Bad Spacey: Retributive Justice and Queer Erasure

I love The Life of David Gale—a thought-provoking movie from 2003 that highlights the structural failures inherent in the U.S. justice system, and Kevin Spacey was the star. David Gale, played by Spacey, was found guilty of murder and ordered to die, despite later being vindicated. Amidst the accusation, Gale was constantly persecuted by the public, and protestors stood outside the prison walls to condemn Gale. I love the movie because it encouraged my own critical investigation of prisons, retributive justice, and punishment.

In late 2017, as allegations of sexual misconduct of Spacey multiplied, beginning with then fourteen-year-old Anthony Rapp, Spacey was quickly confronted, again, with the jury of public opinion, and verdicts were rendered.¹ Such verdicts intensified after Spacey released a statement noting that he lacked a memory of Rapp’s encounter and that “I choose now to live as a gay man.”² As Vox writer German Lopez writes, “Whether Spacey is gay is simply a footnote here.”³ In one swift motion, Spacey’s fate had been sealed. He had violated a key cultural and legal norm—a violation so egregious that sexuality need not be examined; a violation that required punishment and Spacey was quickly removed from projects—decisions that were applauded. As one Tweet read, “Men brought down by their dicks continued.”⁴

This, “he’ll get what’s coming to him” mentality continued, whereby Twitter users and public personalities alike applauded Spacey’s departure from House of Cards and All the Money in the World. “Best news EVER!” one Tweet read, concluding that Spacey “needs to have his entire career yanked out of his underwear just as he did to others!”⁵ In fact, commentators online noted that, for feminists, this was a watershed moment, where “all around us, once-mighty men are being swept up—and sometimes swept out of their jobs—in sexual harassment and assault allegations.”⁶ Support intensified to sweep out the dirt or the few bad apples from public viewing.

Ben Travers, like many others, envisioned Spacey’s departure from the public sphere as somehow central to eradicating industry inequalities, stating, “A lot of people are hoping this is more of a turning point, that the work that’s being lost won’t be missed because the work that’s being gained will be better. The people who were silenced and thrown out and kept from working by these predators will be able to go forward and thrive.”⁷ As a queer feminist, I, too, work to eradicate oppression; however, I am skeptical of narratives like Travers’s that elevate punishment of Spacey (and others) as the key to a utopian future free of assault. Something about these narratives—particularly those that rely on the erasure of queer differences—gave me pause. Below, I explore responses to Spacey as embedded in retributive justice that erase queer contexts and, instead, privilege perspectives grounded in the prison industrial complex (PIC).

Retributive Justice and Queer Erasure

Spacey did something bad. That badness must be punished. That person deserves to be punished. These assumed truths carry insurmountable weight in retributive systems of justice. I’m interested in the rhetorical responses and the covert operationalization of “justice” and “punishment” that emerge—constructs that support the mundane integration of prison regimes into daily life. My deep reading renders a sad narrative: Spacey is continually reduced to the universal perpetrator—a framing that erases context, complexity, and systemic histories surrounding the PIC, particularly for queer bodies.

Although Spacey is not spatially housed in a prison cell, the rhetorical responses to allegations against him adopt the logic of the prison regime. As Davis argues, “We know . . . that we replicate the structures of retributive justice oftentimes in our own emotional responses. Someone attacks us, verbally or otherwise, our response is what? A counterattack. The retributive impulses of the state are inscribed in our very emotional responses.”⁸ Sadly, our framework is often limited to the tools we have been given, and Davis is clear: we take prisons for granted.⁹ This “taken-for-granted-ness,” however, allows the regime...