Ashley Noel Mack & Bryan J McCann. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Volume 18, Issue 2, 2021.
Revelations that Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein leveraged his wealth and influence to sexually harass, abuse, or assault dozens of women was a watershed moment that helped catalyze the proliferation of #MeToo in 2017. In addition to inspiring White actor Alyssa Milano to encourage her Twitter followers to tweet the hashtag #MeToo—a practice that Black activist Tarana Burke developed over 10 years earlier—to indicate “the magnitude of the problem” of sexual violence, the Weinstein scandal was a powerful representative anecdote for the ways privileged men exploit their power to sexually prey on vulnerable bodies. Among other celebrity men who were subject to assault and harassment allegations that significantly derailed their careers, Weinstein figured as an especially contemptible predator who wielded his ability to make or break Hollywood careers in order to secure impunity for his abuse of women in his industry.
Among the many invectives commentators directed toward Weinstein in the immediate aftermath of the public revelations, the epithet “monster” figured prominently. While monstrosity is a recurring mode of cultural expression that is both durable and malleable, it finds specificity when tethered to the corporeal. In order to reckon with their monsters, publics must be able to engage monstrosity made flesh. In the context of robust public discourse regarding sexual violence in the US and elsewhere, Harvey Weinstein figured as a monster par excellence.
At least a dozen high-profile news sources during the first year of the Weinstein saga featured headlines associating the producer with the term “monster.” For example, in her New York Times op-ed entitled “Harvey Weinstein is My Monster Too,” actor Salma Hayek wrote, “in his eyes, I was not an artist. I wasn’t even a person. I was a thing: not a nobody, but a body.” As Hayek explains, Weinstein regarded her and so many other women as carnal flesh to be consumed. The association of Weinstein with monstrosity also emerged in a variety of conspicuous contexts. For example, during the 2018 Academy Awards, host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel, while remarking on the success of the fantasy-romance film The Shape of Water, quipped, “finally Hollywood is recognizing a monster other than Harvey Weinstein.” In her televised documentary series Citizen Rose, actor Rose McGowan, who also says Weinstein raped her, refuses to refer to the disgraced producer by name. Rather, she calls him “the monster,” claiming, “you’re beneath humanity. You don’t even get a name. Loser.” Weinstein dehumanized his victims and, in so doing, became something less than human himself. Kimmel, on the other hand, used the figure of the monster to inspire laughter and likely diffuse tension at the Oscars—an event often dominated by Weinstein’s films since the early 1990s.
Historically, publics have rationalized and struggled over racial and gender hierarchies in the context of sexual violence through narratives of monstrosity. Indeed, the notion that sexual predators are monsters is one of many rape myths that mischaracterize the lived experiences of victims by trading in normative stereotypes regarding the nature of sexual violence. In addition to inaccurately representing how victims experience sexual violence, the monster myth is always already referential to the figure of the monstrous Black male rapist—a mythos whose cultural currency is vast and consequences for Black bodies often fatal. To be clear, our focal object in this essay is not the experiences of rape victims such as Hayek and McGowan who view their rapists as monsters. Indeed, as we note below, the myth of the monstrous rapist can function to gaslight victims into believing that their experiences of rape were not “monstrous enough.” Our concern is with the kinds of cultural work that occurs when rhetors mobilize the myth of the monstrous rapist in ways that address publics. We argue that the myth of the monstrous rapist is an antiblack symbolic structure that circulates across social discourses and public responses to the Weinstein scandal.
Drawing on the work of Eric King Watts, we demonstrate that Weinstein’s monstrosity is deployed in a manner that discursively darkens him while still reaffirming norms of whiteness and antiblackness. Such discourses entrench the sexual pathologization of Black masculinity in US public culture and mark Black masculine bodies in ways that sustain the myth of the Black male rapist. Previous scholarship has also illuminated how discourses of monstrosity can fashion sexual violence as the work of anonymous predators rather than friends, lovers, and family members who commit a vast majority of intimate violence. We advance understandings of monstrosity with regard to sexual violence by demonstrating how marking White sexual predators as monstrous figures does not disclose the monstrosity of White masculinity, but instead reifies the representation of Black masculinity as monstrous.
In our first section, we provide a theoretical framing for advancing analysis of the rhetorical norms of the myth of the monstrous rapist through theories of monstrosity and antiblackness. Next, we analyze how Weinstein was figured as an embodiment of a monster, and in the process, how monstrosity functioned to discursively darken the producer and sexual violence in general. Lastly, we reflect on the vexed character of monstrosity and sexual violence, and gesture toward ways of resisting the urge to excommunicate, and therefore darken, monsters such as Weinstein and instead recognize them as especially putrid reflections of the norms that structure White cisheteropatriarchy and sanction pervasive gendered violence in US culture.
