Masculinity and medicalization: Gender and vocabularies of motive in the narrative of a sex offender

Abstract

This paper explores the tension between vocabularies of motive provided by a serial sex offender in his narrative construction of his nonconsensual sexual activity. Current discourses on the topic emphasize the efficacy of social control measures and behavioral and pharmacological interventions. There is a dearth of sociological literature exploring the social meanings of sexual offense. Employing a symbolic interactionist approach to a sex offender’s account of self provides an opportunity for making visible the discursive construction of social processes. Deploying broad gender stereotypes in depictions of the women against whom he offended, the case presented here also relied on three dominant therapeutic constructions of the sexual deviant, the psychosocial, the addiction/compulsion model, and the bio-psychiatric—all of which neglect the gendered aspect of his offenses. Positing himself as a “true sex offender” and voluntarily taking hormonal suppressants that rendered him impotent, he was the ideal subject of bio-psychiatric discourse. The paper analyses his narrative in terms of contrasting notions of gender and deviance, masculinity and medicalization, and explores the ways language of institutionally supported interventions are used to make meaningful both normal and deviant identities, while disengaging from gender discourses.

Keywords

sex offenders narrative analysis sexual harassment chemical castration

Widely seen as a social problem, sex offenders are increasingly the subjects of state control. As this criminal justice population grows—there are currently nearly 770,000 registered sex offenders in the USA (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 2010)—the production of knowledge regarding such offenders is increasingly influenced by risk management techniques; in addition to therapeutic treatments, which focus on deviant behavior, pharmacological approaches are also being explored. The intellectual climate surrounding sex offenders is characterized by a dearth of sociological analysis, and few theorists explore social and cultural meanings of these gendered crimes. While feminists have addressed a number of forms of sexual harassment, intimate partner violence and rape (see Robinson, 2009), gender as a paradigm for understanding sexual offenses now appears largely absent from criminological discourses, which emphasize how to correct and manage deviant individuals. For men who engage in a range of sexual behaviors such as groping strangers and flashing, the literature is primarily devoted to treatment interventions that will control these activities, either cognitively–behaviorally or pharmacologically (Laws & O’Donahue, 2008).

The narrative analyzed here is drawn from the author’s study of convicted “child molesters” (half of whom were arrested for statutory offenses with teenagers).¹ All but one of the participants asserted a normal sexual identity. That is, they did not incorporate their offending behavior into a cohesive deviant sexuality, and instead tended to construct the behavior as a “mistake” that was not seen as indicative of or related to abnormal or problematic desire; in their constructions of their offenses, the criminal behavior did not undermine their sense of normal sexual or social identity. However, one of the men, who shall be referred to as “Terry”, had a unique narrative about a life-long pattern of behavior that included many sexual offenses against non-consenting women and girls. Unlike the others, he did label this behavior deviant, and struggled to incorporate the deviance into a cohesive narrative of self. In constructing his narrative, Terry relied on gendered language to posit himself as socially normal and to delineate his desire through normative depictions of the types of women he offended against. This was one of several strategies he employed to establish himself as a normally socialized male. In contrast, when he explained his deviant sexual behavior, he relied on a biomedical paradigm at the same time that he situated the problem in his psychosocial history and his view of himself as “an addict”. He constructed his behavior as a sickness separate from what he articulated as his “true” self, and in so doing was able to maintain a normal masculine social self. Focusing on the self-narrative of Terry’s case makes visible important social processes in the discursive production of both social selves: the normal male and the sexual deviant. The related dichotomies, normalcy/deviance and masculinity/medicalization, were central to the vocabularies of motive employed in reference to repeated sexual misconduct.

Background

The 1990s heralded a new era of criminal justice policies throughout the USA. This shift has been described as “the new penology” and is characterized by mass incarceration, the decline of the rehabilitative ideal, and the emergence of risk-management techniques (Simon, 2000). Included in this spate of legislation are a number of national laws directed against sex offenders, primarily the registration of convicted sex offenders and community notification—which manage the individual in the community both during and after the period of formal criminal justice sanction (Terry, 2006). In addition, some states have instituted “chemical castration” as a condition of probation or parole (i.e. hormonal treatment) (Terry, 2006, p.164), and have civil commitment statutes (sexually violent predator laws, which allow for the indeterminate institutionalization of offenders after they have served their criminal sentence (Terry, 2006). These laws were enormously popular in the USA, and community notification in particular took on the status of a national movement (Jenkins, 1998). Their popularity rested on the construction of the child molester as a compulsive monster, sexual sadist, and outsider par exemplar (Jenkins, 1998). They were, however, enacted in response to extremely atypical, atrocious, and high profile incidents where the perpetrators were strangers to their victims, and as such they do not address the far more common instances of sexual assault that occurs between family members and acquaintances.

