presence in thespace. This contrast between Nagin's focus on black folks, who as we saw above aremen, and Bush's focus on nature, commonly feminized, highlights the gendered andracialized tones that underscore much of the content of these three addresses.

Bush's speech devotes considerable time to the ways in which entrepreneurship willplay a central role in the city's recovery from the storm. Bush (2005) argues, "It isentrepreneurship that creates jobs and opportunity. It is entrepreneurship that helpsbreak the cycle of poverty, and we will take the side of the entrepreneurs" (para. 42).A close reading reveals troubling undercurrents to this seemingly benign discussionof business ventures. Bush calls for the creation of many new businesses, and he saysthose new businesses should "include minority-owned businesses" (para. 37, emphasisadded). When Bush advocates for giving loans to small businesses, he says those loansshould also be given to "minority-owned enterprises" (para. 41). In a city that is 67%African American (U.S. Census, 2000), who is really the minority? Why would theseprojects need merely to "include" black folks? Should not black folks be the majoragents of the rebuilding efforts? Rebuilding, it seems, means creating white spaces,white businesses, and white entrepreneurs. Given that white and middle-class are oftensynonymous, and given that Bush associates entrepreneurship with whiteness. Bush's

statement can be de-coded to read,., . . . , , , "It is [white] entrepreneurship that

' helps break the cycle of [black]

that cJeOñi^^ not on/y .¡ g [white] entrepreneurs."&¡¡/yi¡na¿.&s ¿lack S/>aCe.s, ¡tCreates ö^ac<s.ö /ht iKjhite.neSö. The casting of the rebuilding'fhe. stot/*7 is /i'oiUtñJ as the process as white becomes especiallyaQ&^t cyf thai cJ&ú/vSina. troubling when juxtaposed with

•*« another of Bush's (2005) statements:"Along this coast, for mile after

mile, the wind and water swept the land clean" (para. 24). "Clean" seems to stand infor the displacement of the city's African American population and the destruction ofinfrastructure. The recommendations provided for rebuilding and recovering indicatethat cleaning not only eliminates black spaces, it creates spaces for whiteness. Thestorm is figured as the agent ofthat cleansing.

By casting the storm as such, the seeming contradiction between woman as helplessvictim and woman as violent agent is resolved. Women, in general, evoke sympathyand suffer; they need protection from men. Yet women are able to inflict violence andharm when they are agents of whiteness. Katrina becomes a powerful, feminine forcebecause of her ability to eradicate the chocolate from the city and replace it with thecrescent. New Orleans' symbolic blackness, established through the city's population,is feminized by the most humiliating of invasions: the violence of a woman who issupposed to be incapable of causing damage by virtue of her status as dependent on

18 Women & Language


men. In these discursive moves, the storm not only strips New Orleans of its masculinity,but strips it of color as well. The storm's violence toward others, a quality that usuallymarks masculinity and thus agency, becomes associated with femininity because it isin the service of whiteness.

Despite the disturbing undercurrents of these rhetorical moves, Obama (2005) claimsthat responses to the storm were not raced but classed. He says, "The ineptitudewas colorblind" (para. 8), and he argues that evacuation plans mistakenly assumedan unrealistic level of wealth and access to financial and material resources. He callsattention to the lack of good education, health care, and housing that pervadedNew Orleans even before the storm. Obama's observations about classed elementsof life in New Orleans both before and after Katrina are useful and accurate, yetwhen considered in relationship to Bush's framework, a claim to colorblind actionsobfuscates the interrelationships of class with both race and gender. Further, claims tocolorblindness are part of the discursive mechanism that allows masked commentary,like "entrepreneurship... break[s] the cycle of poverty" (Bush, 2005, para. 42), to seemlike an unproblematic discussion of class absent of racial references.

