This episode of Law and Order: SVU is a case about a serial rapist that is terrorizing SoHo. SoHo is plagued with a serial rapist and blames the police and the SVU team for not being able to catch the rapist at large. The media is making it difficult for the team to catch the rapist due to vigilantism and protestors. Since the NYPD is having trouble finding the actual perpetrator, the rapist continues committing horrific acts. In response, a group of organizers and the people of New York City decide to hold a slut walk in order to protest against the rapist and the lack of success by NYPD to catch him. After the slut walk is held, the team finds two of the vigilantes on a rooftop the male was stabbed with shears and the women was found knocked unconscious and sexually assaulted. The team investigates who could know of the whereabouts of the vigilantes and finds that the male vigilante staged the attack and he was the serial rapist that kept raping women to spend time with his female vigilante partner.
In this episode, like many episodes of Law and Order: SVU there was little representation of African Americans. Other than appearing blurry in the background they did not appear with the exception of the main characters. The focus of this blog post will to be to discuss the reaction of the people of NYC and the slut walks they held in protest of the rapist. Upon doing research on the Slut Walks, I found that they are very problematic. While they are used to make a statement and the message behind them should not be mistaken, the term slut has a different meaning across racial lines. They are problematic because they are used to reclaim the word slut, which has different meanings among white women and black women. Due to the history of African American women, the reclamation of the term ‘slut’ erases how African American women were portrayed in the past as beast-like, contributing to negrophobia. The Black Women’s Blueprint collective objects to the march and published, “As black women, we do not have the privilege or the space to call ourselves ‘slut’ without validating the already historically entrenched ideology and reoccurring messages about what and who the black woman is” (Nguyen p. 161). Nguyen continues, “Moreover, Black women continue to bear the brunt reductionist moral judgments that equate “blackness” with animalistic sexuality and immorality” (Nguyen p. 161). Once again there is a huge misrepresentation of African American women in this episode since they do not include black women, yet they are holding a Slut Walk in protest of the rapes. Without proper representation this type of activism is precisely engrained in white privilege. The episode should have included more representation of African Americans if they wanted to truly exemplify the Slut Walks.
Source:
Nguyen, Tram. "From Slut Walks to Suicide Girls: Feminist Resistance in the Third Wave and Post Feminist Era." Women's Studies Quarterly. Volume 31. 2013.
In this episode, like many episodes of Law and Order: SVU there was little representation of African Americans. Other than appearing blurry in the background they did not appear with the exception of the main characters. The focus of this blog post will to be to discuss the reaction of the people of NYC and the slut walks they held in protest of the rapist. Upon doing research on the Slut Walks, I found that they are very problematic. While they are used to make a statement and the message behind them should not be mistaken, the term slut has a different meaning across racial lines. They are problematic because they are used to reclaim the word slut, which has different meanings among white women and black women. Due to the history of African American women, the reclamation of the term ‘slut’ erases how African American women were portrayed in the past as beast-like, contributing to negrophobia. The Black Women’s Blueprint collective objects to the march and published, “As black women, we do not have the privilege or the space to call ourselves ‘slut’ without validating the already historically entrenched ideology and reoccurring messages about what and who the black woman is” (Nguyen p. 161). Nguyen continues, “Moreover, Black women continue to bear the brunt reductionist moral judgments that equate “blackness” with animalistic sexuality and immorality” (Nguyen p. 161). Once again there is a huge misrepresentation of African American women in this episode since they do not include black women, yet they are holding a Slut Walk in protest of the rapes. Without proper representation this type of activism is precisely engrained in white privilege. The episode should have included more representation of African Americans if they wanted to truly exemplify the Slut Walks.
Source:
Nguyen, Tram. "From Slut Walks to Suicide Girls: Feminist Resistance in the Third Wave and Post Feminist Era." Women's Studies Quarterly. Volume 31. 2013.