White masculine abjection, victimhood, and disavowal in rape culture: Reconstituting Brock Turner

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay, I analyze the defense statement Brock Turner delivered before being sentenced for the rape of Chanel Miller. Turner’s statement exemplifies how white masculine sexual abusers rhetorically construct a fragmented self to evade responsibility for their actions and crimes. By attending to subtle shifts in verb tense and voice, I explain how Turner appropriated victimhood by constructing three different temporal subject positions for himself. Inscribing himself as simultaneously the abject abuser of the past, the virtuous victim of the present, and the servant survivor of the future, Turner evaded responsibility for assaulting Chanel Miller by foregrounding his own suffering. This case study extends scholarship on labile and abject masculinity by illustrating how white men fracture their subjectivities, cast out the abject within, and co-opt victimhood to evade responsibility for violence against women, people of color, and members of marginalized communities.