Owning the Social Body: Raced and Classed Property

The classed elements of these speeches come into sharp focus when one considers severaladditional parts of the speeches. First, Bush (2005) proposes the Urban HomesteadingAct. The act calls forth a set of historically problematic policy decisions in United Stateshistory, and in so doing references ideas about race and class that are worthy of critique.Second, Bush repeatedly emphasizes the importance of homeownership for rebuildingNew Orleans. He argues that when houses are repaired, families should "own, not rent,those houses" (para. 37). Both of these recommendations reveal the ways in whichrace, class, and gender work together in discussions of property in the city.

The Urban Homesteading Act, known when it was proposed in Congress as theHurricane Katrina Recovery Homesteading Act of 2005, was designed to give"displaced low-income families the opportunity to purchase a home owned by theFederal Government" (Hurricane Katrina, 2005). Attempts to offer housing assistanceto low-income families are worthy, and some scholars laud approaches similar to theone Bush proposed. Amar (1990) argues that historic homesteading acts in the UnitedStates were intended to establish a distributional system of property that ensuredminimal entitlement implicitly guaranteed by the Thirteenth Amendment. Sherraden(2005) praises the original Homestead Act of 1862 and subsequent similar efforts forproviding a variety of citizens, not only the wealthy, the opportunity to own property. Ido not wish to critique the overtly expressed goals of the Urban Homesteading Act andI do not categorically dismiss it. I do, however, wish to call attention to the historicallegacy of homesteading acts and their relationships to logics that join race with classand property ownership.

The Urban Homesteading Act, by virtue of its name, references the original HomesteadAct of 1862 that awarded "free" land to people willing to settle it. Oliver and Shapiro



(2006) argue that access to this opportunity was patterned along lines of race andgender. Further, the act effectively displaced Native Americans, and Smith (2005)argues that this was accomplished and justified "on the grounds that Native peoplesdid not or do not properly control or subdue nature" (p. 56). The original HomesteadAct is thus a site where racialized and gendered logics of hierarchy collide and collude.Through allusions to this history, the Urban Homesteading Act of 2005 calls forth atradition in the United States in which property ownership, assumed to be both benignand beneficial, is premised upon hierarchical relations of race, class, and gender.

In an incisive analysis of property law, Harris (1993) argues, "Rights in propertyare contingent on, intertwined with, and conflated with race" (p. 1714). Suggestingthat whiteness is a form of property that is written into the legacy of the law in theUnited States, Harris states, "Whiteness and property share a common premise—a

conceptual nucleus—of a right toPtope-rty oi^ner-ship co^es exclude" (p. 1714). Given the wayst-o <° a Ptet^.O6^;site /-ot ' " ^hich whiteness and property. / • ^f- " ^ / _ / become interchangeable, Naein's

the co^passioti that. , ° , °, ,. , , commentary can be reread. When

^ he says. Were debating whetherc^er-th^ v,c:>l^^t ^^^^^^ ¿g ts should trump

^ts cyf the everything or not" (para. 5), heitetatior, o/* that might be understood as offering a

trenchant critique: "We're debatingwhether [whiteness] should trump

everything or not." I argue that the Urban Homesteading Act's emphasis on homeownership may thus be read as an emphasis on whiteness.Property ownership comes to be a prerequisite for the "compassion" that marks whitemasculinity and glosses over the violent undercurrents of the hegemonic iterationof that identity. In a section of his speech devoted to highlighting acts of kindness.Bush recounts an episode that took place in Chalmette, Louisiana, just outside of NewOrleans. Two men are reported to have been breaking into a home. Though the storyhighlights these men's unlawful activity, thus coding them as criminals, one mightjust as easily describe these two men as people simply seeking shelter from the storm.The criminal men are transformed, though, when the owner of the home invitesthem in. Given that Chalmette, in contrast to New Orleans as a whole, is more than90% Caucasian (U.S. Census, 2000), it is more than likely that the homeowner waswhite. Regardless of the homeowner's actual race, Harris' (1993) links among propertyand whiteness discursively code the owner as white. Although the race of the menbreaking into the home is not mentioned, their lack of property, as well as troublingassociations between criminality and blackness, code them blacL The homeowneris able to reassert and enjoy a superior position in the social hierarchy in two ways.First, the homeowner's rights over the property enable that person to make choicesabout who can be included and excluded, who is allowed to pass. This gate-keeping,a form of (often unearned) power, gets read as generosity. Second, the homeownereffectively transforms the two who would break in from criminal men (coded black) to

