Being Hated: Stranger or Familiar?
| Date | 01 December 2005 |
| Published date | 01 December 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663905057596 |
| Author | Gail Mason |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
BEING HATED: STRANGER OR
FAMILIAR?
GAIL MASON
University of Sydney, Australia
ABSTRACT
Like all emotions, hate is comprised of a number of interacting, sometimes contra-
dictory, feelings. This article looks at hate as a form of affect that is tied to the collec-
tive sense of estrangement that exists between insider and outsider groups. This link
between hatred and estrangement is closely connected to the assumption that the
perpetrators of ‘real’ hate crime are predominantly strangers to the victim. By
drawing upon the results of a study into racial and homophobic harassment recorded
by the London Metropolitan Police Service, the article questions the stranger-danger
image of hate crime and explores the significance of location to the ways in which
victims and perpetrators of harassment know each other. It suggests that the spatial
ambiguity embodied by estrangement – physical proximity coupled with emotional
distance – injects an ambivalence into the victim–perpetrator relationship that has
implications for the definition of all hate crime.
KEY WORDS
estrangement; hate crime; hatred; homophobic harassment; racial harassment;
stranger danger
INTRODUCTION
HATE CRIME is a nomadic concept. It wanders. It moves between
epistemological spaces, drawing meaning from the unique way in
which other concepts and experiences come together to render it
intelligible: prejudice, emotion, motivation, violence, difference, law, and so
on. It has no foundational or historical meaning and the forms of behaviour
that it signifies are changing before our very eyes. Although working defi-
nitions of hate crime have been generated by the criminal justice system, such
legal characterizations are only one component of the dynamic process by
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, www.sagepublications.com
0964 6639, Vol. 14(4), 585–605
DOI: 10.1177/0964663905057596
which our understandings of hate crime are currently being crafted. Hate
crime also takes its meaning from theoretical accounts of racism, homo-
phobia, anti-Semitism, and so on. Indeed, hate has become the new preju-
dice. The two concepts share an intertwined aetiology that is deeply indebted
to psychology and psychiatry, yet, nowadays, we rarely hear or read the
word prejudice. Instead, we talk about ‘isms’ and ‘centrisms’, phobias and
hatreds, otherness and self. The emergence of the concept of hate crime has
thus promoted the idea of group (or collective) hate as a primary heuristic
device through which to understand attitudes, emotions and behaviours that
used to be represented as prejudice. Consequently, if we want to come to
terms with hate crime we have to grapple with the idea of hate itself.
We need not think of hate as pure emotion. Although insights gleaned from
over 50 years of prejudice studies are invaluable (see Young-Bruehl, 1996)
the waning use of the term prejudice is due in part to a scepticism about the
way in which it has come to represent an individualized or pathologized
account of, what might be described as, a problem of ‘negative intergroup
attitude’ (Duckitt, 1992: 23). Recent theories of affect suggest that such atti-
tudes or feelings may be better understood as collective, rather than purely
personal, experiences (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Patton, 2000). For
example, Gibbs (2001) argues that the collective nature of affect is demon-
strated in the sociality of feelings, in the way in which one person’s feelings
(whether they be hate, sadness, anxiety, and so on) can be visually and
linguistically transferred to others and thus felt by others: we ‘catch feelings’.
This process of interaffectivity – the contagion of feelings between us – is
embodied, but not contained by, a ‘subjective’ or ‘personal’ sense of self
(Massumi, 1996: 221). Thus, hate is literally ‘what happens to us’ (Colebrook,
2002: 22) when we ‘catch’ an intense dislike, extreme aversion or hostility
towards groups of others whom we may not know in a personal sense
(Winborne and Cohen, 1999). This does not mean that such feelings are not
experienced at the personal or individual level, but, rather, that they do not
originate in, and cannot be reduced to, individual subjectivity. They manifest
in the body as a curling of the upper lip, a turning of the shoulder, a tight-
ening in the gut, a raging in the head, a clenching of the fist, or a physical
desire to injure. The phrase collective hate can be used to signal both the
communal experience of such emotion and the fact that it is felt towards a
class of persons (rather than individual hatred towards a particular person).1
Like all emotions, collective hate is comprised of a number of interacting,
sometimes contradictory, feelings (Armstrong, 2003): fear, disgust, shame,
anger, estrangement and, even, love. One way of understanding hate, and hate
crime, is to unpack the concept itself, to look at it through the ways in which
it interacts with, and takes its meaning from, these other kinds of feelings. In
this article, I consider one such feeling: estrangement. Drawing upon the
work of Bauman, I suggest that the sense of estrangement that separates
‘insider’ groups from ‘outsider’ groups is one of the affective conditions that
makes hate, and hate crime, possible.2This connection between hatred and
estrangement is, in turn, closely connected to the popular perception that
586 SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 14(4)
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