There’s a lot of talk about ‘cancel culture’ whereby people are called out for their views and then deprived of a platform such as Donald Trump’s ongoing ban from Facebook following his posts inciting violence. In this blog Heather Mendick argues that geek identities support the right-wing appropriation of victimhood via cancel culture.
Cancel culture and the new ‘victims’
In July last year, a group of academics, journalists and writers collectively rejected ‘cancel culture’, which they described as “calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought”, for example, when “editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class”.
While there are certainly instances of this, I like many was sceptical at the time as some of those who complained about being cancelled have access to large platforms through which to share their views and some of those who signed the letter had engaged in efforts to ‘cancel’ others. Following this, there were debates about whether cancel culture exists and about the limits of freedom of speech. Relatively neglected is how cancel culture has been a way for the right wing to claim the positions of victim and of standard bearer in the fight against oppression.
People losing their jobs, freedom, health and lives for expressing political views is not new. A million people were murdered in Indonesia in the 1960s for being communists and up to another million were imprisoned or tortured. In my own country, the UK, until about a decade ago, a secret organisation kept a list of construction workers whose political views were deemed problematic and who were actively blocked from working in the industry.
The cancel culture debate wants to erase these and similar examples by claiming that people who share right-wing views such as about race and IQ are society’s true victims. In this, they gain support from elements of geek/nerd identity.
Geek identity and victimhood
Just as the recent hand wringing about cancel came at a time of unprecedented anti-racist activism following Black Lives Matter marches across the world, the three Revenge of the Nerds films came out in the US at a time when both the feminist and civil rights movements had made huge gains. Lori Kendall sees the films as emblematic of the backlash against these gains. “The figure of the nerd, particularly as he appears in the Revenge of the Nerds movies, substitutes for other oppressed groups and recodes bids for the overturn of the dominance of white straight males”.
As we watch the films, we are encouraged to identify with our nerd underdog heroes. In the first movie in the trilogy, two nerds are rejected by multiple fraternities because of their nerdiness before being accepted by an African American fraternity. “This coding of the nerds as black continues throughout the rest of the movie. The strong and strapping white, blond, Alpha Betas terrorize the nerds using numerous examples drawn from the history of African-American oppression. Just in case we don’t get the connection, at one point the Alpha Betas burn a NERDS sign on the nerds’ house lawn”. The conclusion of the film sees the nerds’ black fraternity brothers coming to their aid as one nerd declares: “No one’s really gonna be free until nerd persecution ends”. As with cancel culture, relatively minor examples of oppression experienced by people with relative privilege, in this case straight white men “being called names, not feeling like one of the ‘beautiful people’”, are placed above and used to erase the more serious structural oppression and violence experienced by African American men.
This transformation of straight white men into victims through geekhood or nerdery persists. Within popular culture, The Social Network depicts Mark Zuckerberg as a bullied nerd battling against the elitism he encounters at Harvard and in the business world, rather than as a powerful corporate CEO. Earlier this year, the news that Elon Musk had become the world’s richest man provoked headlines such as ‘from bullied schoolboy to world’s richest man’ that employ the geek’s fabled suffering to legitimise unprecedented economic inequality.
Even among less-celebrated geeks, in online geek spaces, white male users claim to be victims not just of alpha males but of women. This is epitomised in the manifesto of the self-named ‘perfect gentleman’ and mass-murderer Elliott Rodger who released a lengthy manifesto about his experience of rejection and taunting by women in order to justify his actions. Feeling excluded as Rodgers did is painful but the six people he killed and the fourteen he injured are the victims on whom we need to focus, not Rodger.
When we wax sentimental about 1980s films about high school geeks and nerds or enjoy contemporary depictions of geek entrepreneurs overcoming persecution to find tech success, we can’t ignore the role these have played and continue to play in sustaining a backlash against movements for social justice and in convincing us that people who lead relatively-privileged lives are society’s true victims.