Shame and disgrace in Australian football culture: Rape claims and public affect
Highlights
► I examine popular public discourse responding to rape claims against footballers. ► I examine how emotion defines rape culture in Australian football. ► I examine how ‘family’ reproduces social emotion in this context. ► I argue that shame is feminized and disgrace is masculinized. ► I suggest that in this context public shaming fails as a deterrent for rape.
Introduction
Football, or rugby, has a prominent place in the fabric of Australian cultural life as one of the two most popular national sports – the other being cricket. In Australia, there are two dominant codes of football: Rugby League (established in NSW in 1907) and Australian Rules (established in Victoria 1858). They have since evolved to become the present-day institutions of the National Rugby League (NRL) and Australian Football League (AFL). The NRL and AFL project a certain hegemonic configuration (Connell, 1995) of working-class masculinity characterized by athleticism, strength, endurance, toughness, aggression, and tolerance to pain. This is most likely because football is “a working-class, professional game” in contrast to cricket and rugby union, which are more traditionally affiliated with the middle and upper classes (Hay, 2006: 168). Unlike cricket, which is slower and more strategic, football is fast, gladiatorial, violent and action-packed. Knee and shoulder reconstructions are par for the course and painful collisions are inevitable, so there is an expectation that players must be able to “take it like a man”. Like many masculine sporting codes, the Australian football leagues are privileged sites of the cultural construction of heterosexual masculinity in a homosocial setting. Contact sports, such as football, are a traditionally masculine arena through which male bonds are cemented and in which masculinity is performed and ratified by other men (Flood, 2008, 341). The homosocial institution of the football league territorializes male–male interaction and codifies group belonging in specific ways; as a traditionally homophobic institution prizing heterosexual masculinity, football legitimizes gender through ritualized performances of heterosexual belonging, both on and off the field. As Michael Flood (2008) points out, heterosexualized male bonding can operate as a patriarchal strategy that strengthens the exclusion of women from masculine domains and reinforces gendered ideologies and practices that reproduce male superiority. Hence, the rape of women is one means by which male bonding in such environments is enacted (Flood, 2008, 350–1). Over the last decade, the football codes in Australia, most especially the NRL, have become increasingly notorious for rape allegations made against professional players.
The most recent highly publicized media event of this nature occurred in 2009, with allegations of rape made against celebrity NRL player Matthew Johns. The Matthew Johns case involved several NRL players and was a high profile news story, but it was not the first time that the NRL had been subject to intense media scrutiny over rape claims. The Matthew Johns allegations in many ways reprised the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs furor of 2004. The Bulldogs scandal was alleged to have taken place at the Novotel Pacific Bay Resort near Coffs Harbour and involved at least six players and a 20-year-old woman, while in the Matthew Johns scandal, a 19-year-old New Zealand woman (known to the news reading public as “Clare”) had claimed that as many as twelve Cronulla Sharks players and officials “engaged in or observed sex acts involving her” (Read & Kogoy, 2009, 1) in a Christchurch hotel in 2002. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's current affairs program Four Corners broke the Matthew Johns story seven years after the alleged rape took place as part of its research for a piece on football and rape culture. The Bulldogs and Sharks allegations both attracted the attention of popular current affairs programs and were long-running sagas in the mediascape.2 No sexual assault charges were laid in either case, due to insufficient evidence, though the Bulldogs players were reportedly fined by the club for breaching the code of conduct (Magnay, 2004).
This paper will draw upon fan responses to the Johns incident to examine the way in which the flow of public emotion constructs gendered subjects, reproduces patriarchal rape narratives, and justifies the crime of sexual assault. Where previous research on Australian football and rape allegations has looked primarily at media narratives that construct certain identities (Toffoletti, 2007, Waterhouse-Watson, 2007, Waterhouse-Watson, 2009) and the racialization of rape as justification for racist policies and practices (Baird, 2009), this paper contributes to the feminist literature by interrogating the emotional content of fan responses to footballers' sexual transgressions. This is, first and foremost, a textual analysis that examines the emotional shape of “public opinion” emerging from fan narratives made publicly available through online news posting. Given the evidence in the public opinion reproduced here, I suggest, in keeping with prior feminist literature on rape shaming (see for example, Bourke, 2009, Buchwald et al., 1993, Davis, 1981, Henderson, 1992, Herman, 1994, Raine, 1999), that shame is the primary motivating emotion in a fan discourse that seeks to silence Clare's account of her experience. However, I argue for a further distinction to be made between shame and disgrace in order to account for the contrasting ways in which dishonor traverses gender, or how the work of shameful emotion “involves the ‘sticking’ of signs to bodies” (Ahmed, 2004, 13) marked by sexual difference. While footballers publicly accused of rape do experience dishonor, I argue that public revelations of sexual assault nevertheless fail to produce a shamed, and morally accountable, masculine subject. The problem, as I see it, is in a division between identity and appearance: where shame imposed from without reappears within as a core quality of the shamed identity, disgrace signals a demotion in status, a shift in social positioning. Where shame lives in and through the body as a deeply painful ontology, disgrace affects an already recuperable and socially mobile public image. In the public narratives outlined in this paper, disgrace carries the expectation of redemption so that the dishonored footballer may again be loved, while shame punishes the women who speak its name.