The monstrous rapist
Rape myths are “prejudicial, stereotyped, or false beliefs about rape, rape victims, and rapists.” Such beliefs, while empirically untenable, are widespread and have considerable social purchase. Rape myths are the scaffolding of rape culture. For example, many rape myths “deny the existence of sexual violence … unless obvious indicators of force are manifestly evident and justify sexual violence by suggesting that the behaviors of the woman who was raped may have invited the rape.” One of the most prevalent rape myths is the myth that all rapists are monsters—sexual sadists awaiting an opportunity to attack their prey. The rhetorical norms of the monster myth are varied, but all figure the rapist as intrinsically cruel and incapable of normal sexual conduct. The monster rapist is marked as a man yet demasculinized—he is frequently sexually deprived and, therefore, must force sex upon his victims because he cannot find intimacy in any other way. Such men tend to be unattractive, socially inept, or both. To be a monstrous rapist is to be a cultural Other and something less than human. Signifiers that circulate alongside the monster in contemporary rape discourse include “predator,” “devil,” “beast,” “sociopath,” “freak,” or “fiend.” Such renderings posit the rapist’s crimes as intrinsic to him. He engages in wanton sexual violence solely because he wishes to.
Mythologically, the monstrous rapist is traditionally a stranger to the women he attacks and normatively unattractive in appearance. The victim is typically a chaste or otherwise virtuous (White) woman whose sexual integrity warrants protection. The figure of the monster therefore implicates the White feminine body in specific and culturally salient ways and has concrete consequences for legal and cultural responses to rape. If a perpetrator is not conspicuously monstrous, his victims are less legible as such. Similarly, if a victim does not represent pure White femininity, her calls for protection are less credible. Myths of monstrosity often prompt victims of sexual and intimate violence to question the validity of their experiences as “severe” enough to be considered “real” rape because it may not fit within the generic constraints of the monster myth. In other words, although victims may regard their rapists as monsters, the mythos of monstrosity that shapes so much public discourse about rape potentially diminishes the intensity of their experience.
Furthermore, the myth that all rapists are monsters works to obscure what rape is and who is capable of committing it. Shannon O’Hara writes, “if the perpetrator is a devious monster, rape becomes a random act of violence rather than a societal problem.” Of course, sexual violence of all kinds is heinous, but the myth of the rapist as monster obscures the banality and intimacy of most sexual violence. Most rapes are committed by someone the victim knows or is in a relationship with, and the monster myth makes it harder to reckon with intimate violence when someone we know or who does not fit the cultural archetype of the monster rapist perpetrates it.
Like other mobilizations of monstrosity in public culture, the figure of the monstrous rapist is also racialized. Bound in the symbolic manifestations of monstrosity in dominant narratives of sexual violence in the US are sexist and racist presumptions of White men’s ownership over all women’s bodies. The racialized stereotypes that buttress these narratives include the dominance and superiority of White men; the unrapability of Black, Indigenous, and trans people; the innocence and purity of White women who need protection; the exoticization and dehumanization of women of color; and the monstrosity and primitiveness of Black men. While acts of rape have occurred throughout history, the criminalization thereof was concretized in the US to primarily justify the brutalization and dehumanization of Black men during and after chattel slavery, protect White women as property of husbands and fathers, and mark all women’s bodies as ripe for consumption by White men. Persistent myths that Black women lie about rape also continue to foreclose on Black women’s right to seek or establish bodily autonomy and to have credibility in their accusations of assault.
The myth of the Black male rapist has functioned as a distinctly monstrous figure against which the state and public sought to violently protect White women and determine the borders of permissible sexuality. Ronald Jackson, II offers this description of the brute or buck, which is the primary embodied archetype of the Black male rapist:
[The brute] was almost always a tall, dark-skinned muscular, athletically built character and often either bald or with a short haircut. The brute or buck’s primary objective was raping White women. He, essentially, refused to even attempt to control his insatiable sexual desires and urges; hence, the Black body of the brute was scripted to be nothing less than an indiscreet, devious, irresponsible, and sexually pernicious beast.
This myth persists in US public culture in various iterations across political and popular contexts. He figures prominently in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, mobilized the carnal anxieties of many lynch mobs, and continues to register as culturally salient when police officers shoot young Black men to death. Angela Davis argues that the cultural fiction of the monstrous Black male rapist creates the conditions by which Black men, in particular, are more likely to be accused and imprisoned for rape in the US. In that process, prosecutors, journalists, and others incongruously mobilize monstrosity to render Black men as inherently abominable and guilty. Kristin Bumiller similarly argues that the vocabulary of racialized monstrosity is circulated alongside the bodies of Black and brown men in courtrooms to provide the logical and symbolic structure for reading men of color as guilty of rape. Reliance on narratives of monstrosity in the case of sexual violence justifies turning to carceral solutions, which disproportionately impact men of color while also marginalizing Black, brown, and Indigenous women’s experiences of sexual violence.