20 SNomen ¡S Language


those who need sympathy, compassion, and care (coded feminine). The homeowner,already coded white, becomes masculine by virtue of an ability to provide for those inneed. Black masculinity is feminized, and the violence of a system in which wealth andproperty rights are awarded in relationship to racial histories is obscured. That violenthistory, instead, is appropriated as a celebration of the kindness and compassion ofthose who must be white and masculine in order to perform these acts of heroism.Violent, white, middle-class masculinity becomes compassion, an ability to dictatewho is in and who is out by using a system that defines whiteness as property.

"Compassion" and letrina

Threatening "We": Logics of Exclusion

Group membership based upon exclusion of those who depart from white, masculinenorms (Kitch, 2009) operates in the discursive threads of the speeches analyzed here.Bush (2005) says that "all of us saw on television" (para. 36) the poverty, rooted inracial discrimination, that permeates New Orleans. "All of us," here, become thosewho watched when Katrina made landfall, those who did not live in New Orleans.The "we" to whom Bush refers encompasses those who were not vulnerable to thefeminine storm, those who escaped it by some combination of their gender, class,or race. "We" are spectators, people with theproperty of whiteness and the masculinity ofinvulnerability who can offer sympathy but »g^Ve Mji't/n th&who do not suffer. , r i •

ptop&rty of ÍAJ/II'C

The logic of inclusion and exclusion that is ^ ^ '^'^ '^'fundamental to these conversations aboutKatrina becomes even more clear when each ofthe three. Bush, Nagin, and Obama, reference ^ho do not su/T&t.the war on terrorism. Bush (2005) says, "Ina time of terror threats and weapons of mass destruction, the danger to our citizensreaches much wider than a fault line or a flood plane" (para. 57). For Nagin (2006), thereference is a brief criticism of the U.S. "being in Iraq under false pretense" (para. 7).Obama (2005) wonders aloud, "If we cannot cope with a crisis that has been predictedfor decades . . . how can we ever hope to respond to a serious terrorist attack in amajor American city in which there is no notice?" (para. 7). The turn to discussions ofterrorism in each one of these three speeches is curious given no obvious connectionsbetween the devastation of domestic floods and the violent threat posed by actorsunattached to a state. Read within the logic I have outlined here regarding race, class,and gender, the seemingly odd move becomes an important discursive element of theapparatus that legitimates violence.

The turn to terrorism calls forth anxieties about the status of white, propertiedmasculinity, anxieties that are overlaid upon fears about the perpetuation of thenation. In evoking an Other outside the geographic bounds of the U.S., the mention ofterrorism elicits nation- and citizen-producing difference, a difference that maintains



a divide "between 'us' and 'them'" and articulates "global power hierarchies" (Joye,2010, p. 586). This difference is administered through dimorphic and hierarchicalformulations of race and gender such that masculinity and whiteness become the "we"of the nation. Following this logic, those who are perceived to exist outside the boundsof privileged and prioritized versions of whiteness undermine the "agency [of majoritymasculinities] and, by extension, the viability of the nation" (Kitch, 2009, p. 168). Inthese speeches, that risk and threat is contained through a reinforcement of potentiallyviolent, white, hegemonic masculinity.