This wave of legislation had its roots in the second wave of feminism of the 1970s and 1980s which brought attention to the sexual assault and harassment of girls and women, with particular attention to rape and incest (Jenkins, 1998). Some positioned these on a continuum of normative male behavior that conforms to patriarchal values, and argued they are a routine expression of structural gender inequalities (Jenkins, 1998; see also Brownmiller, 1975; Messerschmidt, 1993; Smart, 1989). While addressing the threat of rape and sexual harassment by strangers, feminists highlighted the victimization of girls and women experienced in relation to male partners, family members and acquaintances. They challenged the idea that rapists are pathological deviants, and rather posited them as “normal” men. For instance, investigating convicted rapists’ childhoods and sexual, psychiatric, substance abuse and criminal histories, Scully (1994) concluded that rapists do not differ from other felons and display no unique psychopathology or psycho-social characteristics. Instead, they draw on culturally available and highly gendered myths that are prevalent in the larger socio-cultural context and furnish the psychological and cognitive tools that enable sexually violent behavior. In explaining their behavior, her participants drew on “stereotypes of women in our rape-supportive culture” (Scully, 1994, p.101). Highlighting gender, these discourses attempted to frame non-consensual, criminal sexual behavior within a social context, underscoring normative masculinity and gender roles as significant factors in sexual violence.

The feminist movement influenced and coincided with the rise of the child protection movement which generated fears about children’s well-being and culminated in a panic regarding child pornography, childcare abuse and ritual abuse (Jenkins, 1998). This movement laid the foundation for the public embracing of the1990s sex offender legislation. The attention feminists brought to incest fed cultural anxieties about mothers working outside the home, and sexual abuse of children was easily enfolded into a morality issue for conservative politicians adopting a family values stance against pornography (Jenkins, 1998). Moving away from incest, domestic violence, and acquaintance rape, the media refocused the threat as posed by a stranger. The media sensationalized horrific and extreme incidents and characterized perpetrators as crazed deviants. This deflected attention from the more common instances of sexual assault, and obscured arguments positing offenders as conventionally and successfully socialized men. Sociological frameworks are generally neglected in current discourses on sex offender policies, and advocates of these generally construct a vision of traditional communities pitted against the threat of uncontained deviants who must be identified, punished, banished and surveiled (Simon, 2000).

In addition to criminal justice and policy concerns focusing on recidivism, punishment, and control, the discourse on sex offenders relies on knowledge produced by bio-psychiatry which aims to treat deviant sexual perversion and psychopathology. Historically, treatment modalities for sexual offending have ranged from behavioral approaches such as “masturbatory reconditioning” (Abel, Osborn, & Gardos, 1992) that include aversion therapy and “satiation therapy” (intended to reduce arousal through overexposure to deviant fantasies) (Lotringer, 1988; Marshall, Anderson, & Fernandez, 1999, p.124; Marshal & Barbaree, 1978), to cognitive–behavioral methods that privilege the role of conscious thought in behavior. This last is a commonly used modality (Hanson, 2003; Rice & Harris, 2003), often taking place in groups where they address “cognitive distortions” and learn “social skills” (Terry, 2006, p.163). Currently, there is also growing interest in biomedical interventions that impact sexual functioning, in spite of the fact that studies have not shown significant differences between the sexual responsiveness of sexual offenders and males in the general population (Zilney & Zilney, 2009). This approach largely sidesteps socio-cultural contexts and instead focuses on biological and neuropsychological systems (Ward & Beech, 2008) wherein sexual deviance is conceptualized as related to hormonal imbalances (androgens become linked to excessive libido) or dysfunctional neurotransmitter mechanisms (which are linked to impulse control, as well as libido) (Ward & Beech, 2008). Hormone-suppressing drugs, such as medroxyprogesterone acetate (known as MPA or by the brand name Depo-Provera, which is used as a birth control method by women) can be injected into offenders every few months to reduce or eliminate the production of testosterone in the testicles and adrenal glands and keep it at extremely low levels in the blood stream. Although not approved by the FDA for impotence, MPA suppresses erections, ejaculations and erotic thoughts (Terry, 2006). Other hormonal suppressants used to treat sex offenders include leuprorelin, or Lupron, which is commonly used to treat prostate cancer. It is worth noting that hormonal suppressants have the same effect on all men, not just sex offenders, and that they impact all sexual behavior, not just deviant behavior. Studies are not conclusive regarding the effectiveness of these drugs on re-arrest of sexual offenders, but some indicate that combined with behavioral therapy they may reduce relapse (Bradford, 1990; Grubin, 2000; Rosler & Witzum, 2000).

