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Foreword Recent surveys of the store of general knowledge possessed by Americans reveal that 11 percent have a firm grasp of evaporation; 23 percent know pretty much where the equator is; 63 percent can identify Jimmy Carter and 34 percent Gerald Ford; over 8 percent can do long division; Edgar Alan Poe is correctly linked to "writer" by 19 percent; as for the larynx, almost as many people regard it as "a body part" as feel it is "some kind of animal"; and one person (0.002 percent) can locate Lake Huron on a map. Yet a solid 100 percent, every single adult and child, knows Jeffrey Dahmer, identifies him as serial killer, homosexual, cannibal , ghoul-now dead, killed by a righteous man, albeit a prison inmate , who had had enough. Why is Jeffrey Dahmer number one? Why should that be? Why should Jeffrey Dahmer mean so much to us, figure so prominently in our cultural geography? Even if I haven't got the survey results quite right-though I heard about them from Mother, who got them from her friend Bess-I'm sure the point is still valid and the questions just as stinging. What are we doing with Jeffrey Dahmer and all other serial killers? Why do we construct them as we do? What do they represent for us? What stories do they allow us to circulate? What conditions of "knowing" do they generate? What needs do they bring into being and then serve? What cultural itches do they scratch? It's clear enough that we have a not very clandestine affair going with these monster-hunks, these white male superhero fiends, these Hannibal Lecters. We build them up as Others so we can fear and despise them, while we long for them and admire them. They are projections not only of nightmare but of some dark wish fulfillment we want to play with but not acknowledge. We keep our relations with the serial killer under cover, where all the fun is. But it's not just fun, as Richard Tithecott shows-certainly not harmless fun. In this barrel-house brilliant study, Tithecott uncovers ix Foreword grisly point after grisly point, not about the serial killer but about us and our needs. It's like taking a tour through Jeffrey Dahmer's freezer, only to find out we are the ones who've done the shopping and stocked it. Less metaphorically, this is a book not about what makes the serial killer tick but about those of us, all of us, who have wound the clock and need to keep it running. Less metaphorically still, Tithecott asserts at the start that serial killers are not simply an assault on our cultural center, totally outside our moral circumference, but continuous with it, necessary to it. The "perversion" of the serial killer, he says, is a "fulfillment " of our civilization. To make good on this radical and deeply unwelcome claim, Tithecott leads us briskly and with unwavering acuity through a labyrinthine set of interconnecting links in the makeup of this seductive and indispensable serial killer. He probes, for instance, why this figure is seen as mysterious but sane, beyond the reach of psychiatrists and philosophers, but somehow within the ken of the psychic/intuitive and, most centrally, of the police, the FBI. These serial killers, always "evil" as well as sane, extend the boundaries of the police enormously , extend them specifically into moral territory. The FBI becomes an agency of good, of God, as it tracks down, as only it can, these inhuman monsters. Thus, as the police becomes scientized, they also become sanctified. This promotion of police omnipotence is a deeply conservative move, suggesting the fascist attractions of this serial killer construction. The serial killer, Tithecott points out, is "motiveless," which means there's nothing to do with him but hunt him down; he exists in an isolated Gothic world where all that counts is eradicating the horror. Any attempt to "explain" the serial killer is always seen as weak, unmanly ; it is really to be in league with them, sympathizing with them in a feminine or queer way. The motiveless serial killer serves not only a patriarchal myth but a brutally misogynistic and homophobic one too. Tithecott's serial killers also serve the culture's need to avoid systemic problems by isolating and individualizing. These inexplicable and motiveless monsters are seen as freaks of nature, never as a social problem. Insofar as they can be comprehended, they...

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