As in other moments in history, the sense of threat elicited by "terrorist" relies on thesymbolic construction of "homelands as female bodies, vulnerable to violation andpenetration by foreigners" (Kitch, 2009, p. 167). In its contemporary context, the

word "terrorism" evokes images^^pl 77 / - / / r- und Krtt-i r of 9/11, of a nation unable

^g / r' J ^ I I to protect the symbolicallyH o¿t¿-fSC.aceS th& tea/ r . • I I c • •^m ^ • I nn ^ /-> feminme body, of an mvasion^H cÁ/id /yjûzefiûj &TTeCXS or r^i . r J X- ••.

^H of the innocence ot domesticity.• d,sc.oar-SeS that enal/e ^ g "compassion" of chivalry,^ H oppression. 1 he. diScurSiVe protectiveness over the^m /oßic casts us as a feminine, and the power of gate-

^^^F Coherent entity—in/u/neraA/e keeping through parental-like^ ^ i ^ to discri/*iination ¿aSed decision making produce the

^ B on cateqories o/" identity illusion of invulnerability; thusI "¡<?S o/^ identity

-nCe—t/'lto/Jq/} a

'ion i4j'it/i " the/yii

aSSi^^ed to ¿aa//y oeyond the.

¿oandS o/^ the ¿/nited ¿>tat&S.

violent masculinity is reinforcedthrough reference to thepossibility of future attacks.

Yet the violence of thatprotectiveness is unmarked.

Valorized "compassion" depends on and perpetuates the invisibility of racial andgender subordination. Further, by focusing on the division between an external "them"and an internal "us" of the United States, we conveniently ignore divisions between"us" and "them" within the United States. Claims to colorblindness and to compassion,enhanced by a seemingly united project to disarm an intangible enemy, serve as a maskfor the troubling, underlying currents that wash through these discursive moves.

Conclusion: Reasserting Violent White Masculinity

I now briefly recap the moves I have outlined so far. The storm is not dangerous. Itis feminized, thus not capable of truly violent acts of masculinity. Yet the storm canbe violent when it creates space for whiteness. The threat of nature in either case isminimized: Either the storm does little damage, or it does damage in support of a socialhierarchy that privileges an exclusive "we." The real threat, these speakers suggest, isfrom masculine people with enough property (class privilege) to inflict violenceon "us," those who are assumed to threaten not only the masculinity and the class

22 Women & Language


position of the nation, but also the whiteness of it. By highlighting an external threatthe speeches deter us from questions about the "we" of the U.S. and about the peopleto whom this rhetoric is really addressed. Instead, the country unites against a falsefoe. The talk around Katrina obfuscates the real and material effects of discourses thatenable oppression. The discursive logic casts "us" as a coherent entity—invulnerable todiscrimination based on categories of identity and difference—through a juxtapositionwith "them," terrorists assumed to be geographically beyond the bounds of the UnitedStates.

The talk around Katrina also obstructs discussions of social justice. Although Katrinaopens an opportunity to address reflexively the U.S.'s problematic distribution ofresources across intersectional categories of difference, we defer to a presumed outside.In so doing we reinforce the idea of American inclusion, of a colorblind country inwhich the American Dream is an equal access opportunity. In a beautifully tragicdemonstration of hegemony, collective energies are organized around the interests ofthe state to maintain global prominence and deflect terrorist attacks. Because the stateproject is already articulated with the interests of whiteness and masculinity, thesemoves reinforce the very same mechanisms on a global scale that generate problemswithin the U.S. on a national scale. Global cultural imperialism is retained withoutattention to the economies of exploitation that secured the prominence to which "we"so violently hold.

Instead of critiquing and dismantling the systems of inequality played out in Katrina,public discourse after the storm makes an oblique move. Attention and concern is"displaced and diverted laterally onto other groups, social beliefs, and practices"(Banning, 2006, p. 83). Although this deferral differs in important ways from Banning'sdiscussion of a politics of resentment, the idea is useful here for its attention to asophisticated system of denial that allows "questions of social justice and injustice [tobe] submerged or suffocated in public discourse" (p. 83). Discussions did not attend tothe discursive and symbolic prioritization of whiteness, masculinity, and class status,nor did they consider the related material manifestations of that privilege that led tostruggles at the intersections of poverty, color, and femininity. Public conversationrestored a sense of safety by referencing the abilities of the privileged: Those who canprovide and protect already are masculine; those who advance entrepreneurship alreadybenefit from whiteness; those who heroically open their homes are already propertied.Those in positions of power can "help" those who do not enjoy unearned benefits. Yettheir compassion is false: It can only be enacted when others are disadvantaged.