In addition to marking Black men as inherently sexually sadistic and uncontrollable, the myth of the monstrous Black male rapist provides White masculinity with its opposite and therefore the grounds for judging and punishing sexual violence. Afro-Pessimists argue that Blackness, in its broadest sense, is social death and is constitutive of White Western subjectivity. In other words, the very notion of the human is predicated on the exclusion and disposability of Black bodies. Eric King Watts explains that to be “Blackened” is to be “thrust toward the horrible condition approximating (but not identical to) the Black’s structural position.” Because Blackness is an originary exclusion constitutive of US civilization, it provides symbolic resources for designating White civil society’s most loathed forms of sexual violence as such—they are discursively darkened and therefore outside the normative boundaries of whiteness. The implication of such an understanding of Blackness is that, as Fred Moten argues, “blackness and that people are not the same.” To be clear, we agree wholeheartedly with Moten and Watts that the bodies of those we most explicitly mark as Black and the meanings of Blackness are co-constitutive. But understanding Blackness as a category that exceeds the bodies to which it traditionally adheres illuminates the ways antiblackness operates as a nimble marker of exclusion.
Achille Mbembe explains that contemporary neoliberal public culture mobilizes Blackness in sufficiently flexible ways that foster the Blackening of non-African bodies. While monstrosity is often mobilized to render Black men and other men of color as inherently abominable and guilty in juxtaposition to White men, the latter can be monsters when their actions threaten to disclose the sexual and gendered violence that underwrites White cis-masculine dominance. For example, when White men who are rapists are framed as monsters, they are often marked as exceptional individual cases of “extreme evil.” As we detail in the following section, discourses situate Weinstein outside the norms of White masculinity. While the wealthy film producer did not experience social death relative to other, far more marginalized Black bodies, we argue that discourses about his case darkened him. Because of the racialized logics of sexual violence that rely on widespread myths of the carnal and monstrous Black male rapist lurking in the shadows, the circulation of narratives that focused almost exclusively on Weinstein’s exceptional monstrosity protected normative whiteness from being constituted as monstrous through popular media discussions about sexual violence and failed to frame gendered violence as part of broader patterns of US White supremacist and imperialist violence. To put it bluntly, by marking violent White men as monsters, political and popular discourses can absolve US public culture of its own monstrous deeds while reaffirming the social death of Blackness. If we have any hope of dismantling and abolishing the cultural and political norms that enable systemic sexual and racist violence, we must examine the nuances of how specific discourses work to reinforce various systems of domination simultaneously, and in varying iterations.
Making of a monster
Before proceeding, we wish to be clear that our objective here is not to cast judgment on the recollections or experiences of sexual assault victims. Rage toward and dehumanization of victimizers is a reasonable response to sexual trauma. Women who invoke the imagery of monstrosity to detail their own trauma at the hands of Weinstein are not our focal objects and we are not criticizing or dismissing their feelings or experiences. We are also sympathetic to the desire and impulse of those of us not directly impacted by Weinstein to rage publicly against him and other privileged men who have for too long gotten away with acts of sexual violence because of their racial or class-based privilege. Furthermore, we acknowledge that discourses of monstrosity are not uniformly antiblack or otherwise problematic. Rather, the figure of the monster can function as a generative critical heuristic in its own right and as a transgressive positionality for historically marginalized bodies. For the precise purposes of this project, we are critics interested in the ways spoken memories and affects circulate in public culture and find resonance with other fragments of the Weinstein saga, including the dominant narrative framing of various news stories, the curated imagery of his monstrosity in mass media, and the consequences of those symbolic convergences.
There are three ways that discourses about Weinstein’s monstrosity discursively darkened him while containing his predatory actions and obscuring the systemic realities of gendered violence in White, imperialist, cisheteropatriarchy in US culture. First, his monstrosity was pathologized. Next, the popular coverage emphasized his corporeal monstrosity. Finally, the discourse focused on Hollywood as the “hunting ground” or particular site of perversion.
The pathology of monstrosity
Central to the various public reckonings with Harvey Weinstein’s many acts of sexual violence was reconciling the man with his acts. How do we account for the fact that one of the most successful executives in recent film history assaulted and harassed legions of women? Whereas the relationship between a man and his acts may be complex, the relationship between a monster and its acts are immanent. In other words, there is no distinction. Monstrous rapists, on balance, are all impulse. They are darkened beasts with an insatiable drive to satisfy their carnal desires without regard for consent or social mores. In the aftermath of Weinstein’s fall, public responses to the saga collapsed act and agent by characterizing Weinstein as fundamentally predatory. Public tellings of the Weinstein saga discursively darkened the producer by characterizing his professional and private lives as inherently entrenched in an essential monstrosity.
