Tough on Hate?: The Cultural Politics of Hate Crimes

6. Epilogue: Challenging Hate Crimes on a Cultural Front

109 Chaper 6 Epilogue Challenging Hate Crimes on a Cultural Front All too often our culture indulges in an entirely putative mentality towards those who are defined as different (something that is even more painfully evident in the general public indifference to the brutalizing impact of “law and order” initiatives and prison expansion in the United States). We seem to have largely lost the capacity for empathy, for imaging ourselves (or our circumstances) as different from who we are (or what they are). This identification can never be complete—we can never claim to fully inhabit the other’s subject position; but we can imagine it, and this imagination , this approximation, can radically alter our sense of who we are. It can become the basis for communication and understanding across differences of race, sexuality, ethnicity , and so on. —Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces In 2005, artist Mary Coble stripped down to the plainest white underwear ever manufactured and stoically endured twelve straight hours of inkless tattooing. The ordeal, or more judiciously “endurance performance ,” titled Note to Self, was staged in Washington, D.C., at Conner Contemporary Art, a gallery that focuses on conceptual art in nontraditional media. Prior to the performance, Coble immersed herself in research on victims of homophobic hate crimes. From her findings, Coble compiled a list of over four hundred victims’ names, each of which she would tattoo on her body, and developed an analysis of the connection between individual hate crime victims and the broader role homophobia plays in shaping social and material relations in the United States.As her blood pulsed out of each fresh marking, an assistant dutifully pressed a clean piece of watercolor paper against the wound. Each new print transfigured the tattoo needle’s damage into what Figure E.1 Untitled 1 (from Note to Self). Reproduced with permission of Mary Coble. Epilogue 111 Coble describes as an “opportunity for a visceral reaction and reflection on the mental and physical violence that hate crimes enact on individuals and communities.”1 The performance symbolically co-opted hate crime perpetrators ’ strategy of carving slurs into their victims’ bodies. Coble allowed her audience to witness the pain of bigoted branding and to think about its disturbing meaning in a space that was designed for dialogue. The long list of names was intended to produce a different effect from an individual memorial. Coble explained that she wanted “people to see a compilation of names, not to individually mourn, but to understand the broader scope.”2 Coble’s work invents visibility that then allows for reflection on pain that is usually hidden.The visceral presence of harm that her work enacts makes people uncomfortable. In a photograph taken at the end of the performance, Coble stands with her back to the camera,exposing her canvas.She looks back over her shoulder with an expression that is hard to decipher, but is certainly not nostalgic: Her intense direct eye contact is decidedly non-elegiac. It might well be angry. Erin Davies’s Volkswagen Beetle also makes people uncomfortable. On April 18, 2007, the Volkswagen Beetle of art education graduate student Erin Davies was assaulted with graffiti. A passerby noticed her car’s rainbow sticker and sloppily scrawled the insults “fAg” and “U R gay” on the car’s windows and body. Needing the transportation, Davies drove the tagged car to school and parked on campus.To her surprise, there was an outpouring of public response. People demanded that the car be moved, left notes on her windshield, and tried to talk her into removing her pride sticker. Davies found herself in the middle of a strange new kind of public debate. Homophobes and hate crime victims alike shared more of their experiences and perspectives than Davies could possibly have predicted.The outpouring inspired Davies to leave the tags intact. Dubbing the car the “Fagbug,” Davies drove the crime scene across the country for fifty-eight days,documenting her interactions on the road in a film of the same name. Davies’s strategy is one of unflagging friendliness. She can and does talk to everyone. Even homophobes. Davies describes her risky road trip as an act of “externalization” aimed at inspiring “important exchanges.” An out lesbian prior to the hate crime, she explains that she let the car further out her in order to incite reaction and conversation:“A person’s first response to something like that...