Heteromasculine Nationalism and the Threshold of Violence in the U.S.: How deviance is made intelligible in representations of the Fort Hood shooting

Taylor G. Buck Discourse Analysis (Winter 2014) Final Paper

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Heteromasculine Nationalism and the Threshold of Violence in the U.S.:

How deviance is made intelligible in representations of the Fort Hood

shooting

In this paper I will analyze a number of online journalistic articles concerning

an incident of gun violence on the Fort Hood military base in Killeen, Texas on April

2, 2014, wherein Ivan Lopez reportedly shot 19 people, killing three and injuring 16,

before committing suicide (Article 1). I will consider the ways the categories of

“mental illness,” “terrorism,” and improper masculine aggression are employed

discursively to suggest norms of masculinity and proper U.S. citizenship, positioned

against a (violent, threatening) deviant from whom the proper citizen must be

protected. How does violence function as a threshold of the intelligibility and

normativity of the (heteromasculine nationalist) subject? I suggest that the mentally

ill person and the terrorist, as well as the racialized, aggressive male, function to

tacitly perpetuate projects of normativity. While historically madness itself (in its

many manifestations, including the perceived impulse toward “terrorism”) served

to mark the (non) subjects to be feared, modernity is largely characterized by a

restoration of the mentally ill to a potential for reason through individual

internalization of norms and control of environment/socialization (Skull 1992). I

thus argue that a certain conception of violence functions as the threshold that

determines the citizen from the outsider to be feared.

We can define discourse as that which determines what meanings can and

cannot be made intelligible. As a system of concepts that function to differentiate


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between text and context, discourse determines what comes to “be” at all. By

representing incidents like this one through discursive divides between

violence/non-violence, sane/insane, and terrorist/citizen, the structures of hetero-

masculine nationalism and militaristic control are secured and perpetuated. The

representations I look at are indicative of a project to delineate who deserves

protection from this constructed violent non-subject. The construction of the mad

person/the terrorist makes possible the very act of not labeling other instances/acts

as violent. The illusion of safety/non-violence necessary for the state’s continued

monopoly on violence is made possible by representations of distinctive,

unreasonable acts of homicide. This constructed threshold precludes an adequate

deconstruction of violence by taking as given what it means to be an intelligible

subject in the first place. The text functions to normalize what it claims to merely

represent as that which is already normal/deviant.

I will analyze four news articles published online between April 2 and April 8,

2014 that directly address the Fort Hood incident. All articles were published in

English from the U.S., one by the Associated Press via the Huffington Post (article 1),

one by Fox News (article 2), and two by the New York Times (articles 3 and 4). I will

focus on the articles’ discursive framing of violence through mental illness,

terrorism, militarism, and hetero-masculinity. I am not seeking to assess whether

the statements made in the articles are “true” in their representations of “real”

events, but am instead interested in the deep structuring of a surface linearity that

makes such statements intelligible to their public audience in the first place. In other

words, determining the accuracy of a representation becomes irrelevant when we


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consider instead that what “really” happened cannot be located outside of or prior

to its discursive construction. Online news sources are significant factors in the

formation and mediation of the meanings that circulate to construct the event of the

Fort Hood shooting (that it is even identified primarily as a shooting has discursive

meaning—we cannot remove ourselves from such circulation) in so far as they are

charged with presentation of “facts” about the event through nearly instant

knowledge production. I have thus chosen national, well known and politically

variant news sources in order to best capture the most wide reaching discursive

framings of this event.

I will begin with an analysis of the four news articles in relation to three

particular consistencies: the goal of finding the “true” motivation of the violent

act(s), the construction of a linear narrative of the event, the construction of the

victim as proper subject, and the construction of Ivan Lopez, the “gunman.” I will

then discuss the implications of these discursive trends in relation to my question of

how violence functions as a threshold to delineate the proper heteromasculine

national subject.

From cause to motive to incident: (Re)creating a linear narrative

All four articles focus on locating an intelligible intention or impetus behind

the act of violence. There are two key implications in the articles’ framing of the

event: first, that violence is necessarily individually motivated, and that this

motivation can and should be found retrospectively with the eventual goal of

anticipation and prevention; and second, that mental illness and terrorism are the

key motivators for the kind of (gun) violence marked as “rampage” violence. All the


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articles orbit in some way around these implications, drawing new conclusions or

solidifying old ones, always purporting to expose what preexisted the incident, the

implicit motive being to understand the “truth” in order to facilitate prevention in

the future. This narrative rests on the naturalization of the dualisms that are

constructed in part by the narrative itself.