In the Pulitzer Prize-winning article that hastened Weinstein’s downfall, Ronan Farrow writes, “Weinstein combined a keen eye for promising scripts, directors, and actors with a bullying, even threatening, style of doing business, inspiring both fear and gratitude.” He elaborates, “multiple sources said that Weinstein frequently bragged about planting items in media outlets about those who spoke against him; these sources feared similar retribution.” Suggestive in Farrow’s characterization was that Weinstein was a manipulative megalomaniac. He raped women and he vanquished adversaries in Hollywood. The sadistic acts for which he now must answer were part of a broader structure of monstrous behavior. In a New York Times piece that played an equally consequential role in exposing Weinstein, journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey write, “Mr. Weinstein was a volcanic personality … given to fits of rage and personal lashings of male and female employees alike.” Weinstein, crucially, did not have a volcanic personality. Rather, he was one. Explosiveness and disregard for the dignity of others are posited here as immanent to his subjectivity. Here was a man who either could not or chose not to control his basest impulses toward others. Fundamental to the monstrous rapist is a lack of control over his urges. Even calculated, cunning predators such as Weinstein deploy their strategies in the service of unrelenting sexually violent urges. O’Hara explains that other keywords associated with such monstrosity are “sociopath,” “fiend,” “predator,” and “devil.” While no such words, nor the phrase “monster,” appear in Farrow’s article, they linger enthymematically in his accounts of the myriad accusations against Weinstein. Recounting actor Asia Argento’s descriptions of sexual encounters with Weinstein, Farrow writes that “she described the encounters as one-sided and ‘onanistic.’” Even when engaged in consensual sex or business affairs, Weinstein’s sole priority was his own pleasure and survival. Such single-minded self-interest and disregard for others is the stuff of sociopathy, which is a central characteristic of the monstrous rapist. And while he only sexually preyed on women, Kantor and Twohey note that the assaults and harassment were but one expression of a monstrous disposition. For example, they interview individuals who testify to Weinstein’s penchant for leaking damning stories about competitors and enemies to the Hollywood press. He spared no one.
In her article chronicling her personal trials with Weinstein, Hayek characterizes him as a Jekyll and Hyde figure. After recounting many instances when he yelled and threatened physical violence against those who threatened his ego, Hayek concedes that Weinstein was also capable of being “kind, funny and witty.” She writes, “you just never knew which Harvey you were going to get.” In their profile of Weinstein’s early years, Scott Johnson and Stephen Galloway describe a common thread that connected the “more than two dozen” people from Weinstein’s life to whom they spoke. The journalists write,
Nearly all of them describe a young man of extremes: charming and coarse, brilliant and belligerent, but always fiercely competitive. While he remains a paradoxical figure, this much emerges: It was not simply power that twisted his moral compass; long before he was a mogul, he was a bully and a predator.
In other words, Weinstein was always a monster. The man who terrorized Hayek with his predatory and unpredictable behavior was capable of such cruelty as a young man and aspiring figure in the film industry. While some of their source material and subsequent content suggests a more complex figure, Johnson and Galloway posit Weinstein’s monstrosity as predetermined. For these writers, Weinstein’s monstrous behavior was inborn and pathological.
These framings of the producer function to absolve White heteropatriarchy of its own intrinsic sexual violence. Weinstein stands apart from those who properly perform normative White masculinity as well as Jewish masculinity. While contemporary norms of Jewish gender politics value the “tough Jew,” Weinstein’s toughness exceeded the parameters of acceptable gender performance. He reflects myriad anti-Semitic stereotypes that figure the Jew as diabolical, demonic, monstrous, and exercising outsized control over the Hollywood film industry. In so doing, he risks disclosing the violence that underwrites normative White masculinity. Such discursive darkening marks Weinstein for exclusion from proper whiteness and situates him within ready-made discourses of racialized and gendered monstrosity. His mind’s monstrosity becomes all the more potent when articulated with his hideous body.
The body of a monster
Harvey Weinstein’s body is ugly. At least it is when compared with normative standards of White masculine attractiveness. He is fat. His face sags. Many visual representations of Weinstein position him within ocular registers of anti-Semitism. His corporeal monstrosity figures as a salient element of the broader cultural discourses that darken the producer by marking him as a hideous and monstrous predator.
Details of Weinstein’s corporeal ugliness figure significantly in descriptions of his predatory behavior toward women. At times, journalists, victims, and others explicitly name his body as a salient element in their narratives. In other cases, such details linger enthymematically as other details of Weinstein’s acts are disclosed. In her description of Weinstein’s assault against her, actor Lucia Evans recalls entering a room alone with the producer, explaining, “even just his presence was intimidating.” She explains that, when Weinstein began forcing her to perform oral sex on him, she did not fight back because “he’s a big guy. He overpowered me.” Argento disclosed that he “terrified me, and he was so big.” She described her experiences with Weinstein as “a big fat man wanting to eat you. It’s a scary fairy tale.” The two above descriptions of Weinstein appeared in Farrow’s New Yorker article. Thus, even as Evans and Argento’s memories are intimate, they are also public discourse.
