*This article is reposted here by the original author for blind review. Original post can be found here.
She doesn’t remember her assault. But the Internet does.
In the winter of 2013, the Steubenville rape case entered into national consciousness, plastered across every news outlet. The assault took place at a highschool party in Steubenville, Ohio on August 11th, and hit local news stations by August 22nd. Two teenage football players, who have since been found guilty, were allegedly involved in the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl, which (according to the multimedia evidence on social media and the cell phones of the perpetrators and their peers) took place over several hours while the girl was unresponsive. The town’s residents began taking sides, some supported the girl as a victim, while others blamed her, arguing that she was defaming the football team—a beloved part of the community. The story gained national attention when a photo and video from the night of the assault were posted online.
In our current world, inundated with continuously advancing technology, it seems natural that law enforcement uses things like security footage, social media, and smartphone data to investigate and try criminal cases. We need all the information we can gather to catch the bad guy, right? And surveillance technologies, like security cameras for example, seem so…unbiased. A neutral witness to the facts, allowing the police and prosecutor to do their jobs efficiently and accurately. But maybe we should be a little more critical of the ways that law enforcement are watching and collecting information not only about ‘criminals’, but all of us. And while surveillance can certainly be helpful in providing evidence in cases like Steubenville, as scholar Joshua Reeves notes, we should think about how we, as citizens, are being encouraged to constantly surveil each other. How we are oftentimes utilized as the eyes and ears of the police (think Neighborhood Watch, for instance).
As individual citizens, we are called to be vigilant, alert to any potentially suspicious activity, especially since 9/11 and the War on Terror. With Steubenville, Anonymous illustrates one of the unintended consequences of this ‘See Something, Say Something’ society. In some cases, vigilante forces like Anonymous stretch the limits of what is considered acceptable civic engagement, working to challenge rather than support the state, but in ways that could cause additional harm to the victim. Yet both law enforcement and Anonymous rely on ‘seeing’ technology—videos from the assault, phone messages, internet data. When is this acceptable and when isn’t it? And to what extent is surveillance being presented as the catch-all solution to justice? What are the implications of our support and participation in these practices—especially when addressing the complex issue of rape?
So, as with all of our deep, existential questions, we turn to television. In Asking For It (2015), Kate Harding writes that there has been an exceptionally high amount of rape on TV in the last few years. Sonya Sariaya explores this issue in a Salon article, discussing how shows across networks and genre (Game of Thrones, Scandal, Orange is the New Black, Downton Abbey) have all rather graphically depicted rape. Sariaya’s problem with this trend is how rape is often used as a vehicle for male story lines, with a focus on how rape affects the male characters’ feelings, rather than the impact on the female victims. Many media and feminist scholars have written about rape on television–how accurately it is portrayed, the extent to which feminist ideologies are employed. But, as one of those scholars, Lisa Cuklanz, points out: television is a business. TV execs are generally more concerned with what will make money, not what will best reflect reality, or what will advance a feminist movement against rape culture (just the opposite, in some cases).
Like many other Marshmallows (VM fans), I watched Veronica through streaming services, where the show accumulated its larger cult following after its cancellation in 2007, following only three seasons (Pro tip: you can now legally stream the show for free through Go90). In 2013, fans broke Kickstarter records by raising $1 million in four hours to fund a film revival of the series. Ninety thousand backers raised over $5 million by the end of the campaign. The movie, which takes place nine years after the final season, was released in 2014, following an adult Veronica caught between a sensible life as a lawyer and the intrigue of private investigation.https://youtu.be/iksrM_LNZ6s
Commentary in the both academic communities and the popular press analyse how Veronica Mars emerged from a particularly 90s version of girl power, comparing Veronica to her predecessor, Buffy. And while there is a substantial amount of writing about how feminist or not Veronica is (looking at survivor discourses, feminist empowerment, depictions of rape, postfeminist representations), there’s much less material looking at Veronica’s style of investigation—surveillance—and its relationship to sexual violence.
In Citizen Spies, Joshua Reeves studies how the U.S. has developed into a surveillance society, calling upon individual citizens to watch each other in public spaces and online, basically crowdsourcing police work. Reeves argues that we should be critical of state surveillance and should consider how we act as “citizen spies,” creating a culture of hostility and fear that may not be so effective in fostering community or preventing crime. Reeves discusses how vigilante forces, motivated by a sense of civic duty, work outside of or against the law via surveillance.