While relating problematic sexual conduct to an excess of male hormones (Barbaree & Blanchard, 2008) and “hypersexuality” (Murphy & Page, 2008, p.64), this paradigm does not take into account that sexual behavior is conducted by social actors in gendered and sexed bodies or that through social processes sexual activity is made meaningful (Weeks, 1985): like sexual normalcy, sexual deviance is a social production. Some gender theorists have addressed the “male majority” (Liddle, 1993, p.103) in sexual offenses against children. As most of these are committed by men (Cossins, 2000), theorists have explored the phenomenon through the lens of hegemonic masculinity, asserting that

Desires structured within hegemonic masculinity are widely supported and reinforced… both by prevailing ideologies of male and female sexuality, and by widespread participation in the sets of relations which excrete these. Hence, the resilience both of popular beliefs about men, women and sexuality,…and also of their pervasive bodily inscriptions. (Liddle, 1993, p.115; emphasis in original)

Differentiating between the sexed body and gender roles, Cossins (2000) explains that

the term “sexed” embraces the cultural meanings that are ascribed to the sexual characteristics of different bodies. Like gender, sexing is recognized as both a historical and cultural process… This means that sexing and gender are different ways of conceptualizing men and women as social subjects. (p.6)

She continues to argue that in regard to child sex offending, “the biological characteristics of the male child sex offender cannot be used to distinguish him from other men, since to do so is to invoke the specter of essentialism” (p.7). Instead, gender allows theorists to “focus on the masculine dimensions of the crime: that is, on what the offender shares with other men in terms of his sexual practices and in terms of his experiences of power and powerlessness” (p.5). These authors acknowledge and redirect attention to the gendered nature of most instances of non-consensual sexual behavior and sexual assault and privilege a non-essential, non-deterministic paradigm. However, there has been little further exploration of sexual behavior that seriously addresses the gendered nature of “paraphilias”—sexually deviant behaviors that are distinct from normative male sexual behavior and yet are primarily associated with males. Feminists concerned with sexual violence continue to focus on other forms of interpersonal harassment, intimate partner violence, and rape (Robinson, 2009). Interactionists’ studies of sexual deviance will be discussed in the next section.

Narrative analysis

A discursive approach to non-consensual sexual behavior which acknowledges that speakers “draw on the practical ideologies available in their language community in order to render their social action intelligible” can highlight “the socially constructed nature of sexual practices” (Lea & Auburn, 2001, p.13). Narrative offers an opportunity to examine the individual production of socially and culturally meaningful identities, and to explore the relationship between these constructed meanings, deviant behavior, and lived experience. In explaining the significance of interpretive methods and social interactionism, Denzin (2001) states:

Everything we study is contained within a storied or narrative representation. The self is a narrative production. Material social conditions, discourses, and narrative practices interweave to shape the self and its many identities… self and society are storied productions. This is why narrative is a prime concern of social science today. (p.58–59)

This study looks at the “self-narrative” of one convicted sex offender, which is an “account of the relationship among self-relevant events across time” (Gergen & Gergen, 1983, p.255). It examines his explanations of events in his life that he sees as relevant to his sexual offending. According to Scott and Lyman (1968), an account is “a statement made by a social actor to explain unanticipated or untoward behavior” (p.46), and in the self-narrative presented here the participant is explaining one of the most highly stigmatized of social behaviors. Scott and Lyman (1968) further argue that “accounts always occur between persons in roles” (p.58), and in this self-narrative the participant is presenting an account of his externally labeled role of convicted sexual offender, and his subjective identification of himself as sexually deviant.

Attention to personal accounts within the social sciences grew out of studies in deviance (Orbuch, 1997), where they were seen as “verbal statements made by one social actor to another to explain behaviors that are unanticipated or deviant” and are thus considered to be “social explanations of events” (Orbuch, 1997, p.456). Mills’ concept of “vocabularies of motives” posits all accounts of motives as socially situated, stating that they “have no value apart from the delimited societal situations for which they are the appropriate vocabularies” (Mills, 1940, p.913). In generating accounts of behavior, social actors articulate not only an understanding of the conventions of narrative, but an understanding of social norms and expectations (Mills, 1940). Accounts allow individuals to regain esteem and construct a story that establishes order while allowing them to exert control on the meaning of events (Mills, 1940). In generating accounts of behavior, social actors articulate not only an understanding of the conventions of narrative, but an understanding of social norms and expectations (Mills, 1940). Actors rely on the “background expectancies” of their “interactants” (Scott & Lyman, 1968, p.53), and accounts can be seen as drawing on existing socially constructed meanings and discourses. Because self-narratives are “embedded within the assumptions gleaned from the broader social structure” (Schultz, 2005, p.46), individual accounts can be seen as a site of the production of meaning and the reproduction of social norms. Additionally, they make visible the discursive constructions of deviance and modes of managing deviant behaviors and labels.

Some interactionists have recently conducted qualitative studies of sex offenders, exploring the motives and social situations in which abuse occurs (see Pryor, 1996; Schultz, 2005), although they do not explore the role of gender and meanings ascribed to the body in the constructions of deviance and normalcy. As Plummer observed in Sexual Stigma: An Interactionist Approach (1975), not all individuals who engage in sexual acts considered deviant will develop deviant identities; that is, the behavior may or may not become linked to a sense of self. Language plays a key role in mediating the meanings assigned to social acts and social objects (Plummer, 1975), and through language experience is integrated into coherent narratives. Qualitative inquiry provides a way of exploring how deviant sexual behavior is made socially meaningful, and narrative is the site where discursive practices are employed in this process.