Crucially, constituting Weinstein’s body as hideous also darkens it. Recall that the caricature of the Black brute is traditionally physically overpowering in nature—a superhuman beast of sorts. While Weinstein’s body is not muscular like so many mythological Black male rapists of the White civic imaginary, his still towers above those of petite and thin young women who serve as his prey. In accentuating the non-normativity of Weinstein’s body, these discourses move him further from the locus of normative White masculinity and closer to White projections of Black masculinity expressed through the myth of the Black male rapist.
Visual portrayals of Weinstein also emphasized his corporeal monstrosity and, in so doing, darkened his predatory body. For example, in a cover image entitled “Harvey Weinstein, monster,” drawn for The Hollywood Reporter, artist Edward Kinsella portrays Weinstein’s head from just below the neck up in black and white. The producer appears unshaven, wearing only a gray t-shirt rather than a business suit or Oscar-night tuxedo. One eye is half-open while the other is nearly shut. Weinstein’s mouth hangs ajar in such a way that one might expect to see drool. The open mouth reveals fangs rather than human teeth. The caption under a version of the image appearing on the webpage of the trade magazine Communication Arts reads, “for the Hollywood Reporter. ‘Portrait of producer, rapist and piece of shit Harvey Weinstein.’ 5 × 6 1/2, graphite, ink, watercolor, gouache on paper.”
Kinsella’s portrait constitutes Weinstein as a monster hiding in plain sight. In addition to accentuating Weinstein’s ugly physical characteristics, the artist gives him animalistic fangs. He appears as an unkempt, hairy beast lusting after the next feminine body he will devour, only “exposed” through his revealing fangs. Fangs suggest a hunger for blood and flesh. Among the most pervasive anti-Semitic canards in the Western imaginary is so-called “blood libel,” which imagines Jews as Satanic figures in constant search of gentile blood. Weinstein’s Jewish masculine body, which once dominated an industry that is itself at the center of many anti-Semitic narratives, functions as a further warrant for figuring him as a darkened monstrous rapist. Both the diabolical Jew and the sexually sadistic Black buck occupy spaces outside the boundaries of the human. Both are dark and, therefore, more Black than White.
Courtroom sketch artist Jane Rosensberg also accentuated Weinstein’s darkened physical traits in her so-called “unforgiving” sketch of the producer. What appear to be two detectives flank Weinstein, each holding one of his arms as if restraining a beast. Weinstein’s belly appears massive, causing his blue sweater to function as the sketch’s most conspicuous element and, therefore, call attention to the producer’s fatness. In the sketch, Weinstein’s head cocks backward and to his right. His face is noticeably darker, wrinkly, and droopy. He frowns and stares into the distance. His body size is depicted as noticeably larger than the officers next to him. While Rosenberg’s image of Weinstein differs from Kinsella’s in salient ways, it broadly operates in the same visual registers of darkened grotesque monstrosity. One Twitter user responded to the image with the comment, “I bet that’s exactly what he looks like to his victims.” Another user affixed a GIF of Star Wars villain Jabba the Hutt to their post along with the text, “interesting choice of cross promotion with [forthcoming Star Wars franchise film] Solo.” By comparing Weinstein with the famously gluttonous, misogynist, and violent Star Wars villain, the poster situates Weinstein within a vast lexicon of Hollywood monsters. The ways in which audiences are invited to gaze upon Weinstein’s corporeality indicate how these visual renderings materialize his grotesque monstrosity and darken his body.
Both The Hollywood Reporter cover and Rosensberg’s sketch muddle and eschew Weinstein’s whiteness and place him within the familiar racialized registers of Blackened sexual criminality while also calling on anti-Semitic stereotypes that themselves darken Weinstein’s body. Kinsella’s portrait decenters Weinstein’s whiteness by marking his physical characteristics within familiar visual norms of racialized monstrosity. Rosensberg’s courtroom sketch, on the other hand, quite explicitly darkens Weinstein’s skin. The image of two White police officers constraining a darkened monster reifies a durable narrative of protective White bodies shielding White civilization from racialized sexual violence. In so doing, the image sustains broader cultural norms that function to perpetuate the carceral state’s role in violently expressing White supremacy. Weinstein’s monstrous figuration reaffirms White fantasies of Black criminality and the myth of the Black male rapist as monster as well as the purity and humanity of “normal,” “human” White men and the monster’s victims. In marking men such as Weinstein as monsters, publics darken them and absolve the context from which violent acts arose.