These elements manifest themselves in Veronica Mars, where sexual violence is a recurring theme. Sexual violence and the state’s response to it—as illustrated in the Steubenville case and in Veronica Mars—have key connections to both surveillance and self-responsibility. Surveilling technologies are being used by perpetrators to record assaults, by law enforcement to prosecute, and by vigilante elements to challenge state authority. And, of course, we want every stone turned in cases of sexual violence to get justice for victims. But how does the state surveillance apparatus end up contributing to rape culture, where men look and women are to be looked at? To a culture that ultimately places the responsibility for solving issues of sexual violence on the victims of assault? Surveillance in these cases doesn’t provide a preventory solution to sexual violence, but, rather, a reactionary response. These questions are important to consider for a feminist understanding of and response to rape culture.
In this piece, I want to explore how issues of surveillance, responsibility, and sexual violence intertwine on Veronica Mars–and how this 10-year-old show can help us think about these issues today in a world of Trump and #MeToo. First, I’ll introduce you to Veronica, looking at how sexual violence shapes her role as a vigilante-esque private eye fighting for the underdogs. Next, I’ll discuss how hyper-individualism and responsibility come into play, causing Veronica to essentially do the work of the police for them. Finally, I’ll explain how the show—as well as surveillance and responsibilization in general—prevents solidarity between women and victims of sexual assault, while obscuring alternative responses to sexual violence.
Veronica Mars: Private Eye
What drives Veronica is largely combating violence against young women. The murder of Veronica’s best friend Lilly Kane and Veronica’s own rape at a high school party trigger her work as a private investigator. Lilly’s murder–the overarching investigation of season one–shaped Veronica’s character in more ways than one. On top of losing her best friend in such a violent way, Veronica’s social status was decimated when her father, Keith (as the town Sheriff), went after Lilly’s dad, Jake Kane as the murderer. Keith was fired, and Veronica’s mom left them soon after–an event that echoes throughout the series. Veronica’s rape is also depicted as a turning point for her: a loss of innocence transformed into an empowered motivation to find the culprit and bring him to justice. Despite Veronica’s steely resolve, the question of her rape hangs over her throughout the series and shapes how she approaches her other investigations as well.
From the very beginning, Veronica frames law enforcement as a corrupt, incompetent institution. The Sheriff department, under the leadership of the vile Don Lamb (Michael Muhney), is established as an adversary to victims of sexual assault in the pilot episode. In a flashback sequence, we see a slightly younger Veronica, after having woken up in a strange bed, underwear missing, leave the party house—disheveled, crying—and stumble toward the Sheriff department to report her rape. In his office, after hearing that Veronica has no memory of the night, Lamb mocks her: “is there anyone in particular you’d like me to arrest? Or should I just round up the sons of the most important families in town?”
Here we start to see how institutionalized sexism manifests itself in the Veronica Mars universe. Sociologist Janet Saltzman Chafetz defines institutionalized sexism as the inclusion of harmful, traditional gender norms in the formal structures of society: in legislation, higher education, finance, the justice system, etc. Similarly, Elise Morrison explains that “the disciplinary gaze of surveillance” is gendered, exemplified in our language of “Big Brother” and “the Man.” We generally assume that the entities behind surveillance are male: a policeman, a male CIA agent, the typically male private detective of noir. Veronica is the foil to this stereotype in some interesting ways.
While we may understand institutionalized sexism as a more subtle incorporation of sexism into the law, Veronica Mars dramatizes the issue to depict law enforcement’s direct role in perpetuating rape culture. In “Silence of the Lambs,” the Neptune mayor calls Keith in for extra reinforcement after a series of murders of spring breakers. Emphasizing how little Neptune’s officials actually cares about violence against women, Keith wryly explains, “a killer preying on partying college girls tends to kill the spring break business!” In the next episode, Veronica is framed for creating fake IDs, and
Sheriff Lamb pulls her out of school in handcuffs in a creepy power-play. Veronica tells him “you really don’t have to do that”; Lamb says, yeah, “but I’m gonna do it anyway,” taking pleasure in besting the girl who is often a step ahead of the police (“Clash of the Tritons”). And in season three, after a string of rapes on Veronica’s campus, Veronica goes to Lamb with a possible culprit. He responds: “if it’s Bigfoot, we checked–he’s got an alibi” (“Hi, Infidelity”). Though cartoonish, Veronica Mars frames law enforcement, primarily represented by Sheriff Lamb, as one of the show’s most nefarious villains.