Article 3 immediately begins the work of individualizing the violence so the

reader is urged to accept the dualisms of mentally ill/not mentally ill,

violence/nonviolence, terrorist/citizen, intelligible subject/unintelligible non-

subject. The authors introduce Ivan Lopez as “a soldier who was being evaluated for

post-traumatic stress disorder” who was responsible for the “rampage,” implicating

a causal connection between PTSD and uncontainable violence. Article 2 claims that

the event “did not appear to be due to some ongoing mental problem, an Army

official said Monday,” securing a distinct line between mental illness (which would

make violence and general unpredictability intelligible) and the preceding

normative state of mental health—there is no room for variance, or for a nuanced

understanding of what is meant by “mental problems” in relation to the natural,

normal mental state that is assumed by the use of the term “problem.” The articles

simultaneously legitimate the causal connection of mental illness and violence and

depict Lopez as retrospectively not mentally ill (enough). Had he met the

predetermined criteria of adequate signs of trauma, shown certain behavioral signs

linked to madness, and engaged more consistently in mental health services, this

link could suffice for the purpose of determining the “truth” of Lopez’s motivation.

However, because he does not, the viewer learns that we must look elsewhere.


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Like the hypothesis of mental-illness-as-motivator, terrorism or “extremism”

is mentioned in 3 of the 4 articles as a potential reason for the violence. All assure

the reader that there is no proof of a link to “terrorism,” but the articles legitimate

this potential link through mention of an incident of gun violence in 2009 that

occurred on the same military base, wherein Nidal Hasan, an army psychiatrist, shot

and killed 13 people. Hasan was Muslim. In article 3 the authors indirectly quote a

commander who posited that “[Lopez’s] motive remained unclear, but that the

shooting did not appear to be related to terrorism” (ibid). Article 1 states, “He had

no apparent links to extremists, [Army Secretary John] McHugh said.” It is thus the

case that violence is only discursively intelligible as an explosive incident (a

“rampage”) caused most probably by either mental illness (diagnosable and

quantifiable) or terrorism/extremism (Islam).

An alternative to the PTSD-as-cause and Islamism-as-cause explanations is

formulated once it has been determined that such accounts are insufficient in the

project of making Lopez’s individual motivation intelligible. Article 2, whose

headline reads “Fort Hood shooter snapped over denial of request for leave, Army

confirms,” puts forth “confirmation that an argument of a request for leave had

immediately preceded the shooting,” implying that this conflict (another instance of

unregulated, explosive violence meant to indicate the potential of “snapping”) in

some way provoked Lopez to “rampage.” This “confirmation,” the article claims,

…seemed to further put to rest prior speculation that the 34-year-old Army specialist's Lopez's spree may have been related to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Although he had reportedly been treated for mental issues including depression, military officials had expressed skepticism that his four-month tour in Iraq as that war wound down could have caused PTSD. (Article 2)


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Again, PTSD is framed as something one either has or does not have—something

that either was or was not a factor in motivating Lopez. It is determined that,

because of this “confirmed” argument and because Lopez’s experience in war was

not sufficiently traumatizing to warrant a legitimate diagnosis of PTSD, the mental

illness hypothesis does not suffice. It is replaced as the cause here by an improper,

overly masculine rage. That Lopez argued over a request for leave in the first place

is marked as indicative of his lack of emotional control. Further, that this lack of

control is linked as a causal factor to a “rampage” of gun violence is marked as an

unacceptable manifestation of hyper-masculinity. The implication is that Lopez did

not get his way, and thus resorted to extreme violence. The reader is expected to

recognize this as indicative of an improper subject—someone who, tragically, could

not control himself. Article 4 likewise discusses the argument as “the catalyst,”

despite that “investigators have not yet established a clear motive. “In that argument,

[Lopez] expressed anger over the processing of the request, officials said. One of the

soldiers in that meeting, Sgt. Jonathan Westbrook, described the specialist as “irate.””