Furthermore, the publication of recollections that frame Weinstein’s corporeal monstrosity, as well as visual renderings of Weinstein’s fat, darkened, monstrous body, produced a cultural context that conditioned the ways other descriptions of the producer’s corporeality could be read. For example, in his description of French actor Emma de Caunes’s traumatic encounter with Weinstein, Farrow writes, “Weinstein came out, naked and with an erection. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked. Weinstein demanded that she lie on the bed and told her that many other women had done so before her.” Any man exposing his naked body and erect penis to a nonconsenting woman is disturbing. But here, Farrow invites us to mentally picture Harvey Weinstein nude and aroused. The same fat, ugly body that would adorn so many news articles and caricatures now haunts the imagination without the cover of clothing. Other accounts of Weinstein’s assaults include demands that women give him nude massages or watch him shower. Stories of such predatory acts, which are by no means exclusive to Weinstein, become affixed to Weinstein’s monstrous body in juxtaposition to the young and normatively attractive women who are his victims. Thus, descriptions such as Farrow’s, drawn from the recollections of Weinstein’s victims, conjure an image of a hideous beast occupying intimate space with beautiful women. “It was like a hunter with a wild animal,” de Caunes recalls. The predatory monster tracking down the gorgeous (usually White) woman is a common narrative within US horror and the cultural politics of monstrosity. Such chasing is especially characteristic of the figure of the Black male rapist against whom the state and civil society seek to protect the damsel in distress—the embodiment of pure, White femininity. The corporeal discourses of that emerged in the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s downfall, therefore, trade in both reinforcing the myth of the monstrous Black male rapist while also eroticizing and exalting White femininity as the ideal of womanhood.
Amidst such articulations, a narrative of Weinstein as a sympathetic White male whose monstrosity was born of rejection from beautiful women also emerges. A lengthy Hollywood Reporter article chronicling Weinstein’s youth and early career speculates that insecurities with his physical appearance and the resulting rejection by attractive women played a role in turning Weinstein into a monster. The Reporter article, entitled “Young Harvey Weinstein: The Making of a Monster,” offers a sympathetic portrayal of the abuser by providing an origin story to show readers how monsters are born. Like so many other monsters, Weinstein sought to capture that which he could not have.
Although it presumes to offer history and nuance with regard to Weinstein’s sexual predations, this narrative articulates responsibility for Weinstein’s actions to the attractive women who rebuffed him rather than the logics of whiteness that we argue structure sexual violence in the US. This narrative is formally similar to the discourses of “incels” who argue that they are entitled to punish women for rejecting them romantically and sexually. The Reporter piece posits Weinstein’s actions as the logical outcome of a lifetime of rejection from women to whose bodies he desires access. If only he had been loved earlier in life, he might have spared the legions of women who now accuse him of sexual assault. In the Reporter’s telling, Weinstein enacted his rage upon the bodies of beautiful and famous women as if forcing them to pay penance for his past rejections. The article frames Weinstein as a sympathetic character whose monstrosity was the result of humiliation and frustration. What might have been productively understood as a performance of possessive whiteness laying claim to feminine bodies figures instead as reasonable heartbreak taken to violent extremes. Like so many discourses of White violence, such framings function to humanize White male preparators even as other discourses Blacken them.
Such contextualization of Weinstein’s monstrosity is also notable because it is so uncommon in less publicly conspicuous stories of rape committed by Black men and other men of color. While Weinstein, a highly successful White man, warrants biographical scrutiny, less privileged men accused of rape rarely receive such attention in public discourse. Theirs is a monstrosity without origin rooted in the entrenched pathologization of Blackness. While Weinstein remains a darkened monster, his whiteness affords him nuance. These deployments of monstrosity trade in the upward mobility of whiteness even as they darken Weinstein. Whatever nuance Weinstein’s monstrosity invites, however, these discourses continue to frame him as anathema to normative White masculinity.
Hunting grounds
Monsters occupy and hunt upon the terrain of specific spaces. In horror genres, this typically entails any manifestation of what Carol Clover calls “the Terrible Place.” Other monsters occupy spaces with more porous boundaries. Such is the case for Weinstein. Hollywood was his space, but not the singular Los Angeles neighborhood. Rather, just as it is for the film industry in general, Hollywood is metonym for Weinstein’s professional sphere. In her work on rhetorical mobilities, Leslie Harris argues that racialized discourses about mobility within spaces aid critics in “understanding power and public identity.” Responses to Weinstein’s repeated acts of sexual violence engaged in a cartography of Hollywood that characterized it as Weinstein’s hunting ground and posited Weinstein as a symptom of Hollywood’s gendered culture. In this section, we narrate how, despite these critiques, these rhetorics still assured Weinstein’s social death while preserving the integrity of normative White masculinity.