Rob Thomas, the show’s creator, explains how classic noir informed Veronica’snarrative, highlighting the show’s setting within a corrupt social system where class differences (and gender violence) are potent. Rosalind Sibielski, feminist media scholar, explains that Veronica’s character is constructed to show empowerment instead of grief in response to her assault. Veronica’s experience with an unjust justice system, a system that doesn’t take sexual assault seriously, that blames the victim, only fuels her fire. In response to her depraved world, Veronica is positioned as a benevolent vigilante, fighting for the underdogs, and for herself, when it’s made clear that the police won’t.
As a private eye, Veronica is incorporated into a world of surveillance–of secret mics, cameras, trackers, and confidential data. In season one, Veronica will stop at nothing to find the truth about what happened to Lilly, after discovering that the man Lamb arrested for the murder couldn’t have done it. And she’ll use every investigative technology available, working independently of the law, to do so. Accordingly, Veronica collects personal data about everyone connected to Lilly, including her closest friends, the most powerful people in town, and her boyfriends past and present. For example, Veronica swaps out a stapler in the school guidance counselor’s office with a bugged stapler, allowing her to tune into her peers’ confidential conversations about Lilly’s death (“Clash of the Tritons”). Discovering that Duncan Kane (Lilly’s brother and Veronica’s ex), has no memory of that day, and that he’s on medication, Veronica sneaks into Duncan’s doctor’s office to steal his medical files (“Mars vs Mars”). While it’s not exactly accurate to consider Lilly Kane–daughter of the richest man in town–an underdog, her case does connect us back to a larger system of violence against women, and the failure of the state to respond justly. And that, as always, is where Veronica steps in.
Veronica does often show up for the underdog, especially for her friends and peers. On multiple occasions, Veronica proves her friend Eli “Weevil” Navarro, head of a biker gang, innocent when wrongfully accused and arrested for crimes ranging from robbery to murder. When Veronica isn’t helping her clients out of trouble with the law, her cases often involve young women experiencing sexual harassment or violence. In one episode, Veronica gets to the source of a cyberbullying incident that had the entire school slut shaming her friend Meg. Veronica hijacks the school newsreel to screen the culprit’s confession to the entire student body (“Like A Virgin”).
In “The Girl Next Door,” we see more explicitly how Veronica’s experiences with sexual violence have shaped her investigations. She gets particularly invested in the disappearance of her young neighbor, Sarah (Jessica Chastain), who Veronica discovers has been raped and has isolated herself from family and friends. Veronica eventually finds Sarah safe and sound a few towns over, but we learn that it was Sarah’s stepfather who raped and impregnated her. In “M.A.D,” we see Veronica’s vigilante response to this theme of gender oppression in peak form. Her classmate, Carmen, is blackmailed by ex boyfriend Tad with a sexual video. Veronica hatches an Anonymous-esque revenge plot, creating a website that suggests he’s in a gay relationship, and threatening to send the link to his potential Naval officers (this was 2003, mind you). Again and again, Veronica is using her detective skills and surveillance technologies to confront issues of sexism and rape culture, motivated by her personal experiences and the negligence of law enforcement.
Veronica Mars: One Woman Army
As I’ve suggested, what the Neptune Sheriff’s department lacks in competency (and decency), Veronica makes up with vigilance. Though Veronica is generally working to counteract the state, she still works within their logics, utilizing the surveillance apparatus. Regardless, Veronica’s dedication to the disenfranchised, her deduction skills, and her snarky one liners have us rooting for her. Though I recognize that Veronica’s surveillance methods go too far sometimes, I’m so immersed in Veronica’s rationale while watching that I’m typically on board for whatever punishment she deems fit. Sending the Kane’s head of security creepy photos of himself from afar to send a message? Of course. When Veronica questions her classmate, Dick Casablancas, about his role in her rape, and he responds, “Don’t go blaming me because you got all wasted and slutty,” she backs her car over his brand new surfboard (“A Trip to the Dentist”). 100% here for it. But it’s not really about whether Veronica is in the right or the wrong with her investigation methods. I want to look into why Veronica is left responsible for solving her own rape–why she seems to be the only person her classmates can turn to for help. Yes, Veronica is a skilled private detective. But she only really embraced that role after her assault, when Sheriff Lamb laughed her out of his office, and after her best friend was murdered. If no one else would do the job right (or at all, even), Veronica is the type of person who will do it herself.