In the self-narrative of Terry, who was convicted of multiple crimes against girls and women, normative gendered tropes played a key role in the construction of his offenses and gendered language played a central role in the articulation of self and others. This self-defined sexual deviant, who described engaging in several of the paraphilliac behaviors that are the focus of hormonal, pharmacological, and psychological intervention, relied on medical explanations in the narrative construction of his self, his sexuality, and his deviance (Rickard, forthcoming).

Terry was interviewed as part of a study designed to explore the ways convicted sex offenders construct and present socially viable selves. To understand how sex offenders make meaning out of their deviant status, I collected a small sample of life histories of people convicted of a sexual offense against a minor. Using open-ended in-depth interviewing methods, I sought to provide an opportunity for these stigmatized men to construct a narrative of self that would make visible the ways in which their social identity was maintained, internalized, and/or resisted. A total of six men each participated in two separate 90-minute interviews.

To access offenders, flyers were sent to several treatment facilities. The flyers announced a life history project for which participants would be paid $25–40 per interview. The interviews were anonymous (participants only provided a first name and were instructed they could use a pseudonym) and informed verbal consent was obtained. The research design conformed to requirements of an institutional Internal Review Board (IRB). The first session was devoted to obtaining biographical details and establishing life history, including sexual and criminal history, while the second session focused more specifically on their sexual offenses and the impact of these convictions on their lives. The interviews were recorded and the tapes were destroyed after transcription. The transcripts masked any identifying characteristics of participants’ narratives and analysis was conducted based on these transcripts.

The men in my sample had convictions for a range of offenses that were consistent with other researchers’ findings (Meloy, 2006): three were statutory offenders, one was an Internet offender who unwittingly made plans to meet a law enforcement officer who adopted an online persona of a teenaged girl, one was an incestuous perpetrator, and one was a serial offender against strangers. None represented the type of violent rapist of young children that inspired national legislation. With the exception of the serial offender, the men I interviewed resisted the deviant label associated with their conviction, did not internalize a stigmatized identity, regarded themselves as sexually normal, and argued that current policies should not be applied to actions such as theirs. In contrast, “Terry” stated that he was someone from whom society should be protected, and that in spite of criticisms he had of the policy, Megan’s Law was designed for him. This is the name of the first state-level notification policy in the USA. Now all 50 states have some version of this law. He referred to himself as a “true sex offender”. In his self-narrative, his sexually offending behavior and identity as a sexual deviant were articulated through recourse to broadly drawn gender stereotypes and the culturally available medicalized constructs of sexual perversion. His production of deviant selfhood drew on the existing paradigms for the social control of sex offenders.

Terry (a serial offender)

Terry is a white man in his early fifties. He tended not to make eye contact when he spoke and seemed to choose his words very carefully. In fact, a number of times he made a point of correcting himself if he thought he did not have exactly the right word.

Terry had a history of flashing, public masturbation, frottage (rubbing up against people for sexual gratification), and groping strangers: “They were all similar offenses, either public masturbation or molesting a woman. They were things that were thought out.” These behaviors are clinically classed as paraphilias in the DSM-V (exhibitionism, frotteurism and what is sometimes called “toucherism” (Lusser & Piche, 2008, p. 132). Terry had 13 criminal convictions for sex offenses, but stated that “they say that for every arrest there are about a hundred other incidents,” indicating that he engaged in these behaviors far more frequently than reflected in his official record. His victims were females between 12 and 40 years old. He asserted that he had gotten away with “slaps on the wrist” in the past because the offenses were not taken that seriously and were seen as more of a “public nuisance type thing,” which is quite often the case (Morin & Levenson, 2008, p. 77). In addition, he stated that his offenses were not severely punished because he was seen as a “responsible” member of the community. He was able to keep the majority of these arrests a secret and his lawyers negotiated a schedule of serving jail time on weekends and during vacations so as not to disrupt his professional life (“They thought I was contributing highly to society… I was doing good things for the community aside from my other life”).

Terry had always lived in upper-middle-class suburbs, and characterized his life as “traditional.” He described his father as “strict” and his mother as “emotional.” Terry “was a star athlete” and excelled in academics. He went to a technical college where he dated a woman for three years in his early twenties. It was a celibate relationship; neither did he believe in premarital sex. Eventually, he asked her to marry him but she declined his proposal. He had dated sporadically since then and had not had any other long-term relationships. He went into a financial industry after college and had been working at local institutions his entire adult life. He lived in the same community for years and until his most recent conviction had participated actively in church organizations and sports teams.

He began sexually offending as a teenager (although his first arrest was years later). The first time Terry was caught by authorities was in a department store where security was already aware of him. He stated that he “brushed up against a woman’s rear end intentionally” and that security detained him, approached the woman and “convinced her to testify”. He was “petrified” by this experience although “nothing would come of it… It was reduced to a disorderly conduct or something like that.”