As I, along with others, turn toward broad questions about a feminist politics ofhumanitarian aid, we can ask about the mechanisms by which productive conversationsabout justice are buried in the rubble of Haiti and other disasters. Because of theanalytic and theoretical frame I adopt, I assume that the hegemonic white masculinityreferenced in these speeches arises in specific historical and cultural configurations.Thus the insights of this analysis cannot be applied directly to other disasters. Thequestions this analysis raises, however, can. In the talk around other disasters, inwhat ways do particular versions of masculinity and femininity become privileged or



subordinated in relationship to logics of race, class, and nation? As these logics are bothsedimented and disrupted, how are conceptualizations of ecologies transformed? Howdoes talk about disasters reinforce, constitute, or challenge existing relationships ofdifference, both among people and our environments? In what ways do disasters serveas sites of discursive national identity negotiation, especially as that identity relies onhistorically and geographically specific intersections and hierarchies of gender, race,and class? These questions should be a central heuristic as scholars, practitioners,and activists think, move, and talk toward a feminist and communicative politics ofhumanitarian aid.

As we attend to these questions, we should be particularly alert to the deployment ofcompassion in the service of white violent masculinity. Messner (2007) argues thata hybrid masculinity is emerging, one that is both caring and forceful. He suggeststhat "what tethers these two seemingly opposed principles is protection—protection ofchildren and women from bad guys . . . or from faceless, violently irrational terroristsfrom outside our borders" (p. 467). I think Messner is on to the circularity of thismasculinity. What links violence with compassion is, in many ways, that which isalready attached to masculinity: chivalrous care for the feminine. In the speechesconsidered here, race and class—not gender alone—constitute the fulcrum that allowshegemonic masculinity to encompass both violence and compassion. Because careis associated with both masculine and feminine qualities, gestures toward it couldchallenge problematic formulations of masculinity. In the talk around Katrina, however,an unmodified, hegemonic masculinity is reasserted. Compassion simultaneously re-fixes the dominance of masculinity, whiteness, and wealth and casts its own implicitviolence as a necessity.

/ am grateful for the guidance that Marlia Banning and Sally Kitch offered during thedevelopment of this piece. Thanks also to Lisa Flores, Eric Freedman, Ben Lard, and theeditors of this journal for their insightful critiques and suggestions.

References

Amar, A. R. ( 1990). Forty acres and a mule: A republican theory of minimal entitlements.Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, 13,37-43.

Anastario, M., Shehab, N., & Lawry, L. (2009). Increased gender-based violenceamong women internally displaced in Mississippi 2 years post-HurricaneKatrina. Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, 3,18-26. doi:10.1097/DMP.0b013e3181979c32

Banning, M. (2006). The politics of resentment. JAC, 26, 71-103.Brah, A., & Phoenix, A. (2004). Ain't I a woman?: Revisiting intersectionality. Journal

of International Women's Studies, 5, 75-86.Burnett, J. (2005, December 21). More stories emerge of rapes in post-Katrina chaos.

Morning Edition, National Public Radio. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyld=5063796

2 4 l/Vomen & Language


Bush, G. W. (2005, September 15). National address. Jackson Square, New Orleans,Louisiana. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/09/15/bush.transcript/

Butler-Kisber, L. (2010). Qualitative inquiry: Thematic, narrative and arts-informedperspectives. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

Clair, R. P. (1994). Resistance and oppression as a self-contained opposite: Anorganizational communication analysis. Western Journal of Communication, 58,235-262.