In doing the work traditionally associated with law enforcement, Veronica takes up some of the logics and tactics of the state. The show frames the existence of Mars Investigations as a result of the corrupt, incompetent Sheriff’s department. Keith started the business after being fired from his position as Sheriff when he went after the most powerful man in town for murder. At Mars Investigations, Keith is using the same skills and technology he utilized at the Sheriff’s department, now less restrained by the rules of law. And Keith taught Veronica everything he knows. So, already their investigation practices are informed by the practices of the state, but also transformed by the freedom that comes with working outside of the state. Though Veronica is depicted mostly as the benevolent counterpart to the corrupt police, she’s not purely a vigilante–she does delve into the tactics of state surveillance and traditional ideas of criminal justice. In most cases, Veronica still turns the culprit over to the police.
The Sheriff’s department is a key resource for Veronica, as she repeatedly manipulates her relationships with officers to gain access to police files. In general, Veronica is utilizing state resources more wisely than the Sheriff’s department itself. She’s the one who solves Lilly’s murder, using classified files and audio from police interviews to formulate her investigation. Veronica is the one who notices a discrepancy in the crime scene photos proving that the man convicted for murder was innocent. And in the end, it’s Veronica’s personal relationship with Lilly that leads her to the most damning evidence: videotapes hidden in Lilly’s signature hiding place. So while Veronica appropriates surveillance technologies from the police, she manipulates them in a way that incorporates her perspective as a teenage girl and a victim of assault. However, Veronica’s girl power persona shouldn’t prevent a closer look into her tactics.
Veronica’s approach reflects the influence of neoliberalism–arguably the reigning logic of American society since the 70s. Cultural scholar, Julie Wilson, describes neoliberalism as “a set of social, cultural, and political-economic forces that puts competition at the center of social life.” Under neoliberalism, “government’s charge is not the care and security of citizens, but rather the promotion of market competition.” Neoliberalism promotes a capitalist, free-market mentality in all corners of our society. This perpetuates a culture of “hyper-individualism” where self-responsibility is king, and reliance on the government is an indication of failure, or, as Yael D. Sherman argues, “illness.” The concept of neoliberalism helps us understand what’s happening in our political culture today. Following a neoliberal logic, we are completely and totally responsible for ourselves, since reliance on the government in any way is a sign of personal failure. In the communication field, we use the term “responsibilization” to describe this phenomenon.
Joshua Reeves, drawing on philosopher Michel Foucault, uses “responsibilization” to analyse how citizens are encouraged to act as state deputies (think Neighborhood Watch, “See Something, Say Something” posters). Part of our personal responsibility–our civic duty, Reeves argues–is to act as the eyes and ears of the police to warn law enforcement of suspicious activity in public spaces, and in our own neighborhoods. We are asked to retweet missing persons ads, to call in tips to the police station if anyone or thing seems out of place. We’ve had entire TV shows dedicated to police crowdsourcing (America’s Most Wanted). While looking out for neighbors and helping to find individuals guilty of terrible crimes can certainly be useful, Reeves notes that our personal and cultural biases contribute to a tense environment where some people (often people of color) are wrongfully criminalized (and in the case of Trayvon Martin, murdered). When citizens are responsibilized to constantly be on the lookout for ‘suspicious behavior’, we help to create a culture of distrust and paranoia in order to achieve the goals of state control–to help them catch the bad guys, to make their job easier.
The Steubenville rape case provides a poignant example of how issues of surveillance and neoliberal responsibilization converge. Within a culture of self-responsibility, in Steubenville and across the country, many blamed the victim for her own assault, and for discrediting the football team. Ironically, this doctrine of self-responsibility excluded the perpetrators, whose futures were on the line! In Transforming a Rape Culture, Michael Kimmel talks about how sexual responsibility is gendered. He suggests that rape culture is a product of normative gender ideologies–that traditional heterosexuality and toxic masculinity tend to maintain a power imbalance between men and women. Following traditional gender roles, men are the sexual aggressors, encouraged to take risks, while women are positioned as “asexual gatekeepers.” This plays into a larger tendency of victim blaming: it’s women’s responsibility to dress modestly, to be perpetually sober, to just avoid parties and bars and walking home alone. Put crudely, it’s the woman’s responsibility not to be raped. So if it happens, it must somehow be their fault. Boys will be boys, after all.
