Dr. Cloud – “You are a scary woman.”
Framing the Enemy in Conservative Hate Mail
Stepping in to Olin 110 was a pleasant surprise in itself as I’ve never been to a guest lecture so crowded before, a feeling that was soon to be succeeded by the similarly pleasant surprise of Dr. Cloud’s motherly demeanor and thought provoking material. Sitting in bright red with a sunny smile, she quickly cut through her mask of cookie-harmlessness by presenting us with a hand-out of the war being waged against her via followers of the hard conservative media and an impressive thesis where she attempted to explain this phenomenon as “a social movement strategy [called] “framing by foil”, or establishing one’s own identity by negatively framing another” (Cloud).
Going on to explain this means of identity establishment in terms of the three main categories of hate mail she’s received over the years: “scholar as elitist intellectual, the Leftist as national traitor, and the feminist/lesbian as gender traitor”, she argued that these foils only held power or sustainability while kept under the privatizing wraps of her own email inbox (Cloud). It’s a sort of personal identity reassurance or reaffirmation that was actually best summed up by a fellow lecture-goer, Evan Brewer, as something so obvious most people wouldn’t normally think of it, that to label someone with something negative is to silently suggest that they are the opposite. Essentially, this realization means that people attacking Dr. Cloud with rhetoric and ideas adopted from the conservative media are not simply attacking her because of a differing of opinion but because – as is made clear by their method of attaining said rhetoric and ideas through a media source – they must have some form of labeling and something to stand up against in order to defend, justify, and reaffirm their security within their own media-constructed identities.
Her lecture, very orderly, very clear, very professional, really did stun me as did her coping mechanism of laughter as I read through some of the emails she received in response to her own liberal perspective and lifestyle. Emails that threatened her and her daughter’s safety, emails linking her with Hitler, emails suggesting that she should have sex with men, others suggesting she should go live in the Middle East or simply improve her manners, and even one which suggested that a student of hers should throw acid in her face – a litany of hatred and useless attack that not only inspired fear but did nothing to further or aid the conservative cause. It really did frighten and baffle me that there are people out there who believe that this sort of hostility is necessary and even helpful in explaining or defending a cause, highlighting for me how paper thin their arguments and their own self-security with those arguments must be. Really, for me it begged the question of just how much of their personal identities were carved out of the larger group identity of the conservative movement as defined and bolstered by certain medias (such as Fox news) and why they would feel empowered by such a crutch to self-definition that leaves no room for compromise or concession – by something so frighteningly brittle that it must tear down even a college professor from voicing an opinion.
Of course, what surprised me even further was the fact that once Dr. Cloud brought these emails out into the light of day and public eye, immediately people began to recant and apologize. If something is so central to a person’s own identity and belief system that they would feel compelled to send hate mail and participate in public medias that encourage such responses, then why would they be so unwilling to have that trained response be put before public scrutiny? If someone believes they’re right that passionately and yet is able to step back at the first suggestion of further opposition, it suggests to me that perhaps they never really believed they were right to begin with, perhaps they never really thought of an honest opposing view as having a face connected to it, perhaps they assumed that all opposition was in fact some quiet phantom as the hard conservative media would have it portrayed. – Why else would anyone assume that such outrageous opinion and hate would be fostered and kept quiet? And I suppose this is what really gripped me about the lecture and what I would’ve liked to hear more about: about personal/individual identities being constructed and dependent upon realities created by certain, specific medias.
peace out for now, amigos
