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I Never Wanted to Be a Stereotype

A Sociologist’s Narrative of Healing

by Cindy Brooks Dollar (Author)
©2021 Monographs X, 200 Pages

Summary

Trauma and its consequences are social phenomena. Coming from a working-class family and raised in a small, rural Southern area, this author's narrative offers a unique style of life history reporting whereby the author uses her academic standpoint to situate her life experiences in broader macro-social and cultural contexts. Weaving scholarship with personal narrative, the author highlights connections between self and social awareness, which is crucial, especially in a modern, Western context where the rhetoric of excessive individualism is prioritized. Discussing various issues, including objectification, violence, isolation, stigma, trauma, shame, integration, healing, peace, and love, she illustrates the application and significance of sociological knowledge to individual life. Many chapters include and conclude with excerpts from the author’s diary entries, which she has maintained for over 30 years. These provide a relatively unfiltered glimpse into her personal and social consciousness throughout various life stages, including adolescence, teens, young and middle adulthood. The book closes with a summary of existing research on trauma and recovery, which often promotes the use of body-based therapies. The author argues that these findings have important implications for sociology given the body’s symbolic socio-cultural status and how it is used to maintain existing inequalities and inequities, which (re)produce shared forms of trauma and differential access to recovery.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Table of Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Chapter 1. What Is This?
  • Chapter 2. Memories of Mine
  • Chapter 3. Incitements from a Young Girl’s Mind
  • Chapter 4. Tiptoeing Out … and Back In
  • Chapter 5. On the Way Out, But Still Very Much In
  • Chapter 6. I’m Ready for a Conclusion
  • Chapter 7. No More: A Ritual
  • Chapter 8. Whose Stereotype Is This?
  • Chapter 9. Abstracting My Healing Processes
  • Chapter 10. Final Thoughts
  • Appendix: Summarizing Trauma-Related Research to Promote Understandings of Social Trauma
  • References
  • Index

←vi | vii→

Acknowledgments

This work is a representation of much encouragement. I should first thank the staff at Peter Lang, including Michelle Smith and Ashita Shaw who worked steadfastly with me during the acquisition process, and Jackie Pavlovic and Sarath Kumar, who made the book production process relatively straightforward and manageable. I also thank the anonymous peer reviewers who provided critiques of the work and suggestions to improve it. Even in its early iterations, they recognized the value of this work despite its difficulty “fitting in” to a clear genre.

My colleagues at UNCG, some who still roam the hall and others who have retired from in-office visibility, have been instrumental to the publication of this work. A special thank you to Saundra Westervelt, Steve Cureton, Ken Allan, Steve Kroll-Smith, Dave Kauzlarich, and Ting Wang. All of you have been shockingly supportive, thus reminding me of the acute power of help. I also wish to thank Carol Stack for her insightful comments as I worked my way through writing this book.

In 2018, around the time that this book idea came to me, I proposed a new course at UNCG titled Considering Ourselves Offenders, Victims, and Survivors. The name has been disparaged as too long and the course content as unpleasant by some university folks, but the students who I have met through the class ←vii | viii→are magnificent. They are capable of grappling with ostracized ideas related to violence, cruelty, love, and respect. In our coming together and discussing our visions of the world, my questions about humanity have been reignited and my commitment to “us” has been renewed. To those of you who stay with me through this course, I appreciate your honest, complicated dedication.

I am fortunate to have a life partner, Kevin, who offers me unwavering reassurance and is perpetually patient and understanding of my interests and goings-on. Living just wouldn’t be the same without Kevin being beside, in front, and behind me. I am grateful too for my family and the amazing friendships that they provide. To Kevin, Brenda, Newell, Cheryl, and Tony, as well as the countless other teachers and friends who continue to appear in numerous forms, more than words can communicate, I thank you for making this life possible and this work imaginable.

←0 | 1→

· 1 ·

What Is This?

“Get a piece of the rock!” Andrew Brolin1 said as he grabbed my backside. I tightened my legs and fixed my gaze at the head in front of me hoping to hide my humiliation. My thoughts screamed with sadness until Murry Browning’s laugh transformed them into stifled rage. This happened at least once a day, nearly every day of the school year. When we left the classroom to go to lunch or outdoor play, the teacher instructed us to line up alphabetically, putting Andrew directly behind me and Murray behind him. Hoping to remain hidden, hurt bubbled from my stomach into my throat, but I would push them back down with an inward stare. Why do we need to line up like this? Each time that line formed, my body stiffened. Nothing’s happening. Just stand still. Don’t move. If I pretend like it’s not happening, no one else will see it. Not moving was my power because Andrew’s grip threatened to weaken me so deeply that the only other possible reaction was dropping to the ground like lead. Instead, my body didn’t seem to flinch. No words came out of my mouth. No tears rolled down my face. I was as stiff and quiet as a corpse. In many ways, I was just that.

As I write this, I experience the same shameful feelings these encounters inspired over 30 years ago. I wish I could say that this was the only time I felt sexually violated.←1 | 2→

Feeling ashamed and angry towards myself and other people continued through most of my youth and young adulthood. In fact, blistering feelings of humiliation are not foreign to me. At gas stations, at work, driving down the road, and doing a myriad of other routine things, I would close my throat, dull my gaze numbly or pierce my eyes in such hatred that I wondered if I might ignite fire. I wondered why I got so much unwanted sexual attention. I don’t understand how I’m asking for it. What can I do to not be seen? Please just let me pump my gas. Please let me just drive to work. Can’t I just walk to class? Please, stop seeing me. I am not asking for you.

