Low Risk of Criminalization

What I find most interesting about the Gotell article this week and the Dean Spade lecture was that they both touched on the societal sense of the “idealized subject.” While Spade argues that neoliberalism enacts the idea of the “healthy citizen”, Gotell argues that neoliberalism also promotes this, but in the way of the “ideal victim.” For both, I think that they touch on such important topics of who government and society care about, and how laws effect people in such extremely different ways based on race, class, gender, etc.

One aspect of the Spade lecture that really stood out for me was when he spoke about how just because certain laws have been passed, this does not mean that anything has actually been changed (Spade, 2009). For me, this makes me think of disparate laws, and how some laws which are intended on being race, class, or gender neutral, actually have more of an impact on anyone who is not your typical white, middle class, CIS gendered male. This becomes most problematic I feel, when we talk about rape laws, and the racialized subject who is far from the “ideal victim.”

“Only yes means yes.” With this consent standard, there should be no way for an offender to use the defense of mistaken belief, and most importantly, this should apply equally to all women/men within society. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and most often it is racialized women that suffer the most from this disparate impact. Keeping this in mind, Gotell states that, “it is the risk of criminalization, rather than the insistence on respect for sexual autonomy or recognition of the harmful consequence of coerced sex, [which] functions as the main inducement to comply with a specific consent standard,” (Gotell, 2008). As we saw today in “Finding Dawn,” and in the Pamela George reading, Aboriginal women seem essentially to lack this risk of criminalization due to the racialized space that they encompass. As it has been mentioned on so many occasions, society and colonialism have made sure to exclude Aboriginal women from any part of these laws, therefore, “only yes means yes” in no way is applied equally among subjects.

Thinking of this, there is an alarming rate of Aboriginal women carrying the HIV virus, which further distances them from the idea of the “healthy citizen” that Spade speaks of and the “ideal subject” for Gotell. Furthermore, because there is a  prevalence of myths and stereotypes about Aboriginal people within our language, the Ewanchuk rules of “only yes means yes,” are so inconsistently applied by Judges and Juries who’s ideologies are plagued by them. In this sense, some of the alarm and shock at the decision that was made for the Pamela George ruling wears away when the deaths and disappearances of Aboriginal women have become so naturalized in our society.

I feel that this “wilful blindness” that we speak of in perpetrators has become consistently applied within neoliberalist ideas and laws mainly because the idea of the “drunk Indian” and the “native prostitute” has consistently been shoved down society’s throat.