With In An Abusive State, Kristin Bumiller explains that responsibilization contradicts the feminist anti-violence movement, which sought a more communal approach, providing victims with shelter, care, and solidarity with other women. Bumiller argues that these tensions between the individualistic neoliberal logic of the state and feminist collectivism has been resolved in a compromise: incorporating the anti-violence movement in state practices and regulation. As a result, there has been an uptick in legislation confronting sexual violence as well as the bureaucratization of non-profit organizations and facilities that work with victims of abuse.
Think about Title IX on college campuses, for example. Despite its positive goals, Title IX totally bureaucratizes sexual assault, arguably enacting disciplinary control over victims who must follow particular rules and practices that essentially work to protect the institution rather than the victim. While some, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, believe that male students are treated unfairly within the application of Title IX, legal scholar, Nancy Chi Cantalupo, argues that female victims can’t trust their schools to protect their rights. And maybe there’s some truth to both perspectives. But these institutions have incentives to protect their national image and keep the case within their control. It’s difficult to properly address the complex issue of sexual assault with an algorithmic, bureaucratic process — a one size fits all system that prioritizes protocol over complex human experience. Bumiller contends that a reliance on the state has watered down feminist ideas of structural gender inequality–the very structures that contribute to sexual violence in the first place. The state and its legislation doesn’t perceive sexual violence as a systemic cultural-political issue, but instead, as a medical and criminal justice problem. With university policy and sexual violence legislation in general, lines are necessarily drawn and definitions are necessarily constructed. But we should consider who gets to decide these things, and how this framework enacts surveilling power onto victims of assault.
Veronica doesn’t have any of these formalized procedures behind her. Partially a product of her noir-style isolation, Veronica is on her own. Blamed for her own rape, mocked and ignored by the police, Veronica takes up the investigation of her rapist herself. Here’s where Veronica is most clearly a responsibilized citizen. In this neoliberal dystopia, where the state doesn’t offer any meaningful assistance (working explicitly against Veronica’s well-being), a survivor of rape is made individually responsible for any sense of reconciliation or support. Veronica’s pursuit of her rapist kicks into full force in the final few episodes of season one, when she studies the blackmail video recording of Carmen to discover that both of them had been drugged at the same party. Veronica discovers that Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring), her current boyfriend and fan favorite, brought GHB to the party that night (“M.A.D”). Veronica confronts Logan, telling him what happened to her for the first time: “I’m gonna find out who did this to me and I’m gonna make them pay. Even if it was you…” (“A Trip to the Dentist”).
Veronica proceeds to fearlessly confront her peers who were directly or indirectly involved in her assault, trying to piece together a narrative from her witnesses. Here the script is flipped: Veronica is relying on her peers’ surveillance/watching rather than her own. Veronica talks to a series of students, each with their own subjective memory of the night and different accounts of what Veronica had been up to. Finally, Veronica speaks with someone who saw her with Duncan in a bedroom that night having sex. After hearing this, Veronica doesn’t go to the police, or any other authority–she goes to Duncan’s house to confront him head on, crying, “you were the one who raped me!” While this can certainly be read as an empowering, perhaps feminist, representation–a teenage girl is more effective than the literal government–we should consider: where’s the line between empowerment and neoliberal responsibilization? Are there some forms of support that the government should provide or facilitate? Is “female empowerment” an excuse not to provide these things in any significant way? In that case–in Veronica’s case–the onus is on those who have experienced sexual violence.
Solidarity, Sister
Cultural critics have argued that Veronica’s concurrent sexual assault storylines work to show how rape is a symptom of systemic sexism and violence against women–something that very few shows do. While the same critics note that the show isn’t perfectly feminist (maybe postfeminist), I want to explore the ways Veronica Mars’ depiction of surveillance and empowerment-responsibilization is obscuring solidarity as well as alternative responses to rape and rape culture. Lisa Cuklanz and Sujata Moorti, who looked at how Law and Order: Special Victims Unit depicts rape, found that TV narratives rarely represent female solidarity or a wider feminist collectivization. Despite the suggestion that sexual assault is a part of a wider system of gender inequality, Veronica Mars generally shys away from solidarity or collective action amongst female victims of assault and harassment. Scholars Alaine Martaus and Susan Berrige agree that Veronica’s individualism aligns with the isolation associated with the noir style. This focus on the individual, rather than wider social change, also highlights the overarching influence of neoliberalism, prioritizing personal responsibility.
