Donileen Loseke
Professor
Contact
Office: CPR 215
Phone: 813/974-2517
Email:
Links
Personal Bio
I'm talking to a former shelter client who hated her shelter stay. She complains that workers treated her like a child, telling her what to do, telling her how she should understand herself and her experiences. She tells me, "I’m not that type of woman, I’m not a battered woman, I didn’t want them to make me into one so I left." A social worker would say this woman is in “denial,” but I wonder: She had been assaulted but she resisted being that type of woman. A battered woman must be a "type" of woman, but what type? Where does the image of a "type" of woman come from? Can workers make woman into a "battered woman?" Can workers convince women that this is how they should think of themselves? Would that be a good thing to do?
That interaction many years ago was how I became interested in questions about social problems consciousness which is a more-or-less publicly shared definition of a condition as morally intolerable and in need of change. Why do Americans worry about some things—such as random violence, or crime in general—while we ignore others—such as environmental pollution or the lack of medical care for poor people? Objectively speaking, what we don’t worry about sometimes causes more harm than what we do worry about. How is that? My particular concern has been in understanding relationships between social problems consciousness, the organization of social services, and identity.
Identity is a very complex concept that has personal, social, political, and cultural dimensions. At the personal level, identity is about how individuals categorize ourselves, how each of us answers the question of "who am I?" While working at the shelter I realized that women with objectively very similar experiences might nonetheless understand themselves in very different ways: Some women would readily and eagerly claim the identity of "battered woman" while others would adamantly resist it. At the social level, identity is about how others categorize us, regardless of how we categorize ourselves: It was not uncommon for shelter workers to categorize some potential shelter residents as “not-battered” while the women categorized themselves as "battered;" workers could categorize some women as "battered" although the women themselves said they were not this type of person. Politically, identity is about how types of people are categorized as deserving of social benefits or punishments: There are multiple (although not enough) social services for women socially categorized as "battered," there are far fewer services for women who simply want to leave their partners but have no where to go. Culturally, identity is about how types of people are accorded various levels of value and worth, how types of people are accorded various types of emotional response: It is hard to conceive of feeling hatred toward a battered woman or saying that she should be punished; in the United States it is just as hard to believe that we should feel sympathy for, and assist "terrorists."
My initial interest in understanding why some women who had been assaulted refused the personal identity of "battered woman" led me to examine the importance of socially circulating images of victim and villain types of people that are constructed for all social problems. Our world is littered with villain types of people who are constructed as causing social problems—the rapist, the drug dealer, the drunk driver—and with victim types of people constructed as experiencing the personal consequences of social problems—the rape victim, the crime victim, the victim of medical malpractice. Activists, scientists, and mass media personnel construct these images in their attempts to encourage social problem consciousness. One of my continuing interests has been in understanding the detailed images constructed of types of people. I started with battered women and then moved to examining public images of the "deserving poor" and the "homeless mentally ill." What social images of these types of people have in common is that they achieve their power by evoking the emotional response of sympathy. More recently, I've become interested in the social production of villains, types of people produced as deserving public hatred, condemnation and punishment: the "pedophile priest" and the "terrorist." My general interest is in examining relationships between these political and cultural identities, the organization of services for these types of people and the personal identities of individual people. My research has focused on a range of specific questions such as: How do individual women who have been assaulted decide to accept or reject the personal identity of "battered woman?" How do organizations such as shelters for battered women reflect and perpetuate particular identities? How do public images of homeless people as "mentally ill" justify forcibly removing these people from the streets "for their own good"? How does the image of the "deserving poor" reflect and perpetuate images of the proper subject in the late-modern era? How does the public image of "pedophile priest" become an often unspoken—yet ever present—part of social evaluations of individual men who are gay? How do the images of the "terrorist" and the "pedophile priest" silence questions that reasonably might be asked about individual people who are categorized as these types of people? How does the public image of the "terrorist" construct such a person as “less than human” and therefore a type of person whose elimination does not pose a moral problem?
Education
Ph.D.,University of California - Santa Barbara, 1982
Current Courses