Reflections from the Chair

MAY 2024

Hello, and welcome to our panel event, Misogyny, Racism, and Violence at UCSB: The Isla Vista Killings 10 years Later. 

My name is Jane Ward, and I’m the chair of feminist studies department, and I am joined by my colleagues in Feminist Studies Laury Oaks, Debanuj DasGupta, aand Mireille Miller-Young, as well as Tristan Bridges from the Department of Sociology.

Before we begin I’d like to thank the Department of Feminist Studies, The Women’s Center, The Center for Feminist Futures, and the Pahl Center for the Study of Critical Social Issues for sponsoring this panel. Thank you to the MCC for this beautiful space.

I also want to be clear that we are meeting here today at a settler institution that exists on the occupied, unceded, and ancestral lands of the Chumash peoples. Our department stands in opposition to the violence committed by the University of California against Indigenous peoples—through resource extraction, racist research conducted in the name of science, and the ongoing exclusion of, or lack of adequate support for, Indigenous scholarship, including and especially Indigenous feminist scholarship.  We stand in solidarity with Indigenous resistance, thrivance, sovereignty, and land back movements around the world and we affirm the knowledge of Indigenous feminists who teach us that occupation and settler colonialism are deeply gendered forms of violence, and the gender binary itself a settler colonial invention. 

 ***

There are many ways to relate to the tragedy of May 23, 2014, ten years ago yesterday. One way is to grieve and remember. We grieve for the families of Weihan Wang, Cheng Yuan Hong, George Chen, Katherine Breanne Cooper, Veronika Elizabeth Weiss, and Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez. At UCSB, we memorialize and we archive, so that we remember their lives and the way this campus was forever transformed by collective shock, fear, and outrage.

Another way to relate the tragedy is that we analyze it, and we do this not to distance ourselves from its devastation but to the grapple with its causes. We want to be able to recognize the conditions that makes misogynistic violence possible and to place what happened in Isla Vista within broader contexts of gendered and racial violence. Doing this allows us to honestly and accurately assess what we have done—and not done— to prevent it from happening again, and again. 

This is why we organized this panel: so that we can talk about the normalized hatred of women that goes unaddressed until it erupts in a public catastrophe (and then is still called by other names); so that we can have a space to unflinchingly examine how violence is one of the constitutive elements of some of the world’s most beloved constructs (constructs like masculinity and heterosexuality and whiteness); and so that we can move beyond the simplistic accounts of this tragedy that have tried to focus us on only one causal variable.

The Isla Vista tragedy defies many of the common narratives about the killing sprees young men.

·      It is not only a story of gun violence, as the perpetrator killed three people with a knife, a weapon he’d have access to if we passed even the most ambitious of gun control legislation. 

·      It is not only a story of mental illness, as research shows that mental illness manifests in culturally-variable ways, shaped by gender, region, religion, and age and a number of other factors. The vast majority of people living with mental illness do not commit episodes of mass violence.

·      It is not only a story of violence against women, despite Rodger’s stated aims, because four of the six people he killed were male students and because his manifesto and previous online behavior made clear that he was angry at men who successfully accessed sex with women, angry at the men in Pickup Artist spaces who promised to teach other men how to manipulate women into sex but hadn’t delivered on their promise, angry at Black men for being able to “get” white women, and angry at Asian men, including himself, for having failed at this. I want to be clear that in the manosphere, where Rodger spent much time, the swirl of men’s feelings of resentment about the racial hierarchies of heteromasculinity are a conversation among men, one where women appear not as people but instrumentalized objects of male achievement.  I can’t help but invoke Rubin’s “traffic in women” here, and Sedwick’s “between men,”  because these are spaces where the trading in women (white women in particular)animate male homosociality. I have written at length about these spaces precisely because they are (what Tina Gruebler would call) affective networks for men. They are spaces of men’s suffering, fragility, and anxiety not about so much about women, but about access to the resource of women.  

·      The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at the Hague called the Isla Vista killings an act of misogynist terrorism. This, I think, is a suitable term, and helps to explain why the murders in Isla Vista were taken up and celebrated by legions of incels and other denizens of global manosphere. But these killings were also about white supremacy, about the anti-Asian racism that Rodger had internalized and that queers or perversely gender Asian men, about the objectification of white women’s bodies, and about the misogynoir underneath all of this. I examine this in my research on Pick Up Artists, a community that Rodger circulated in, because seduction workshops for Asian men were among the most popular, with many focused specifically on training Asian men in how to seduce white, blonde women –the women they had been socialized to desire.  And for Asian men living in who could spend many thousands of dollars on this, these seduction training companies would happily take them on sex tourism trips to northern Europe (the Bangladesh to Sweden sex route I talk about in Tragedy of Heterosexuality). And, as is made evident on Pornhub, Isla Vista and Santa Barbara loom charge in the pornographic imagination as a place of access to white women’s bodies. For this reason, we can understand it as a hot spot of aggrieved masculinity, and we can expect more violence here unless we intervene.

I’ll close my comments by saying that it is a mindboggling exercise to teach feminist studies in this era. On the one hand, the evidence of patriarchal crisis is everywhere.  From the unapologetic misogyny of Donald Trump to that of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, China’s Xi Jinping, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the dehumanization of women, queer, and trans people has become a normalized feature of the political zeitgeist and its consequences are global and deadly. On the other hand, the discipline of gender studies—the very field of research on gender-based violence and its solutions— continues to be dismissed as frivolous, unmarketable, and inconsequential in the “real world.” Only patriarchy itself could take a crisis of this scope and magnitude and reduce it to a niche interest, or have the audacity to question the real-world applicability of teaching students to produce solutions to one of the most pressing social problems.   

And with that rant, I turn it over to my colleagues.