Veronica Mars demonstrates how isolating surveillance can be, echoing the noir trope of a cynical, lone detective. While multiple factors contributed to Veronica’s disengagement from her old friends and her peers at school (including Veronica assault and her father’s botched investigation), Veronica’s position as private eye is particularly relevant. While her fellow students come to Veronica for help, these connections rarely last beyond a one-episode arc. Veronica’s disillusion with her world, influenced by her experience with injustice and violence, has eroded her trust in everyone around her: those she considers her closest friends; her boyfriends, past and present. Everyone’s a suspect. And for Veronica, that means everyone will be subject to her surveilling eye–trackers on their cars, bugs in their rooms, photographs from afar, stake outs, hidden cameras. Although Veronica’s surveillance provides ground for resisting a corrupt state, it doesn’t really promote an environment of trust and community–an environment that could perhaps best address sexual violence.
From the pilot onwards, we know that Veronica keeps her assault to herself, not seeing the point in telling her father. She doesn’t confess to her best friend Wallace until the second to last episode of the first season. And while her experience does influence who she takes on as a private detective and how she investigates, Veronica deals with her experiences in solitude–even when her client’s experience connect to her own. In “The Girl Next Door,” the show pretty clearly suggests a parallel between Veronica and her neighbor Sarah, who also isolated herself after her rape, yet Veronica doesn’t voice her shared experience. Similarly, when Veronica finds out that Carmen was drugged at the same party, she doesn’t mention this revelation to Carmen, to whom this information is also significant (“M.A.D”). This isn’t to say Veronica necessarily has a duty to talk about her assault, but rather to point out the tensions wherein the show maintains Veronica’s isolation in her own experiences while simultaneously signalling to the larger issues of gender violence that exist.
In addition to this lack of solidarity, the show makes some more obvious departures from feminist responses to rape, especially in its widely criticized final season. The show ultimately falls back on harmful rape myths, including the cartoonish villainization of the rapist. While in season one, we find out that Veronica’s assault is more of a complicated sexual encounter with her ex, we get a new answer to the mystery in the finale of season two. It turns out that Cassidy (who very believably swore he didn’t touch
her in season one) was the actual perpetrator, and had raped Veronica’s friend Mac as well. The show villainizes him, explaining his actions by his own past sexual abuse: he causes a bus crash, blows up a plane carrying the man who had abused him, attempts to kill Veronica for finding him out, all before committing suicide by jumping off a building (“Not Pictured”). Kind of pulls you out of the cultural reality of sexual assault.
What draws the most critique amongst feminist scholars is the campus rape story arc of season three. There’s a serial rapist at Veronica’s college who drugs and shaves the heads of their victims. One of the victims is Parker, roommate of Veronica’s friend. Parker, established as someone who sleeps around, is raped while Veronica walks in and out of the room, assuming Parker was having consensual sex. Veronica turns her “unbearable guilt into steely resolve” and promises to “catch the rapist [and] see him crucified” (“My Big Fat Greek Rush Week”). This is one of the very few instances where Veronica shares her assault story with another victim, trying to convince Parker she is on her side (“Charlie Don’t Surf”).
But this narrative takes a turn when when Veronica is pitted against the college feminist group, the Lilith House. As Veronica becomes more suspicious of the group, and as the feminists are shown working against “the cause,” the show tries to turn us against them as well. Again, the show misses the opportunity to pursue commonality and solidarity between women who care about sexual violence. Rosalind Sibielski called this a backlash narrative that may reflect the mainstream, postfeminist views of the time–that modern feminism was contrary to U.S. values. Veronica, proving a fraternity innocent of any involvement in the rapes, is portrayed as a crusader for the truth. The feminists don’t care about the truth, they just want to punish Greek men. This comes to a head when we find out that the Lilith House has (1) staged one of the assaults in an attempt to get all of Greek life kicked off campus and (2) committed sexual assault themselves against the president of the accused fraternity (“Lord of the Pi’s”). Veronica, usually countering corrupt institutions, is now the moral and intellectual superior to the (largely non-white) feminists. While Veronica’s investigation finds two non-Greek college men responsible for the rest of the rapes, this narrative delegitimizing the only women in the series who self-identify as feminist.
