![]() ![]() In literature, we might call him the protagonist. ![]() In cases like this, the perpetrator is a dense magnet, intentionally or incidentally becoming the center of a grand discursive field. It was important, if you were invested in the promise of his innocence, to stress the toxic bacchanalia of the American campus, to mourn his future, to call him “the Stanford swimmer.” And it was crucial, if you saw him for what he was, to uncover how affluence safeguards abusers. The fleshing out of his identities was useful to apologists, and it was instrumentalized by activists. The interest in Turner was voraciously cultural. That he was the son of a nice white couple in the idyllic town of Oakwood, Ohio, that he had been heavily recruited to a swimming scholarship at Stanford, and that he was an Olympic hopeful. I could trace in the air the curl of his hair, still unkempt at the time of his booking for the sexual assault of an unconscious young woman on Stanford’s campus in January of 2015. ![]() ![]() The nostrils flared, the neck thick, the eyes shocked and orb-like, the mouth tight with some strain. A fact: whether you believed Brock Turner to be a good boy, ensnared by the confusing lures of hookup culture, or an entitled élite, cornering women like game, you knew his face. Chanel Miller, in her new memoir, “Know My Name,” situates victimhood as a conduit to expertise, and trauma as a mode of human insight. ![]()
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