His most recent act, groping the breasts of a 12-year-old girl, was caught on a video surveillance monitor and released to the local news stations and papers. Because the girl was a minor and the case received so much publicity, this last conviction was taken more seriously. He had to wear a Global Positioning System (GPS) monitoring device and was under house arrest. When the news spread to his community, he was immediately dismissed from his job, excommunicated from his church, and kicked out by his sports teams. All his professional contacts were severed, as were relations with some family members. Insisting that his socially conforming self was his “real” self, Terry argued that when the community reacted to the publicized incident, “They didn’t see me for who I am. They saw me for that separate life.”

Normalcy and masculinity

Terry’s narrative interwove concepts of masculinity and femininity with conflicts about sexual desire. Although he presented himself as socially conventional, and often privileged this non-offending side of his life as “real”, he did not fully see himself as “normal.” He identified his sense of abnormality exclusively with sexual compulsion. He had sought therapy throughout his life for what he called “depression caused by the urges” and struggled to understand and contain the behavior he found so troubling. As part of these efforts, he relied on bio-psychiatric explanations which helped him relegate the deviant behaviors to a sickness that he was able to separate from his public social identity. On one hand, he described having a deep sense of himself as a sexual deviant. On the other hand, he bracketed this off from the rest of his life, seeing himself in every other sense as normal.

Masculinity was a key component of the construction of his normative selfhood. Connell and Messerscmidt (2005) assert that “‘masculinity’ represents not a certain type of man but, rather, a way that men position themselves through discursive practices” (p. 841). Articulating his social normalcy, Terry described traditional male identities. He saw his life course as particularly male-identified, which reinforced his sense of being normal. For instance, he emphasized his engagement with sports as a youth when describing what he called his “typical” upbringing. He contrasted his skills in math and science, which he associated with male pursuits, with the humanities and literature, which he stated were more female ones. In making this contrast, he pointed to the fact that pursuing these conventionally male interests limited his association with women. Discussing his choice to go to a technical college, he stated:

I would have preferred a liberal arts college that had [a] more varied curriculum and student base. Because I felt like I was socially isolated growing up… and also I needed to expand my relationships with people, especially women…. I developed socially with guys but not with women.

He relegated men and women to separate social spheres in such a way that it reinforced a sense of his being conventionally socialized, at the same time that it contributed to what he experienced as a social deficit.

Hegemonic gendered constructions and deviant behavior

He frequently deployed the words “masculine” and “feminine” to demarcate women and his relationship to them. He stated that the women he offended against were “extremely feminine.” He had difficulty articulating what these words meant to him, and seemed to take their meanings for granted. Explaining what “feminine” meant, he answered “Un-athletic. Primping all the time, that sort of thing” and could not think of any other way of defining the term when I asked for clarification. The word “primping” linked femininity with appearance, presentation, and display. Slightly derogatory, it conveys disdain for excessive vanity. “That sort of thing” suggests that his listener shared his cultural assumptions regarding female behavior and would recognize the attributes he had in mind. When asked what “masculine” meant, all Terry offered was: “not primping all the time.” Reinforcing the idea of female concern with appearance, masculinity was posited as less visible, the neutral absence of feminine markers.

In isolating his sexual deviance, he made it clear that the women he offended against were distinct in type from those with whom he socialized, and his classing of women into two stereotypical categories was a primary mechanism through which he differentiated the women offended against. His normal life included social/romantic interests and relationships with women described as “masculine”. He asserted that he was not attracted to the “feminine” type of women he offended against. At the same, time he seemed to indicate that neither was he sexually attracted to the women he dated.

The women I’ve been involved with are less feminine. Even though they’re extremely good looking women, there’s no chance for a real relationship. There was no threat.

Terry’s articulation of his romantic relationships was perplexing because he claimed that he pursued them with women with whom he was unlikely to develop a sexual relationship. He indicated that sexual attraction to a woman was threatening to a social/romantic relationship. Furthermore, he did not think that sex was necessarily an important part of a serious relationship; a strong relationship was

…where you fulfill each other. Where you’re able to work together and smooth out the bad points, the rough edges of your partner. Comrades. Best friends. It doesn’t have to be sexual.

Asserting that sexual offending against feminine women was part of his “separate” life, he discursively articulated a “real” life wherein “masculine” women were seen as less sexed, and therefore (and perhaps paradoxically) as suitable romantic partners. However, Terry stated that he had strong romantic feelings for the women he had been involved with, and that he had no feelings for the women he offended against. Describing a non-sexual yet romantic relationship, Terry’s depiction of this aspect of his “normal” life contained non-traditional elements. He continued to explain:

I could deal with them on a camaraderie basis as opposed to a sexual basis. Whereas the women I’ve offended against are weaker or more feminine.