Veronica explores what happens when a corrupt law enforcement either ignores victims or explicitly perpetuate harmful myths about rape; what happens when a vigilante, female force takes the tools of law enforcement and pursues justice herself. While pressuring our government to better address sexual violence is important, Bumiller warns of the consequences of relying completely on state institutions to regulate sexual violence. She takes a slightly controversial stance, arguing that the increased surveillance and criminalization of perpetrators hasn’t significantly improved the lives of victims, or decreased sexual violence overall.
Andrea Smith’s work talks about how state surveillance is historically rooted in settler violence against natives. Smith considers how state surveillance is always looking out at the violence of the ‘other’, directing attention away from the violence the state enacts itself. We see this today in the justification of police surveillance and brutality against black men, with police often pointing us toward the behavior that apparently begets heightened suspicion and, sometimes, fatal violence. While many feminist thinkers are critical of the proliferation of surveillance, Bumiller stresses that some tend to dismiss these connections to crooked power structures when utilized to combat sexual violence. Smith notes that, for the mainstream anti-violence movement, gender violence is “the exception to the rule of opposing state surveillance.” A dependency on state surveillance, and all the ambiguities that come with it, impact how we “see” and respond to gender violence, diverting attention from alternative strategies.
We naturally want law enforcement to use as much of their surveilling technology as necessary to detect and prosecute rapists. But finding justice for survivors, and preventing rape in the first place, is unfortunately not so straightforward. According to RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), less than 1% of perpetrators will serve prison time, and only about 35% of assaults are reported in the first place. These disparaging statistics still encourage a mindset of increasing state control–a call for more stringent policy and practice. But Bumiller challenges us to think of a response to sexual assault beyond increasing criminalization and surveillance. It’s important to note that the incorporation of the anti-violence movement into law coincided with the problematic “tough on crime” political moment. This contributed to the degradation of the movement’s connection to feminist ideologies, ideas about confronting systemic gender inequality, which were neutralized by the state. Instead, this collaboration produced a campaign against stranger rape (primarily directed at already criminalized black men); the criminalization of victims (especially women of color); and the expansion of state social control by means of surveillance (ditto).
So if both victim responsibilization and current law enforcement interventions are incomplete, problematic solutions to sexual assault where do we go from here? Joshua Reeves suggests some alternative solutions in his discussion of resisting citizen-spy-style responsibilization. Reeves offers up community solidarity–unifying the community as a source of power that can resist pressures to turn on your neighbors, decreasing hostilities often rooted in harmful biases that perpetuate those hostilities. Creating a culture of mutual empathy and support could potentially decrease crime, and at the very least provide support for victims. Reeves also talks about sousveillance, or using technology to turn the surveilling gaze back on the state– a “bottom-up” method rather than top-down. One could make the argument that this is what Veronica is doing; however, the most effective sousveillance comes from a unified collective rather than one very determined individual.
Andrea Smith is an advocate for more community-minded strategies to prevent and respond to sexual violence; cultivating community discussion and support around sexual violence could be a step forward. In addition to law enforcement’s ineffective approach, some women just don’t want to go through the harrowing (and expensive) formal process of a legal trial against their assailants. Bumiller adds that community restorative justice programs will only work if there is a consistent network of support and resources available (which isn’t always possible, especially for poor women). Bumiller also notes that this approach doesn’t really challenge the larger structures of gender oppression. Smith answers this concern with a more optimistic stance:
When one asks the question “What can I do?,” the answer is likely to call the police or to do nothing. But when one asks the question “What can we do?,” a whole range of other possibilities arises (37).
Looking Forward
Issues of crime and punishment are particularly complicated when it comes to sexual violence. My instinct is to call for more stringent legal punishments, to boost reporting and the proportion of perpetrators who are prosecuted. And yet I also critique our system of mass incarceration, the discriminatory modes of criminalization that come with punitive “tough on crime” initiatives. Does increasing the scope of state and citizen surveillance really work as a preventative measure for sexual assault? Maybe. And I certainly don’t want to suggest that those who commit rape shouldn’t face the appropriate consequences. But we should also be thinking more deeply about how to support survivors of sexual assault, how to make sure victims aren’t getting caught up in systems of abusive surveillance and hyper-responsibility. To do this, we must consider ways to deconstruct a rape culture where sexual harassment is the norm.
