Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Exhibiting the expulsion of transgression 35
This rivalry leads to scandal. Girard deploys the use of the term
‘scandal’ to refer specifically to a situation whereby a person or group
is obstructed from their desire of what the model possesses. They
cannot obtain their desire in that they cannot displace the model and
acquire what the model has or the rivalry within the group is so
intense that everyone prevents everyone else from succeeding. This
escalates to the point where those involved need to ‘let off steam’ or
the social fabric of mimesis will burst. At this point, all those involved
in this tangle of rivalry turn their frustrated desire against a victim,
someone who is blamed and persecuted for being ‘identified as an
offender causing scandal’. 87 The ritual act of scandal and sacrifice
stems from the operation of the ‘single victim mechanism’ in which a
human is offered as a victim of sacrifice to be either expelled or
killed. The ritual of expelling a victim is termed ‘scapegoating’ and as
part of the single victim mechanism ‘ ... provides most communities
with their sense of collective identity. But the price to be paid is the
destruction of an innocent outsider: the immolation of the ‘other’ on
the altar of the ‘same’.’ 88
In relation to Girard’s theory, Cohen becomes the scapegoat in
Patriotic drag in that he is deemed to be an offender that causes a
scandal. Cohen provides a stumbling block to the neo-Nazi supporters
by exposing to them not only the construction and artificiality of the
masculinity that they are mimicking but also through his use of drag
that reveals gender as an ‘imitation without an origin’. In Patriotic
drag, Cohen disarms the mimetic desire of the neo-Nazi supporters,
which is met by his expulsion from the event. Girard 89 describes this
action by stating that ‘[w]e easily see now that scapegoats multiply
wherever human groups seek to lock themselves into a given identitycommunal,
local, national, ideological, racial, religious, and so on’.
The neo-Nazi supporters, by locking themselves into a given identity,
forge a communal identity of sameness achieved through the
elimination of the other. This process mobilises the community into a
mob and according to Girard 90 suggests ‘a military operation against
a real or imaginary enemy’. The enemy in this case is Cohen in that
he is deemed as abnormal to the heterosexual matrix. Girard
identifies social abnormality as another element in the process of
scapegoatism. In such a case, the ‘average’ determines the norm so
that the further one is from the ‘normal’ social status of whatever
kind, the greater the risk of persecution. 91 This concept of the norm
is also integral in Foucault’s work. The ‘power of the norm’ is
expressed above all in discipline, which subjugates individuals to a
87 Williams ‘Foreword’ (n 85 above) xii.
88
Kearney (n 84 above) 216.
89 Girard (n 85 above) 160.
90 BO Ushedo ‘Unloading guilt: the innocent victim as illustrated by James Baldwin
& Rene Girard’ (1997) 53 Journal of Religious Thought 131 140.
91 Ushedo (n 90 above) 131.