The fixation on individual motive precludes any analysis of the structural

factors at play in such an incident. In a video embedded in article 3, U.S. President

Barack Obama ensures security after the incident, and emphasizes the project of

finding “truth.” “We are going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened,” the

president said. This implies that if an individual motive can be established, the

incident can be explained within a paradigm of “rampage” violence vs. state-

monopolized violence-for-safety which is not even coded as violence. By

emphasizing a search for the motive of the individual “gunman,” all four articles


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effectively secure the nation as the realm of nonviolence from which an individual

has deviated, having been “broken” in some capacity either by mental illness

(trauma of war), improper masculine rage (overreaction to not getting what one

wants), or by Islamism/extremism.

This search for the “true” motivation behind the violence is supported by

attempts to construct a linear narrative of the event’s progression. This is especially

apparent in article 4, which attempts a cohesive, linear diagramming of the incident.

It seeks to (re)construct the “facts” and progression of deaths in real-time,

imagining the movement of the unintelligible violent man. One wonders what

discursive function this appeal to temporal linearity serves. To whom is such a story

meant to appeal, and how does it normalize the conception of “explosive” violence

fundamental to all four articles’ constructions of the crux of the event? Not only does

the article’s body focus most on a step-by-step detailing of “how the shooting

unfolded,” it also includes a numbered, diagrammed map of Fort Hood. The six sites

deemed most significant in Lopez’s “rampage” are numbered in order of occurrence

and explained in straightforward captions detailing Lopez’s action (such as “enters,”

“kills,” “wounds,” “exits”) in present, active tense. It is these actions that differentiate

Lopez from his victims, and from the public, and the assumption is that a detailed,

linear account of what “really” happened (what Lopez really “did”) may help to

solidify for what reason Lopez so dramatically deviated from norms of (non-violent,

or rather, properly violent) citizenship. As I will argue below, however, this news

coverage participates in the very construction and solidification of those norms

themselves, and the deviations that make those norms intelligible at all. I will now


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consider how the victim (the normative subject) is depicted in these narratives in

opposition to Lopez as (potentially) mentally ill, terrorist, overly aggressive male, or

otherwise deviant less-than-subject who, both after his death and retrospectively as

a living person, becomes that which is excluded from the law, simultaneously

serving to legitimate that law and the assumptions on which it rests.

Construction of the victim and the proper subject

I will now consider how the articles describe the victim(s) of the violence.

For whom is “protection,” safety and prevention important? Who is seen as

threatened by the (always potentially) violent mentally ill person, terrorist, or “irate”

man? How is the proper subject constructed against its violent deviant? Article 4

discusses the victim as a person with family, feelings, etc. One of the men who was

shot is quoted saying, “The next thing going through my head was my family: my

wife, my children, my mom, my dad. Make sure that I can get safe so I can stay alive

for them, and that’s what I did. And through the grace of God, I came out of there

alive.” Article 3 uses an anecdote about the wife of a soldier who was on the Fort

Hood base that day. She is quoted describing herself as a “waiting bird,” having

“stood outside the visitor center at Fort Hood’s main gate Wednesday evening,

anxiously awaiting word from her husband of 10 months.” This positions the victim

of the violence as, not only those who were shot, but also the patient female

heteronormative subjects who, through the institution of marriage, were deeply

emotionally affected by the incident. One of the three images in article 3 is of a

woman not mentioned in the article’s body, resting her head on the boot of a soldier


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whose upper body is not pictured. She appears distraught, and the captions states:

“Lucy Hamlin and her husband waited for permission to re-enter Fort Hood on

Wednesday.” Discussions of those who were affected negatively by the violence are

distinguished from Lopez himself through direct quotes and present information

about decision-making, emotions, and thoughts that are presented for the reader to

identify with.

Construction of the villain and the broken subject

In article 1, the only of the four that focuses on attempting to construct Lopez

as a coherent subject, the emphasis on motive functions as the thread that connects

otherwise disparate statements. First framing the event as “baffling,” the article

quotes someone who had known Lopez personally: "[Lopez] had a lot of friends. I

never saw him fighting. He never seemed like a boy who had emotional problems."

The article parallels the others in delegitimizing a connection between PTSD and

Lopez’s actions. “Army Secretary John McHugh said Thursday that a psychiatrist last

month found no violent or suicidal tendencies. The soldier was prescribed Ambien

for a sleeping problem.” If he is not properly crazy (i.e. has never seen combat, has

never been injured, and most importantly has not been formally diagnosed) and he

is not a terrorist (a racialized assumption that is “found” through a lack of

connections to “extremist groups”), the violence becomes shocking, surprising,

baffling, and unexpected through its lack of apparent motivation.