The Steubenville case exemplifies just how messed up a surveillance-based response to sexual violence can be. But it’s two sides of the same coin. Elise Morrison explains that surveillance technologies both guard women against sexual assault and perpetuate the sexualization of female bodies “through the male-coded gaze of the hidden camera.” Recording the assault, and the release of the footage online by Anonymous, helped to bring the case to light and prosecute the culprits. But it also amplified the victim’s trauma onto a national stage, and, as Pennington and Birthisel argued, privileged the validity of surveillance technology above her lived experience. Thus, technologies like phone cameras and social media have created a new kind of legal witness that can intensify harmful, gendered ways of watching. But they can also help bring critical attention to those very issues.
With the current #MeToo movement online, and the “Weinstein Effect”, the almost universal experience of sexual violence and harassment amongst women has become increasingly visible. Sexual assault is evidently systemic, protected by our most powerful institutions, combined with an insidious cultural tendency to disbelieve women. Michael Kimmel talks about a “multiplicity of truths,” wherein men experience their actions from a position of power, of control; while women’s experiences come from the perspective of being acted upon. An important part of this, as Brit Marling examines in The Atlantic, is gendered economic inequality that blurs the lines of consent between powerful men and less powerful women. Similarly, feminist scholar Kristin Bumiller draws key connections between sexual violence, an abusive state, and women’s inability to enact autonomy and freedom.
#MeToo has some interesting parallels to Veronica Mars. Like Veronica Mars, #metoo has represented many accounts of sexual violence against women. Both point to the larger issue of institutionalized sexism, of corruption; and both link to responsibilization. #Metoo is pulling on a larger sense of solidarity, a catharsis between women, a consciousness raising; but that solidarity, one could argue, is still individualized, with individual women making posts, which we see on our individual social media feeds. With #MeToo, it’s on the victim of assault or harassment to “expose themselves” to the public. But Veronica doesn’t say #metoo. The show generally fails to connect Veronica and other victims of assault in solidarity, in a broader movement, or even conversation.
While painful for those who have experienced assault to see a new accused in their feeds each and every day, #MeToo feels like momentum. Like the rolling out of consequences for sexual violence, even if it happened 40 years ago. In a movement fitting of a digital call-out culture, some men are actually being held responsible for their actions —being fired from their jobs, facing criminal investigations. But…what’s next? If we find out that #NotAllMen is, like, pretty much all men in one capacity or another, where do we go from there? We can’t logistically or practically throw this many people in jail. These are our bosses, our coworkers, our neighbors, our friends, our President—who has been accused of, and frankly bragged about, sexual assault.
Sexual violence is an endlessly complex issue to tackle, and it goes beyond criminal justice. It has roots in the gendered power dynamics of heteronormativity and toxic masculinity, economic disenfranchisement, racism, and (yes, I’ll say it) the patriarchy. This is a such tough subject because it’s difficult to even think of an alternative response. Something other than what we have now. We don’t really have a blueprint for dealing with sexual deviance outside of (or in addition to) a logic of crime and punishment. This is part of the reason why #metoo is so complicated. While solidarity between women isn’t going to magically transform a clearly systemic problem of sexual violence, it can certainly help. Maybe #MeToo could open up new possibilities; maybe tweets could turn into mobilization. And maybe we could center community and collective voice instead of hostility and surveillance.
Many call for a more radical approach to gender inequality and rape culture. Michael Kimmel argues that an essential part of changing rape culture is transforming how we define masculinity, traditionally tied to sexual aggression, risk-taking, control. And critical theorist Nancy Fraser suggests that a transformative approach, including financial redistribution and a cultural re-valuing of the feminine, would be the most effective way to attack gender inequality. While these solutions seem impossible—especially in this Trump moment—we have to ask ourselves: what kind of world do we want to live in? What do we want our government to do (and not do) for us? Can we think outside of reinforcing responsibilization and surveillance? And is punishment the only thing to be done?
Senior Thesis 