jack the ripper

September 8, 2014

No Name

Jack Graham class, imperialism, jack the ripper, misogyny, patriarchy, poverty, sexism, victoriana 3

Triggers

Apparently, they’ve found out who Jack the Ripper was. Maybe. At least, so says the Daily Mail, and a bloke who’s written a book about the case, and who owns a business selling ‘Ripper’ tours. So, reliable and unbiased sources.

Turns out, Jack the Ripper was… some guy.

Who’d have thunk it?

So, will this put a stop to the lucrative Ripper industry? The books, movies, walks, etc?

No, of course not. Like all previous unmaskings, it’ll just fuel the fire, even if this unmasking turns out to rest on marginally better evidence that some hack’s ability to create anagrams, or an evidently untrue story told by a publicity hound, or the baseless hunch of a crime writer, or an obviously forged diary, or the manufactured bad reputation of a dead one-time heir to the throne.

Because, contrary to what everyone ever has always said about Jack the Ripper, interest in the case doesn’t stem from the fact that the murderer was never caught. It stems from the appeal of the degradation, humiliation, punishment and silencing of women… and from the way revelling in this (with whatever spurious self justification) can distract us from other stuff about the lives those women led, and the world they lived in.

Our misogynistic culture is obsessed with the murder of women. It is possibly the main subject of the present-day Western narrative culture industry, aside from the sexual/romantic conquest of women.

It could be objected that there are so many stories about the murder of women because so many women are murdered… but that doesn’t explain, say, the lack of a similar number of stories about the rape of women (as Alan Moore pointed out), or about the political and social subjugation of women, or about any number of other things that are more common.

The prevalence of the actual murder of women is intimately connected with the prevalence of depictions of the murder of women, but in ways that are far more complex than the merely causal (whichever way you want to imagine the causation runs). It’s all part and parcel of a cultural misogyny which stems from sexism and patriarchy, generated by class society all the way back to what Engels called “the world historic defeat of the female sex” with the start of social hierarchy. (None of which is to excuse our present cultural practice by appeal to the influence of older structures.)

The women murdered (as is supposed) by the man dubbed Jack the Ripper are objects of morbid fascination because they shared a fate which made them only slightly unusual for women of their class and time. Lots of these women were raped, abused, beaten and/or murdered (by men – let’s not efface that vital part of the story). It just so happens that some of these women were murdered in particularly vicious and gruesome ways, with their bodies mutilated and insultingly displayed afterwards. (It’s by no means clear how many women were the victim of the one escalating killer who ended up reaching a crescendo of perverse cruelty in the killing of Mary Kelley and then vanished, but it does seem likely that at least four were part of his distinct sequence.)…

July 10, 2014

Othering Thursday

Jack Graham anti-potter, architecture, cartmel, cartmel masterplan, gallifrey, j k rowling, jack the ripper, jeremy corbyn, poverty, the other, tumblr, virgin new adventures 5

Someone called ‘Bright Coat and Bravado’ (you can guess their favourite Doctor), posted this on tumblr. Here’s a snippet:

I have a serious problem with the “Cartmel Masterplan”. It’s not really about Looms, if you’ll believe that. It’s about The Other.

I can’t fucking stand the idea that the Doctor – or anyone – is “destined for greatness”.

I posted the following off-the-cuff response (which I reproduce here, opportunistically, because I quite liked it when I read it back):

On the whole, I love the Cartmel era, and have a lot of affection for the Virgin New Adventures… but I don’t like the idea of the Doctor as the recycled ‘Other’.

I don’t like the idea of him being ‘exceptional’ for his society. Much as he is bound to be exceptional from a human standpoint, I think that should always be because of what he does rather than what he is. I like the idea of him as someone who failed in his home context – “…scraping through with 51% at the second attempt” – and being a bit rubbish, a bit of a dilettante, a bit of a second-rater, a bit of a fartaround. Probably because I feel like one of those myself. But that’s okay. I hate the winners vs losers view of life. I hate the idea that one’s worth is determined by one’s ‘success’ in the competition of life, in carving a niche for oneself in a hierarchy. I still more hate the idea of those kinds of judgements being made without taking into account the fact that some people start off at higher rungs and with greater advantages. The Doctor should be someone who started off at such a high rung but who proved unsuited for it because of his infinite distractability, his vagueness and his inability to ‘play the game’… and also because of the moral sense – and the imperative to be a social actor – that he acquires from his involvement, from his breaching of the walls of the enclosed and reactionary envelope of Gallifrey, from his adventures and researches and friendships ‘out there’ in the muck and strife and pain of the universe.

The transformation of him into the reincarnation of a godlike founder figure from mythological pre-history injects a 80s/90s ‘epic’ sensibility into a 60s/70s ‘rebel’ storyline. It is a post-defeat rationalisation overwriting an artefact that originated at a time of struggle. The Doctor-as-drop-out-from-the-ruling-class is an (admittedly imperfect) artefact of 1969. It gets renewed – even intensified – in 1976. And then it gets downplayed and downplayed until – interestingly enough – Holmes gets his hands on it again at the end of the Trial in 1986. But in the run up to the ‘long-90s’, Cartmel et al lay the groundwork for a potential vitiation of it. Even as that crew take the show to angrier and bolshier territory than its has visited for quite some time, they’re also utiling an affect from various cultural strands that bigs the Doctor up and fetishizes him, and his ‘power’.

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