Policing the state: Violence, identity and the law in constructions of hate crime

This dissertation takes as its object the sociolegal category "hate crime," and asks (1) what are the conditions of possibility required for this term to have become so widely used and disputed over within the past two decades? (2) What are the ramifications of constructing the category "hate crime" for efforts to think critically about state power---particularly when it involves intense interaction between police officers and groups historically resistant to police authority? (3) What might a Cultural Studies approach reveal about the promises and challenges of interdisciplinary study of broad social phenomena? The research for the dissertation consists of four years of ethnographic fieldwork with social movement groups and law enforcement agencies in Maryland and California. Because its object of attention is not a single community, this dissertation experiments with different methods of data gathering. The unit of analysis is a discursive category, "hate crime." However, the dissertation is not precisely about hate crime. Rather, it is about the complex intersection of violence, identity categories, and representation---specifically legal representation. Drawing upon literatures in feminist theory (especially in the field of human rights); law and society (particularly "the law's violence"); British cultural studies; and discursive ethnography; in-depth analyses of specific sites reveal that individuals, both within and outside of law enforcement, are mobilizing the term "hate crime" in indirect but powerful negotiations over police identity. The sites include an anti-gay homicide trial in which the perpetrators were sentenced to death; the federal hearings leading up to the passage of the Hate Crimes Statistics Act in 1990; interviews with law enforcement officers and hate crime perpetrators; public schools where police give lessons in tolerance; and police academy training sessions on multicultural awareness and hate crime investigation. The mutual constitution of the figure of the law enforcement agent and the category hate crime appears to be a phenomenon of particular cultural salience. This dissertation argues that the U.S. nation is in the throes of re-imagining itself in relation to its multicultural inhabitants and is doing so, with important and contradictory effects, through the law enforcement response to hate crime.