Here, he attempted to construct a “normal” relationship through his understanding of gender norms, while simultaneously characterizing the women he offended against. Femininity was a critical element in the way he understood his offending. When he explained why he singled out women who appeared feminine to him, he recalled his first sexual offense. When he was in high school he had attempted to furtively touch a girl sitting at a desk in front of him. She openly confronted him and the entire class laughed. He said:

I do think, getting back to high school, the woman, the first one I offended against, was one of the most popular women in school, and one of the most feminine women in school. And I feel like maybe it’s a “I’ll show you” attitude that I’m using these other women who are similar types.

He stated that he was not sexually attracted to this girl and had no romantic feelings for her, either before or after the incident. He linked his sexual offending career to the reaction of his peers and the embarrassment he said he experienced, “a very terrible feeling of embarrassment.” He continued to say “And it probably got me disliking women to some extent because I was so embarrassed.”

The male body and medicalized deviance

Throughout his narrative, romantic attachments and sexual objects were described through broadly normative concepts and stereotypes. While gender norms played a large role in Terry’s depiction of the objects of his deviant behavior, he rooted his desire and behavior itself in his male biology. Terry stated that “quite a few times in the past” he had asked to be surgically castrated. Surgical removal of the testicles, orchiectomy, is a voluntary procedure that is often used to treat prostate cancer; in addition it is undergone by male-to-female transsexuals and may be sought by men who have “extreme castration ideation” (Roberts, Brett, Johnson, & Wassersug, 2008). In requesting the surgical removal of his testicles to render himself impotent, Terry was locating and isolating his genitals as the cause of his deviance. The penis was the problem, not the self. In this way, he constructed his deviance as directly related to his sexed body; he implicated the idea of the male sexual apparatus gone awry, and framed his behavior in terms of an excess of embodied sexuality.

However, Terry said that the courts and his attorneys argued that surgical castration

…doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t take away the criminal activity… Because my criminal activity wasn’t completely sexual. It’s a lot of addiction and compulsion and that sort of thing.

When the state would not sanction surgically castrating him, Terry requested chemical castration.

I definitely asked about that. They originally said that they only do that if you really, really need it. Then as they started to get into group therapy and that sort of thing, they recommended it for me… The doctor when I did my original interview he said it was one of the options. And I said, “yeah, I would like to do that.” This was the expert.

Terry believed that his problem required medical expertise, and had said that he did not get the help he needed until he found a psychiatric professional, a proponent of chemical castration, who specialized in treating sex offenders. Taking on the identity of “a true sex offender,” Terry assumed the patient role in relation to authorities and became a medical subject. The medical model that he deferred to supports the idea that sexual deviance is rooted in male biology, and the paraphilliac behaviors Terry engaged in with non-consenting women are tied to the production of androgens. Terry argued that the drug treatment was effective:

Hormonal therapy makes a big difference because it gives you a break from your sexual desires. And you can look at yourself and put the tools into place to overcome it… I’m very satisfied with it. Very, very much. It’s the greatest thing in the world. All repeat offenders might want to consider it.

Terry maintained that the hormonal suppressants enabled him to look at himself, to essentially take the larger society’s view of his behavior. “Sexual desires” were constructed as obstacles to seeing his own behavior in terms of the community’s norms.

He saw the treatment as a temporary measure that would allow him to comprehend his own deviance and develop the capacity to better control his behavior. He stated:

So that medication gave me a break from offending, and weaning off the medication I won’t have any need to offend again, because it gives me a chance to see how perverted and hideous my crimes were.

Again, Terry articulated the idea that he could not clearly “see” his own behavior without the help of anti-androgens. The implication is that male hormones have an anti-social effect; male sexuality is in conflict with social norms regarding appropriate sexual conduct. They prevented him from successfully seeing himself through the eyes of the “generalized other.” Essentially a neutered male, in the absence of any libido, Terry was able to regard his paraphilliac behaviors as deeply deviant (i.e. “hideous and perverted”).

The medicalization of desire: The discourses of addiction and compulsion

However, as indicated in an earlier quote, Terry also viewed his deviance as “a lot of addiction and compulsion and that sort of thing” which operate independently of male hormones and libido. Further iterating his sexual deviance through a medical paradigm, Terry went on to explain that his illness could be also classed as an addiction. He explained that he learned this in a treatment center for sex offenders.

They told us about the cycle of offending and compared it to gambling and alcoholism, and said often times sex offenders before they start offending have a problem with alcoholism and when they conquer the alcoholism they move to sex offending. When they conquer sex offending they move to gambling or something like that.

Grouping his sexual offending within an array of problematic social behaviors, Terry put it on a continuum that includes those for which there is a familiar and at times compassionate discourse. “Addiction” allowed Terry to link himself with others (gamblers and drinkers) who, as groups and individuals, are less severely stigmatized than sex offenders. In this way addiction as an illness offered an opportunity for Terry to humanize, rather than demonize, himself. He continued to explain the relationship between addiction and sexual offending:

It’s something that gives you a… sense of a high when you do it. The danger of getting caught, that sort of thing, and it gives you a flow of adrenaline. So it’s kind of addictive in that sense. So it’s one of those addictive kinds of illnesses.