In an editorial she penned for the same issue of Hollywood Reporter that featured Kinsella’s grotesque portrait of Weinstein on its cover, writer and filmmaker Linda Bloodworth-Thomason argued that misogyny and sexual violence saturate Hollywood. She writes,
forget those iconic letters that make up the Hollywood sign. It would be much more fitting if there was a giant penis casting a shadow over all the women who tirelessly endeavor to rise above this unpoliced playground for men.
She adds, “Harvey Weinstein may have been at the top of the sexual predator food chain, but these kinds of atrocities against women routinely go unreported and unpunished in the entertainment industry.” In Bloodworth-Thomason’s telling, Hollywood is a dangerous neighborhood where vulnerable feminine bodies dare not tread. She writes,
one would think all this rampant misogyny would demand that Hollywood take on the issue of social justice for women—the same way it has embraced the cause of the African American, Jewish and LGBTQ communities. But so far … just the sad sound of crickets.
In ways that mirror actor Patricia Arquette’s controversial 2015 Oscar acceptance speech, Bloodworth-Thomason posits an essential category of woman-as-victim and, in so doing, figures woman as a distinctly White positionality. In distinguishing the interests of women from those of people of color, religious minorities, or queer and trans people (many of whom are women), Bloodworth-Thomason fashions a coherent White, cis woman victim against whom Hollywood’s full sexual monstrosity is directed.
In a Variety article entitled “Harvey Weinstein Is a Monster of Hollywood’s Own Making. What Are We Going to Do about It?,” critic Sonia Saraiya shares Bloodworth-Thomason’s assessment of Hollywood’s gender politics. She writes, “another actress. Another director. Another story where the brutal violence of coercion was somehow made palatable by the norms of the industry, or the desperation to succeed, or just plain fear of retribution.” Saraiya’s cartography of Hollywood charts a space with porous boundaries that surround and conceal scenes of sexual violence. It is a space that renders the bodies of women who enter it vulnerable to monstrous rapists. Writing explicitly of mobility and vulnerability, Bloodworth-Thomason conjures the image of a young woman who, with dreams of stardom, leaves behind a wholesome life to enter the Hollywood’s violent terrain. She expresses a commitment to the belief that
a young woman who climbs into her battered Honda Civic and says goodbye to everything she has ever known and loved should be able to pursue her dream of becoming an actress without having to watch Harvey Weinstein take a shower.
Here, the enthymeme of Weinstein’s ugly, darkened body converges with the rhetorical mobilities that frame Bloodworth-Thomason and Saraiya’s cartographies of Hollywood. Hollywood is a space where innocent (and presumably White) women go with dreams in their eyes only to be at the mercy of the town/industry’s monstrous men. While the narratives that elucidate the cartography of Hollywood’s gendered violence do not individualize monstrosity to Weinstein, they trade in the symbolic currencies of the monster rapist mythos by emblazoning archetypes of White femininity and uncritically participating in the exchange of racialized symbolic patterns of monstrosity.
Saraiya shares Bloodworth-Thomason’s disgust with Hollywood’s culture of sexual violence and resistance to the notion that Weinstein is exceptional, but she offers a more nuanced critique of Hollywood in ways that ultimately problematize discourses that reify the myth of the monstrous rapist in general. Saraiya writes,
It is far too convenient to make Weinstein a monster. And if any industry should see through that easy lie, it is Weinstein’s own—Oscar bait films, which make hay out of complexity, nuance, and shared humanity. If we can understand Hannibal Lecter, interrogate war heroes, imagine sex lives of aliens!—then we can definitely get inside the mind of a rather mundane sex offender, this run-of-the-mill abuser of power.
She adds, “distancing him, and others like him, is like the rest of us washing our hands of what his scandals revealed to the world at large. We don’t get that out. We don’t deserve to get that out.” Saraiya further writes, “the problem is so vast, and so integrated into our social fabric, that we are not equipped to address it.” Saraiya argues that, if Weinstein is a monster, then “we” are all monsters. In resisting Weinstein’s status as a monster—even a monster among monsters—and implicating herself and her colleagues in sanctioning his actions, Saraiya also resists the specificity of Hollywood vis-à-vis sexual violence. Rather, if Weinstein is a symptom of Hollywood, then Hollywood is a symptom of the public culture of which Weinstein’s industry is both cause and consequence. Saraiya’s response to Weinstein’s abuses suggests that no space or monstrous form can contain and do justice to sexual violence. Rather, she contends that, unlike the flesh-eating monsters of Hollywood lore, Weinstein is “mundane.” His violence is banal. His acts are those of so many other sexual predators and give expression to a broader ideological apparatus of gendered violence. Saraiya, in other words, resists the myth of the monstrous rapist by revealing that predators are everywhere.
