Queer Eye on Straight Youth: Homoerotics and Racial Violence in the Narrative Discourse of White Settler Masculinity

ABSTRACT

In September 2001, three white men from Tisdale Saskatchewan sexually assaulted a 12-year-old Saulteaux girl from the Yellow Quill First Nations. At the time, this Reserve was known for having what was called “the worst water in Canada,” while nearby Tisdale still advertises itself as the land of “sparkling waters” and the land of “rape and honey.” This paper, inspired by the work of William Pinar on race and violence, uses Pierre Bourdieu's (1993; 2001) sociological constructs of masculine domination and Lacan's view of patriarchy, builds on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's understanding of homosociality, and extends the work of Sherene Razack on race, space, and the law. The author interrogates this Tisdale group sexual assault as the ultimate act of white heterosexual privilege, compares it to the gang killing the same year of a gay man, Aaron Webster, and sees in both events signs of internalized homoerotic panic that offer insights into how white masculinity is built on race, sex, and gender on the Canadian landscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Canada
• hate crime
• homosociality
• homoeroticism
• masculinity
• Native people
• race
• racial violence
• rape
• sexual assault
• violence
• white privilege

James McNinch, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina, who Saskatchewan where he pioneered a course on schooling and sexual identity. He is the co-editor of I Could Not Speak My Heart: Education and Social Justice for Gay and Lesbian Youth (2004).

This article was triggered by Sherene Razack's (2000) groundbreaking essay, “Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George.” Her analysis of trial transcripts interrogated assumptions about white privilege embodied in the justice system and the actions of two white middle-class “boys.” Steven Kummerfield and Alex Ternowetsky, athletic “stars” at the University of Regina, who sexually assaulted and then killed a Cree woman, Pamela George, in 1995.

Notes

¹ I also felt a need for what Tim Libretti (2004, p. 170) calls the “queer consciousness of a homosexual imagination.” He cites Sarah Hoagland who suggests queerness, by its very existence, challenges “fatherly knowledge” in the historical moment. This epistemological challenge occurs within a broader and deeper crisis; amid many manifestations of racism in Saskatchewan, this case is one that is particularly and portentously symbolic. Here I am referring to many examples of failed and corrupt relations between First Peoples and Saskatchewan's police forces, including the death of Neil Stonechild in 1990 and the on-going investigations and cover-ups of other deaths of Aboriginal men. The hundreds of unsolved cases of missing Aboriginal women across Canada contributes to this poisoned environment (Amnesty International, 2004; See also Pruden [2005] for a typical newspaper article on racism and white police hysteria).

² See: Blackshaw (2003) Connell (2002), DiPiero (2002), Martino & Meyen (2001), Martino & Pallota-Chiarolli (2003), Pronger (1990, 2002), Sears (1992a, b), and Walby (1990), and within the applied field of anti-oppressive education starting with classics like Freire (1970) and hooks (1994) and leading to more recent advocates like Janoff (2005), Kumashiro (2000) and Tuitt (2003).

³ A legitimate question is “How, in this ‘axis of conflict,’ did these men and this girl experience their bodies on the evening of the sexual assault?” An elliptical approximation of that embodied reality escapes from the transcripts of the trial proceedings and is the object of my next queer gaze.

⁴ Racism in western Canada rests on the widely-held assumption that ethnically diverse, but white, European settlers earned their status and privilege through hard work, while First Peoples lost their inheritance because, overwhelmed, they gave up and signed Treaties.

⁵ White privilege at this narrative level means the drama club, the choir, and the senior mixed curling team all made it to the Provincial finals this year. White privilege means being like Caitlin, April's Senior Student of the Month and a portrait of my pre-service education students. She is very outgoing and determined. She is the president of SADD [Students Against Drunk Driving] … Caitlin also represents our school and community at the Saskatchewan Youth Parliament every year… She is always willing to help out in any way she can … Caitlin is a high academic achiever and is a very happy and positive person. Congratulations Caitlin! (Tisdale School Division website, n.d.).

⁶ The “wild West” motif is captured by The Tisdale Historic Museum's boast: “The shoot-out involving the Provincial Police and four Russian Bolsheviks east of Tisdale is another of our permanent displays. Being the largest shoot-out in Western Canada, the story is well worth checking out” (Tisdale Museum website, n.d.). Cf. the television series “Deadwood,” where greed, paranoia, and resentment motivate men. In one 50-minute episode the white male characters call each other cocksucker 38 times. This is the past we like to think we came from. (Shales, 2004).

⁷ It goes without saying that misogyny and violence are deeply engrained in our culture. The 1971 film A Clock Work Orange remains the “gold- standard” for gauging the alienated violence of disaffected youth. (O'Ehley, 1999). The lyrics of “Let's Fuck” by the punk band the Dwarves captures the misogyny embedded in heterosexist masculinity: “Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed/Old enough to pee then she's old enough for me. /Let's fuck” (Dwarves, 1990).

⁸ Both Native Studies and Eco-feminism have shown how both women and the land are exploited by patriarchy. Conquest is both literal and metaphorical (Phillips, 2004). The historical reality of the dependence of Europeans on the generosity of North America's First Peoples is also well documented. On Canada's prairie, because of trade in furs and buffalo, distinct Métis peoples flourished through inter-marriage as a result of just such mutual interdependence. This culture has been twisted into myths of the white man who has “gone Indian” and Indians, “offering their women” as if acknowledging (through white man's eyes) their inferiority.

⁹ It is estimated that the Aboriginal population of Saskatchewan will reach 50 percent of the population by the middle of the twenty-first century, in part, because of the high birthrate of a young population (60% are under the age of 25), and the traditional exodus, since the Great Depression, of the off-spring of the immigrant white settlers (McNinch, 1994).