Performative neutrality and rape culture in Naomi Iizuka’s Good Kids

ABSTRACT

I offer a critical reading of Naomi Iizuka’s play Good Kids, considering the script, the performance of the play I watched, and the talkback with the cast. I argue that Good Kids enacts performative neutrality about sexual assault. By “performative neutrality,” I mean not a performance of neutrality, but a productive construction of neutrality whereby the play forecloses side-taking. I conclude that performative neutrality buttresses rape culture by exacerbating ambiguity myths, he said/she said, and the miscommunication model of rape.

KEYWORDS:

• Good Kids
• Naomi Iizuka
• sexual assault
• rape
• neutrality

Acknowledgements

I owe a debt of gratitude to my friends who volunteer alongside me at Women Helping Women for inspiring me to write this essay, especially Moira Casey whose own critical viewing of the performance of Good Kids she attended the night before I saw the play resulted in fruitful conversations about the play and its politics. I am also grateful to Theresa Kulbaga, who coauthored Campuses of Consent (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019) with me. My thinking about many of the ideas in this essay began while working on that book, so traces of Theresa’s influence permeate this essay, even when I do not have a way to cite them formally.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Choosing the right language to describe gender violence presents a vexing problem for a communication scholar who wishes to write accurately, carefully, and from an avowedly feminist, antiviolence axiology. I take inspiration from Jenn Freitag’s suggestion to use person-first language to describe people who have experienced gender violence rather than invoking the more common terms “survivor” or “victim.” Those terms have helpful uses in specific situations, but both have troubling entailments, too. “Survivor” can suggest victory or overcoming, which may shame people who continue to experience trauma as a result of the violence they lived through. “Victim” may err in focusing on the harm done. Both terms, as contrasted with person-first language, risk eliding the person’s identity and existence as a human being in conflating their entire identity with their experience of violence. In referencing the concept more broadly (i.e. not attached to a particular person), I sometimes refer to gender violence, and in some instances, sexual assault emerges as a more precise term for what I am trying to describe. Gender violence, a broader term, can include stalking, intimate partner violence (sometimes called domestic violence), and sexual assault. By sexual assault, I mean sexual activity without consent, and by consent, I mean ongoing agreement to participate in sexual activity, uninhibited by substance use. Terms like “sexual conduct” and “rape” have legal definitions that vary based on jurisdiction, so I avoid those terms unless I refer to specific convictions, as in the case of the Steubenville students. I credit several scholars with shaping my thoughts about these language choices and the politics thereof (Freitag; Harris, “The Next”; Harris, “Mapping”; Kulbaga and Spencer; Mack et al.; Spry; Stringer, Knowing Victims).

2 My argument throughout this piece is based on my experiences as an audience member who watched Good Kids and later bought and closely read the script. I make no claims about the playwright’s intentions or about other audience members’ experiences with the play, though my decision to think more deeply about the discomfort I felt when I watched the play was inspired by my conversation with other advocates after the show’s run on campus finished. One anonymous peer reviewer of this piece pointed me to an interview with Iizuka to suggest that the playwright herself would disavow the play’s performative neutrality. In the interview, Iizuka claims that she wrote the play because she “was struck by” what she “perceived to be these strangely retrogressive and toxic attitudes around gender roles and female sexuality that were coming to the surface in how people talked about sexual assault” (Playscripts). Nevertheless, Iizuka talks about the play in arguably neutral terms: “This play is not polemical,” she insists, “Nor is it an op ed piece or an editorial” (Playscripts). Her goal for the play is to inspire conversation (“If audience members leave a performance thinking and talking about this subject, I consider that a good thing.”), an arguably sedate aim for a medium with a capacity for fostering empathy and rendering moral judgments.

3 Iizuka is the daughter of a Japanese father and a U.S. American Latina mother. I cannot speculate about Iizuka’s ideological commitments related to the portrayal of race in the play. Iizuka has had a successful career as a playwright, and while some of her plays have directly addressed race and ethnicity, many seem to be as racially unmarked as Good Kids (for more on the playwright, see Fabros).

4 Scholars in disability studies have extensively critiqued media representations that link disability with villainy or that explain a character’s evil as a consequence of their disability (Donnelly; Harnett; Norden).

5 Despite the critiques I offer of some of the politics of how the director accomplished her goal, I affirm the value of giving trigger warnings for students (Carter; Lockhart; Spencer and Kulbaga; Stringer, “Trigger Warnings”; Thorpe).

6 For a compelling account of the complexity of experiencing and perpetrating sexual violence that confounds the roles of hero and villain, see Fox. Fox’s work draws extensively on Ashley Mack’s coining of the hashtag #ItWasMe as a way for people to reflect consciously on their own complicity in acts of gender violence and sexual objectification.