Collins, P. H. (2005). Black sexual politics: African Americans, gender, and the newracism. New York, NY: Routledge.

Connell, R. W. (2002). On hegemonic masculinity and violence: Response to Jeffersonand Hall. Theoretical Criminology, 6,89-99. doi:10.1177/136248060200600104

Connell, R. W, & Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005). Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinkingthe concept. Gender and Society, 19, 829-859. doi:10.1177/0891243205278639

Delaney, P. L., & Shrader, E. (2000). Gender and post-disaster reconstruction: The caseof Hurricane Mitch in Honduras and Nicaragua. Washington, DC: World Bank.

Depoe, S. (2007). Environmental communication as nexus. EnvironmentalCommunication, 1, 1-4. doi:10.1080/17524030701395871

Dobson, N. (1994). From under the mud-pack: Women and the Charleville floods.Australian Journal of Emergency Management, 9,11-13.

Enarson, E., & Fordham, M. (2001). Lines that divide, ties that bind: Race, class,and gender in women's flood recovery in the US and UK. Australian Journal ofEmergency Management, 15,43-52.

Enarson, E. (1999). Violence against women in disasters: A study of domestic violenceprograms in the United States and Canada. Violence Against Women, 5, 742-768.doi:10.1177/10778019922181464

Fairclough, N., & Wodak, R. (1997). Critical discourse analysis. In T. A. Van Dijk (Ed.),Discourse as social interaction (pp. 258-284). London, UK: Sage.

Fairclough, N. (1993). Critical discourse analysis and the marketizationof public discourse: The universities. Discourse & Society, 4, 133-168.doi:10.1177/0957926593004002002

Fischhoff, B. (1995). Risk perception and communication unplugged: Twenty years ofprocess. Risk Analysis, 15,137-145. doi:10.1111/j.l539-6924.1995.tb00308.x

Fisher, S. (2010). Violence against women and natural disasters: Findingsfrom post-tsunami Sri Lanka. Violence Against Women, 16, 902-918.doi:10.1177/1077801210377649

Fothergill, A. (1999). An exploratory study of woman battering in the Grand Forksflood disaster: Implications for community responses and policies. InternationalJournal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, 17, 79-98.

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

Gavey, N. (1989). Feminist poststructuralism and discourse analysis: Contributionsto feminist psychology. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 13, 459-475.doi:10.1111/j.l471-6402.1989.tb01014.x

Harris, C. I. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 106, 1707-1791.doi:10.2307/1341787



Hurricane Katrina Recovery Homesteading Act of 2005, S. 2088,109th Cong., 1st Sess.(2005).

Joye, S. (2009). The hierarchy of global suffering: A critical discourse analysis oftelevision news reporting on foreign natural disasters. Journal of InternationalCommunication, J5,45-61.

Joye, S. (2010). News discourses on distant suffering: A critical discourseanalysis of the 2003 SARS outbreak. Discourse & Society, 21, 586-601.doi:10.1177/0957926510373988

Katz, J. (2006). The macho paradox: Why some men hurt women and how all men canhelp. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks.

Kheel, M. (2008). Nature ethics: An ecofeminist perspective. Lanham, MD: Rowman &Littlefield.

Killingsworth, M. J. (2007). A phenomenological perspective on ethical duty inenvironmental communication. Environmental Communication, 1, 58-63.doi: 10.1080/17524030701334243

Kimmel, M. S., &Mahler, M. (2003). Adolescent masculinity, homophobia, and violence.American Behavioral Scientist, 46,1439-1458. doi:10.1177/0002764203046010010

Kitch, S. (2009). The specter of sex: Gendered foundations of racial formation in theUnited States. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Merchant, C. (1989). The death of nature: Women, ecology, and the scientific revolution.New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Messner, M. A. (2002). Taking the field: Women, men, and sports. Minneapolis, MN:University of Minnesota Press.