To this end, I query those arguments that position shame as an emotion whose primary purpose is the prohibition of violence against the other. In The Civilizing Process Norbert Elias views shame as integral to the development of civility and sociability through its encouragement of internalized constraint (Russell, 1998, 306). Similarly, Aldrich claims that “there are certain things peculiar to a civilized society which its members are naturally deterred from doing, and shame is the special, natural deterrent — just as fear naturally deters the animal in a society of animals” (Aldrich, 1939, 73). While John Rawls sees shame as a properly moral, not natural, emotion, he too states that shame forces a reflection upon violence done to the other (in guilt) through the experience of the self as both unworthy of the respect of the other whom we value, and lacking in the qualities we ourselves hold in high regard (Rawls, 1971, p445–446). Given this emphasis upon shame's moral regulatory role, criminologists such as Dan M. Kahan, Christopher Lasch, Amitai Etzioni, and John Braithwaite have gone on to advocate the use of shaming as a powerful tool in crime control (Nussbaum, loc. 214).
Yet while shame may be necessary for the internalization of the other's pain through the translation of moral guilt into the bad feeling of social inadequacy, I suggest that this subjective recognition of a bad deed is absent in the context of Australian football culture because the male footballer body does not blush. In the context of sexual violence against women, shame resolutely fails as a deterrent for wrongful behavior. By this I mean that even when subject to public dishonor, such as that brought about by allegations of rape publicized in the mass media, the footballing body evades the sticky taint of shame; while shame abjects the feminine from the social order, disgrace offers masculinity the potential to reinvent itself to once again become the beloved object of identification.
Section snippets
Footballers accused of rape and public response
This paper seeks to explain the circulation of shame in fan discourse through an analysis of publicly accessible online reader responses to rape allegations against Matthew Johns, which were broadcast in the national media in 2009. I use material from the online forums of newspapers based in Queensland, NSW and Victoria – including the Daily Telegraph (Sydney), Herald Sun (Melbourne), Newcastle Herald (Newcastle), Courier-Mail (Brisbane) – as well as independent news source Crikey and social
She should be a/shamed
[…] the young woman involved showed an extreme lack of respect for herself (before the actual “act”) by putting herself in such a position in the first place […] just because she was ashamed of her own actions does not give her the right to “shame” the other parties involved […] Shame on her (Chantelle McBride, 2009).
There is nowhere for Clare to hide from shame's touch: the shameless woman lacking in self-respect prefigures the shameful act and invites shame upon herself by attempting to shame
It's a private family matter of infidelity
Leave the man alone, his private life is his private life – and for him and his wife to work out, not trial by Australia (nh jan of Brisbane, 2009).
Australians love their “footy”, and players at the top echelons of the sport are very highly paid and accorded celebrity status. The emotional, psychic and time investments that Australians put into the NRL and AFL indicate the prominence of football as a sport which contributes to a broader sense of national identity. Public adulation propels
Conclusion
This paper has sought to understand the emotional content of fan responses to rape allegations against footballers. It argues that there are affective transactions that occur between players, clubs and fans that work against the legal definition of sexual assault as a crime and reproduce deeply disturbing misogynist rape mythologies. The social emotion of shame is central to this economy of affect, and its feminized attachment to the female body perpetuates victim-blaming ideology. I suggest
Acknowledgments
This was a difficult article to write because of the sensitive nature of the subject matter and the emotional intensity of the narratives. Reading through the hostility in fan responses was both confronting and exhausting, and I hope I have done justice to Clare’s version of events even though the audience for this article is probably not quite as large as the public who read and discussed the news stories at the time. I owe my thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable time and
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