Tied to my experiences of being sexualized as a young person was an avalanche of further objectification, confusion, and loathing. Perhaps incongruous, I grew up with parents and siblings who were caring and supportive; they loved me in the ways in which they knew. This is true despite my writing and implying various issues of familial dysfunction in our relationships. To be sure, that dysfunction is and was experienced alongside affection and enjoyment. It’s funny – or perhaps not funny at all – how a sense of dread and loneliness can overshadow love; the opposite rarely seems the case. Some evolutionary scientists explain this by suggesting that adverse events threaten our existence, and thus, are given more attention. Social philosophers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, bell hooks, Cornwell West, and Patricia Hill Collins, suggest that over time an attentive standpoint toward adversity can wound our spirits and catapult us into a barren existence. For a healthy life, we must balance a recognition of our difficulties, sufferings, and pain with our opportunities, empowerment, and anticipation.

I became well-versed at compartmentalizing my life into sections of this and that. Participating in the world as a fragmented self seemed easier to manage. By my teenage years, I had become dedicated to reading about patterns of criminal offending, criminal injury, and victimization, and in the years that followed, I began completing my own research on these topics. I have toiled over data previously gathered from health, commerce, and law enforcement agencies as well as directly observed and interviewed hundreds of people about their lives in various settings and about various topics. All of this work, and what I read in preparation for and interpretation of it, helped me gain an awareness about the ways in which pain, trauma, and crises may encourage distrust, withdrawal, and a-sociability as well as a disassociation with one’s body. Perhaps not surprisingly, it also influenced and influences what, who, and how I saw, see, heard, hear, felt, feel.←2 | 3→

I Never Wanted to Be a Stereotype purposely blurs genres. This book centralizes my own life experiences and otherwise deviates from the convention of social science, so it is likely to be heavily criticized by social scientists for both its content and structure. (And, others may, of course, criticize it for a variety of other reasons.) I value the knowledge that scientific designs and frameworks can reveal. In fact, I value them so much that I make use of them in some of my own studies. But these are not the only way to discover and understand. In 1980, Clifford Geertz wrote about “genre mixing in intellectual life,” noting that it makes “difficult either to label authors … or to classify works.” Regardless of the difficulty, he welcomed such blending and suggested that it could deliver novel conceptions of human life. In the following pages, I write about how problematic objectification, hyper-sexualization, and socially encouraged silence can distort our experiences and our sense of who we are. I write about how I, over a lifetime, questioned myself and my world, especially in frustration, anger, and shame but also at times of contentment and pleasure. I write about how that felt. I write about how the relationship between me and the world both stabilized and changed as a result of confrontations, sometimes hinting at and sometimes explicating my need for balance between individuation and socialization, remembering and forgetting, and autonomy and reliance. In writing about these things, like in living, things get blurry.

The story I share in the following pages illustrates a myriad of things – how modern social arrangements may encourage alienation, trauma, or opportunity, which can result in disjointed visions of ourselves and other people and things around us; how the harassment of women is dismissed as normative under patriarchal conditions; how a sense of home, including geographical residence and class background, can root us in safety or unrest; how physical attributes, including gender displays and skin color, might limit and encourage certain life opportunities; and how persistent confrontations to (dis)empowering encounters are personified: loudly, quietly, and throughout the life course.

I Never Wanted to Be a Stereotype is a personal narrative that recounts provocations and attempts to overcome the sense of shame, unworthiness, confusion, and misperceptions associated with being objectified and feeling isolated. You’ll follow me through my adolescence, teens, young and middle-age adulthood, the latter of which I still reside. I write to you directly, detailing my memories while also providing some context about when and where certain events happened. I understand the limitations of memory. Sociologists ←3 | 4→and historians have discussed these problems at length. In Peter Berger’s Invitation to Sociology, for example, he mentioned the on-going processes of (re)interpreting the past to fit our present judgments of what is important. Others, including Maurice Halbwachs and existential sociologist Jack Douglas, have raised similar points as have more contemporary scholars such as Eviatar Zerubavel and Jeffrey Olick. Suffice it to say, because speaking directly about our memories is veiled by post-hoc rationalizations and perceptions, I include some “raw” or unfiltered journal entries and other creations I had previously composed to cope with, and arguably elicit, my sense of impending dread, angst, care, and hope. In doing so, I seek to bridge the equal importance of scholarship, imaginative expression, and embodied existence.

Details

Pages
X, 200
Year
2021
ISBN (ePUB)
9781433173417
ISBN (PDF)
9781433185106
ISBN (MOBI)
9781433183966
ISBN (Hardcover)
9781433184369
DOI
10.3726/b17918
Language
English
Publication date
2021 (April)
Published
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien, 2021. X, 200 pp., 10 b/w ill.

Biographical notes

Cindy Brooks Dollar (Author)

Cindy Brooks Dollar is Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from North Carolina State University. Her research on inequalities, control, stigma, and harm has been published in numerous sociology, criminology, and interdisciplinary journals and books.

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