In naming sexual violence as mundane, Saraiya’s Variety article does what so many others failed to do when attending to the implications of the Weinstein scandal for Hollywood as a whole. Those who characterized Hollywood as Weinstein’s hunting grounds or pathologized the film industry with regard to sexual violence contained Weinstein’s abuses to Hollywood’s porous boundaries. Saraiya, on the other hand, characterized the producer’s predations as a function of structures larger than the man himself. She argues that one producer’s acts give expression to a vast cultural logic of masculinity. But in failing to name the centrality of whiteness in Weinstein’s monstrosity, Saraiya still works to contain it. In other words, containment need not be a matter of scope, but is a bordering practice that protects something in which publics affectively invest. By characterizing Weinstein as a symptom of masculinity in general, Saraiya contains his monstrosity in ways that prevent it from contaminating the whiteness that is so essential to its enactment. In so doing, the logics of antiblackness that overdetermine the myth of the monstrous rapist remain unspoken warrants.
Conclusion
We have argued in this essay that the prevailing discourses of monstrosity associated with Weinstein’s repeated sexual violence engage in a logic of antiblackness and reflect the cunning ways whiteness strategically evades reckoning with its own monstrosity. In so doing, these discourses work to sustain the innocence of whiteness and maintain several harmful antiblack myths regarding criminality and sexual violence through the deployment of the rhetorical norms of the myth of the monstrous rapist. As satisfying as framing Weinstein as a monster may be for many of us invested in confronting systemic sexual violence, the collateral consequences of prevailing Blackened deployments of the monstrous rapist in the Weinstein saga are considerable. Such rape myths are problematic because they advance inaccurate and racialized narratives regarding sexual violence. Kate Lockwood Harris explains that discourses about rape often function to individualize and contain sexual violence to the bodies and instances of singular rapists—rapists whose public renderings adhere to a generic economy of tropes that relegate sexual violence to the domain of the individual rather than institutional. Rape, in other words, becomes figured primarily as a form of intimate violence rather than an intimate expression of much broader modes of racial and gender violence. The figure of the monstrous rapist forces experiences of sexual violence into brittle generic forms that jettison those experiential aspects that do not adhere to normative understandings of how sexual violence and victims thereof look and act.
Furthermore, as several others argue and we wish to emphasize here, confronting sexual violence requires complex understandings of gendered violence as part of broader tapestries of racist and imperialist violence that are continually shifting in order to sanction further violence against marginalized bodies as a mechanism of social and political control. Sexual violence in the US is a mode of conquest within the long legacies of White supremacy and settler colonialism. To posit a wealthy White rapist such as Weinstein as an anomalous monster, or even as a monstrous symptom of Hollywood’s toxic gender and sexual politics, disarticulates the producer’s predatory acts from the broader regimes of White supremacist violence of which he and his industry are part. To do so renders illegible the sexual monstrosity intrinsic to whiteness and, in an especially cruel irony, performs such a rendering in the context of a social movement against sexual violence founded by a Black woman committed to naming and ameliorating the distinct ways women of color experience sexual violence. Refusing to name whiteness’s monstrosity ignores such specificity and, therefore, recenters White femininity as the embodiment of normative victimhood. Such refusal, in other words, is antiblack.
In erasing the monstrosity of whiteness, public discourses in the wake of Weinstein’s predatory acts also sustained some of the most insidious and damaging stereotypes of racialized monstrosity. Specifically, although Weinstein himself is a White man, renderings of his monstrosity traded in antiblack and anti-Semitic narratives. In so doing, these discourses provided whiteness with an alibi for Weinstein and instead reified longstanding antiblack myths of sexual violence. When the predator was White, sexual violence remained darkened. Thus, the Weinstein saga illuminates the flexible ways antiblack discourses of sexual violence persist in public rape culture.
Discourses of monstrosity are not nonstarters for emancipatory work regarding sexual violence or other modes of oppression. Bernadette Marie Calafell makes this clear when she attends to the various ways marginalized communities enlist monstrosity to enact their own kinds of publicity or mark the monstrosity associated with whiteness and other regimes of domination. Regarding Weinstein as a monster is not, in itself, problematic. Rather, it is the labor we ask the monster to perform that has myriad entailments regarding antiblackness and whiteness as well as their legacies of gendered violence. As Saraiya demonstrates in her commentary regarding Weinstein and Hollywood, monstrosity can function as a generative heuristic that ultimately dismantles itself when properly scrutinized within the broader context of its deployment. By questioning Weinstein’s status as a monster, Sariya illuminates the limitations of hegemonic deployments of monstrosity and accentuates the ways Weinstein might be legible as a symptom of normative whiteness. To the extent that Weinstein is a monster, he embodies the monstrosity of whiteness itself. If cases such as Weinstein’s are to be opening salvos for a robust public reckoning regarding sexual violence, he and the other monsters cannot be understood as the kind that exceed and pervert the norms of whiteness. Rather, they embody such norms.