The “sense of a high” Terry identified was the closest he came to describing his behaviors in terms of pleasure, and he cast it as non-sexual and rather as consequence of the situations in which the acts were committed. He attributed the high to being “caught,” rather than to any gratification he may have derived from the paraphilliac encounters. Addiction as a medical concept allowed him to construct pleasure through the vehicle of sickness wherein sexual desire and gratification are secondary concerns.

Terry had been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) which he explained

…causes you to check things all the time or have obsessions, sometimes even cutting or scratching all the time. And it causes you to have compulsions. And [my offending] was one of the compulsions.

He attributed his “urges” and related behavior to a psychiatric condition. In addition to hormone suppressants, he had also been prescribed serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) for the OCD. In this iteration, desire is an “urge” which can be compartmentalized and separated from the self. Yet, although he defined his sexual activity as compulsions associated with this disorder, and had stated that his paraphilliac behaviors were not “completely sexual,” he did not consider the SSRIs to be as helpful as the hormone suppressants.

I see [sexual offending] as separate. The OCD did contribute to it and the medication for OCD lessened it a little bit. But it didn’t overcome it. So it’s a component of it, but not the main.

For Terry, the main component in his sex crimes was the effect of unmedicated and unregulated androgens in his male body.

Discussion

Terry asserted that his life outside the realm of sexual offending was conventional and that he was socially normal. At times, he posited the conforming self as the “real,” authentic self. However, at other times he struggled to separate normalcy and deviance and to reconcile what he referred to as these “separate” spheres.

I considered myself a normal person. I didn’t consider myself a normal person, but I considered myself someone who was acting normal, who was able to conform to society’s demands.

Here he vacillated between the concepts of an authentic normalcy and a contingent, performative one. He could not definitively affirm the public social identity as completely distinct from his deviant behavior, which needed to be masked through performance. Conforming to gender role expectations was an important part of discursively establishing his social normalcy. Importantly, at the same time he simultaneously employed these gender norms in the construction of his victims, the objects of his deviant behavior. Gender was critical in the delineation of both aspects of his “self.”

A key aspect of this delineation was the construction of his sexual offending as a medical problem. Terry’s construct of a “real” self was compartmentalized from his narrative of a “sick” self, and it is possible that the medicalization of his deviance allowed him to create an illness narrative where his identity could be in a state of becoming, transforming through the “epiphany” of illness into a fully, not bifurcated, normal man (Frank, 1993, p. 42). Sexual desire, deviant sexual desires, compulsivity, and sexual behaviors became collapsed in his narrative around bio-psychiatric concepts of illness. In the medical model of deviance, “symptoms” signify the existence of an underlying illness (Scheff, 1999, p. 53). Isolating the androgens in his system as the cause, he employed a paradigm in which the improperly functioning male organism could, through science and medicine, be successfully calibrated and brought into line with the demands of a properly functioning social person. In this way, the body could be managed to better fit the social identity, and his non-deviant, “real” self could be affirmed. This involved the disavowal of sexuality in service of his social standing. It required that he compartmentalize and divorce himself from desire. The dual constructs, addiction/OCD and castration, both provided a medicalized language through which he could do this. It is worth noting that he never spoke of his “crimes” or “urges” in terms of pleasure. The frameworks he relied on provided a vocabulary of motives wherein sexual pleasure and activity were viewed in terms of psychopathology and biological excess. They did not offer a way of considering whether Terry enjoyed engaging in non-consenting behaviors that many women find menacing and/or repugnant, nor of exploring the cultural significance of that. Desire and pleasure are as absent from these discourses as are the social contexts in which nonconsensual sexual behavior occurs and is made meaningful.

Both OCD and castration’s underlying assumptions posit the social actor as having an attenuated will due to a psychiatric or physical condition. Freed from these conditions, the actor is able to act as Terry did most of the time and “conform to society’s demands”. He could successfully perform masculine identity while deviance is constructed as a function of a force that is distinct from the true self. This perspective of deviance has enormous appeal. For instance, in a study of judges’ responses to various vocabularies of motive provided by sex offenders, those which cited elements beyond the individuals’ control, such as inner impulses which “compelled him to act ‘against his will’” were seen as much more credible (Taylor, 1972, p. 29, 33). Casting the offender as sick is widely acceptable today:

The strong deference to medical personnel as more knowledgeable about the causes of sexual offending and more capable of providing solutions to this social issue has resulted in the creation and perpetuation of myths surrounding sexual offending and offenders… These myths continue to hold weight today and influence the development of social policy. (Zilney & Zilney, 2009, p. 11)

The medical view of sex crimes obscures researchers’ findings that sex offenders are a heterogeneous group and more similar to the rest of the population than they are distinct from it (Marshall et al., 1999; Pryor, 1996; Winick, 2003). While we prefer to understand nonconsensual sexual behavior as a form of bio-psychiatric pathology, we accept the linkage of sexual deviance to the sexed male body, but neglect considering male social roles, power, and the social construction of sexual behavior.

