Learning From the Death of Gwen Araujo
CA Legislation Passed Following the Death of Gwen Araujo
In September 2006, former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the "Gwen Araujo Justice for Victims Act into law. It limited the use of the LGBTQ+ panic defense by allowing parties to instruct jurors to not let bias influence their decisions, including "bias against the victim" based on his or her "gender identity, or sexual orientation." [1]
Eight years later, former California governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill No. 2501 into law, which further restricted the use of the LGBTQ+ panic defense. It amended California's manslaughter statute to prohibit defendants from claiming that they were provoked to murder by discovering a victim's sexual orientation or gender identity. [2] The bill was introduced by Assemblywoman Susan A. Bonilla in partnership with Equality California.
These laws and others like them are critical for ensuring a justice system that works for victims of LGBTQ+ hate crimes, especially transgender women of color. However, the systems of power that influence these hate crimes (including that experienced by Gwen Araujo), and the LGBTQ+ panic defense, including toxic masculinity, racism, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity, also need to be addressed. No one should have to experience what Gwen Araujo and her family experienced.
Toxic Masculinity, Racism, Heteronormativity, and Cisnormativity
Hate crimes do not exist in a vacuum. They are not individual acts of violence, but are structurally connected to intersecting systems of power.
Historically, ideologies of race and gender have been maintained through violence. In a society where participating in normalized gender roles is central to what makes a person a person, violence, like that perpetrated against Gwen Araujo, is rationalized and legitimized. [4] To complicate matters, gender is also racialized by the oppressive white culture. Whiteness has defined and stereotyped specific racial communities as feminine or masculine, passive or aggressive. The way that gender is constructed through this white lens, has created a culture of violence directed against men and women of color, especially when they could not meet the sex and gender expectations of these same ideologies. [5] Violence is utilized in this way to reinforce white structures of toxic masculinity, heternormativity, and cisnormativity, which all create default expectations for gender expression and sexuality.
The sensless killing of Gwen Araujo showed the most violent side of these structures, ones that are bought into not only by white men in America, but also white women and men of color. White men may produce these structures, but others invest into them. The night of Araujo's death, a white woman instigated the violence because Araujo challenged her internalized structures of heteronormativity and cisnormativity that were based on her relationships with cisgender men. Black feminists and other womanist scholars have noted that the “Cult of True Womanhood” was actually just the cult of “True White Womanhood” in which the bodies of woman of color provided the “non-woman” to counter the “true woman” of this ideology. [9]
The violence was then perpetrated by Latino men, who experience the intersection of white and Chicano masculinist cultures [10] The men operated under a toxic masculine system of fear that drove them to kill in order to avoid falling outside the norm of heteronormativity defined by both their masculinist cultures.
Men have defined their masculinity by their control over the bodily autonomy of women and those who fall outside of ingrained binaries. Violent eruptions of oppression are used to maintain their comfortable privilege and masculinity, which is closely tied to sexuality. Gwen died in 2002 because her killers were afraid of seeming less masculine, which they tie with being gay or falling outside of heterosexuality. This wasn't a case of shock, deception, or provocation; this was a case of control. Araujo's killers needed to regain control of their toxic masculinity, which was, in their mind, threatened by Araujo's biological genitalia.
Araujo's murder was an avoidable tragedy and yet she never received the justice she should have received. Instead, she was smeared and deadnamed in court and the news. The LGTBQ+ panic defense, as used in Araujo's case, is nothing more than victim-blaming and an excuse for toxic lack of control. We must challenge the systems of oppression that allow victim-blaming and hate crimes to go unchecked.
References:
[1] "Gwen Araujo Justice for Victims Act," California Legislative Information, September 28, 2006, https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=200520060AB1160
[2] Anna Pulley, "California Bans Gay and Trans Panic Defense," Easy Bay Express, September 30, 2014, https://www.eastbayexpress.com/CultureSpyBlog/archives/2014/09/30/california-bans-gay-and-trans-panic-defense
[3] Linda Heidenreich, "Learning Form the Death of Gwen Araujo? - Transphobic Racial Subordination and Queer Latina Survival in the Twenty-First Century," Chicana/Latina Studies 6, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 50-86. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23014579
[4,], [5] Heidenreich, "Learning."
[6] Tracy E. Gilchirst, "What is Toxic Masculinity?" Advocate, December 11, 2017, https://www.advocate.com/women/2017/12/11/what-toxic-masculinity
[7] Moya Llyod, "Heteronormativity And/as Violence: The 'Sexting' of Gwen Araujo," Hypatia 28, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 813-34, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24542088
[8] "Definition of 'Cisnormativity,'" The Queer Dictionary, Accessed December 7, 2020, https://queerdictionary.blogspot.com/2014/09/definition-of-cisnormativity.html
[9], [10], [11] Heidenreich, "Learning."