Messner, M. A. (2007). The masculinity of the governator: Muscle and compassion inAmerican pohtics. Gender and Society, 21,461-480. doi: 10.1177/0891243207303166

Mies, M., & Shiva, V. (1993). Ecofeminism. Halifax, NS: Fernwood.Morgan, M. G., Fischhoff, B., Bostrom, A., & Atman, C. J. (2002). Risk communication:

A mental models approach. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Nagin, R. (2006, January 16). Address to New Orleans. City Hall, New Orleans,

Louisiana. Retrieved from http://www.wwltv.com/news/local/Full-video-of-Nagins-chocolate-city-speech-92368619.html

Obama, B. (2005, September 6). Statement on Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.Retrieved from http://obamaspeeches.com/029-Statement-on-Hurricane-Katrina-ReHef-Efforts-Obama-Speech.htm

Oliver, M. L., & Shapiro, T. M. (2006). Black wealth, white wealth: A new perspective onracial inequality. New York, NY: Routledge.

Perera, S. (2010). Torturous dialogues: Geographies of trauma and spaces ofexception. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 24, 31-45.doi: 10.1080/10304310903419542

Refugees International. (2010). Haiti: Still trapped in the emergency phase. Washington,DC: Refugees International. Retrieved from http://virww.refugeesinternational.org/sites/default/files/100710_haiti_still_trapped.pdf

Rehef workers confront 'urban warfare': Violence disrupts evacuation, rescue effortsin New Orleans. (2005, September 1). CNN.com. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com

26 Women & Language


Rogers, R. A. (1998). Overcoming the objectiñcation of nature in constitutive theories:Toward a transhuman, materialist theory of communication. Western Journal ofCommunication, 62, 244-272.

Rojecki, A. (2009). Political culture and disaster response: The great floods of 1927 and2005. Media, Culture & Society, 31, 957-976. doi:10.1177/0163443709344154

Rosborough, S., Chan, J. L., & Parmar, P. (2009). Responding to gender-basedviolence in disasters: Grappling with research methods to clear the way torplanning. Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, 3, 8-10. doi:10.1097/DMRObO13e31819738fïi

Roy, A. (2005). To what end? Politics and Culture, 6. Retrieved from http://www.politicsandculture.org/2010/08/17/to-what-end-ananya-roy-2/

Sherraden, M. (2005). Inclusion in the American dream: Assets, poverty, and publicpolicy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Smith, A. (2005). Conquest: Sexual violence and American Indian genocide. Cambridge,MA: South End Press.

Steinberg, T. (2000). Acts of God: The unnatural history of natural disaster in America.New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Tierney, K., Bevc, C, & Kuligowski, E. (2006). Metaphors matter: Disaster myths, mediaframes, and their consequences in Hurricane Katrina. The ANNALS of the AmericanAcademy of Political and Social Science, 604,57-81. doi:10.1177/0002716205285589

U. S. Census Bureau. (2000). United States Census. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/main/www/cen2000.html

Kote

' Public conversations often mistakenly characterize post-disaster sites as excessivelyviolent (Tierney, Bevc, & Kuligowski, 2006). Thus media and other discussions oflooting, sniper shootings, and gang activity in "chaotic" and "lawless" post-KatrinaNew Orleans (Burnett, 2005; "Relief Workers," 2005) are worthy of significant critique.Although skepticism of these discussions of violence is warranted, it should not reducealarm and serious concern about the well-documented increases in gender-basedviolence following disasters.

Kate Lockwood Harris (M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is a doctoralstudent and graduate instructor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She studiesthe communicative and intersectional aspects of gender, violence, and sexuality.


Copyright of Women & Language is the property of Organization for the Study of Communication, Language

& Gender and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the

copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for

individual use.

Compassion and Katrina: Reasserting violent White masculinity after the storm

Documents

Transcript of Compassion and Katrina: Reasserting violent White masculinity after the storm