In addition to being a medical approach to sexual deviance, castration is also a cultural trope that carries a heavy symbolic load. The penis’ “symbolic double”, the phallus, represents the social power held by men (Bordo, 2000, p. 84). Connell’s hegemonic masculinity offers a useful paradigm for situating aspects of Terry’s narrative in regard to male power. Hegemonic masculinity, referring to the “pattern of practice (i.e. things done, not just a set of role expectations or an identity) that allowed men’s dominance over women to continue” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 832) was passively invoked in Terry’s depiction of the “emphasized” femininity (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 848) of his victims; that is, he employed normative gender assumptions in rendering his victims, and in so doing referenced traditional power arrangements. Gendered tensions pervaded Terry’s construction of his sexual deviance. His sexual acts can be seen as “one pattern of hegemonic masculinity … to the extent that it provides a solution to these tensions, tending to stabilize patriarchal power or reconstitute it in new conditions” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 853). In other words, Terry’s deviance can in part be explained as a way of negotiating gendered relationships so that traditional gendered hierarchies are reinforced through his male body.

Hegemonic masculinity has been criticized for relying “logically on a dichotomization of sex (biological) versus gender (cultural)” and in that way neutralizing the body (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 836). However, Terry himself reinvested his pre-medicated body with social power which he actively sought to revoke. That is, he attributed the sources of his social behavior to his sexed body. This “power” was defined as “sexual desires”.

Interestingly, untreated, this hormonal power had in fact rendered him socially impotent. When Terry began chemical castration, he had already lost his job, which had been a key part of his identity; he could no longer participate in community events and his social bonds were severely damaged. He was under house arrest and carried a GPS device on his person whenever he left the house, which dramatically undermines social autonomy. A registered sex offender, he would be the monitored subject of state power for decades. Chemical castration completed the process of emasculation, rendering him a “true sex offender”, a truly docile body “manipulated by authority” (Foucault, 1975, p. 155), his power dissociated from the body (Foucault, 1975, p. 134). He became the ideal subject of criminal justice and bio-psychiatric discourses, fully embodying their naturalized concepts of deviance and submitting to dominant mechanisms of social control.

Conclusion

The use of the case study in the social sciences is problematic in numerous ways, and raises problems of truth, objectivity, and the relationship between researcher and participant (Denzin, 1990). The case presented here relies solely on the text produced in two interview sessions, and the generalizability of the analysis is in some ways uncertain. It is important to recognize this case as a textual production, and not as a testament of actual facts. The data is the narrative, not the narrator. Instead of allowing us to know why Terry committed his offenses, it provides an opportunity to see how he makes these meaningful. Here, we can see some of the “social role that stories play” (Plummer, 1975, p. 24). Terry’s history with voluntary and court-mandated psychotherapy, and his experience with bio-psychiatry would indicate that he has processed pre-given languages and tropes for conceptualizing his deviancy. These discourses are all presented by him in his interaction with the interviewer; they become the basis of his construction of self in the particular moment of the interview. The analysis presented here, highlighting the ways in which these meanings are employed, as well as the meanings they obscure, is a valuable basis for further study of how deviants managed by the state make sense of their experience. Further study is needed on the ways in which therapeutic interventions work to provide a rhetorical framework for deviancy, creating “types” of deviants through a “sanctioned interpretive and linguistic framework” (Fox, 1999, p. 438). The treatment model of choice for sexual deviants is cognitive–behavioral (Marshall et al., 1999) which relies heavily on verbal reframing of experience. More research in this area could illuminate the mechanisms through which discourses are internalized. The questions raised by this analysis are worth further investigation.

The relative absence of sociological discourse on sex offenders contributes to the widespread social acceptance of bio-psychiatric models of sexual deviance and the expansion of the criminal justice system. The production of knowledge about nonconsensual sexual behavior and the routine experiences of girls and women neglect the role of ideologies and normative cultural assumptions in these encounters. Yet the conflicting paradigms—gender and deviance, masculinity and medicalization—coexist in lived experience. Narrative analysis of sex offenders offers an opportunity to investigate this production of meaning and to explore both the gendered aspect of nonconsensual sexual behavior, and the internalization of pathologized deviance. Terry’s narrative highlights the centrality of gendered tensions in his criminal activities, and provides insight into the successful production of the sexed medical subject. In Terry’s case, sexual desire and problematic behavior was linked to the penis, which compromised his social viability. Constructing desire as an illness, he presented vocabularies of motive in a discursive space in which he could exist as a normal social actor. This normalcy could not be articulated without recourse to gendered language, and his deviant behavior could not be explained except by delineating it as an asocial deviant behavior unrelated to gendered identities. Thus, people who behave like Terry are conceptualized as aberrations and their menacing behavior is stripped from any social context.

Footnotes

Note

Author Biography

Diana Rickard is an Assistant Professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. Her book on sex offenders and stigmas is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in 2016.

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