Having precluded the characterization of Lopez as social outcast, excessively

aggressive man, or mentally ill, the article goes on to present a sequence of other


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possible motivations for such a seemingly unintelligible act. The words used to

describe Lopez throughout the article are: introverted; passionate about music; laid

back; shy; quiet; friendly; perfectly fine; working class; and no violent or suicidal

tendencies. This is the only of the four articles that addresses Lopez as a human with

a personality, past, friends and family. This takes place within a framework of a

mysterious explosion by a previously unremarkable person. The article begins:

He grew up in Puerto Rico, played percussion in his high school band, spent nearly a decade in the National Guard, served as a peacekeeper in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, worked as a police officer and then joined the U.S. Army.

That was Ivan Lopez's seemingly unremarkable route into the military. But what happened from there — and why the 34-year-old soldier turned against his comrades with such deadly fury — were a mystery Thursday. (Article 1)

Imagery of “fury” and “rampage” and the utter confusion this provoked are utilized

throughout the article. This article initially presents him less as a villain and more as

a previously proper hetero (married) masculine (military/police man) citizen (born

in Puerto Rico, served for U.S. National Guard, etc.) somehow mysteriously broken

or gone wrong. He is not primarily represented as either mentally ill or

“extremeist”—the article states, “the family was not aware that Lopez was receiving

any treatment for mental problems.” After setting up Lopez as such a previously

proper citizen, the article goes on to suggest an array of possible resolutions to the

“explosion” by pointing to ways in which these seemingly idyllic aspects of his life

may not have been as they seemed. His wife, for example, who is referred to only as

part of “the couple” or as “Lopez’s wife,” is framed by franticness, motherhood, and

the inability to speak English, all aspects of an unstable, feminine, incomplete citizen.

This disrupts the proper heteronationalism of Lopez’s marriage, a component that is


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key in depicting the ideal victim (and hero) in all of the articles. Article 1 then

alludes to tension in the marriage, quoting their across-the-hall neighbor who

claims that while he had “never heard the couple argue, ‘you could see there was

tension between them. I never saw them leave the house together. It seemed

obvious they didn't talk to one another much,’ Georges said.” Lopez and his wife

thus “obviously” do not live up to the standards of a happy marriage, an indicator of

deeper individual problems that could potentially lead to such an unintelligible

violent explosion as the event in question. The “normalization of exclusively

heterosexual desire, intimacy, and family life” is, as Spike V. Peterson argues, “key to

nationalism” in that it underpins and is not distinguishable from the “sexist

practices” of nationalist projects (Peterson 1999:40). Thus by alluding to deviations

from such norms, the articles mark Lopez as deviant.

This depiction of Lopez occurs in opposition to the “terrorist” perpetrator of

the 2009 incident mentioned above. Linked through the perpetration of gun

violence, Lopez and Hasan are distinguished in that Hasan “had become a radical

Muslim while serving in the military,” whereas Lopez is consistently marked as not-

terrorist, both through explicit statements and through what is not stated. Yet Lopez

is still subtly framed as deviant. For example, article 4 quotes Chris Grey, “a

spokesman for the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command, the lead

agency investigating the shooting,” in its project of reconstructing a linear narrative

of the shooting’s progression. Grey states, “According to witness statements, the

subject was traveling very slowly, northbound in the southbound lane.” Lopez was

going the wrong way at an improper speed, indicating that more was wrong than


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just his inability to decipher the north from southbound lane, a point underscored

by the words used to describe Lopez’s actions and the response provoked: turned

against; mystery; rampage; baffled; explosion of violence; deadly fury; devastated;

trying to comprehend. Accompanied by 27 photos of Lopez, the article invites

readers to view the spectacle of a seemingly “normal” heteromasculine military

citizen in images that depict him prior to the “deadly fury,” and thus to question

whether something exists in the images themselves that may tip us off to an eerily

already-present explosive violence.

Discussion & Conclusion

Nationalist projects are necessarily exclusive, fortifying the homogenized

national identity against those who do not belong. This functions both externally,

against other nations, and internally (Peterson 1999), as the homogenous hetero-

masculine ideal is positioned against its opposites with regards to gender, class,

sexuality, (dis)ability, etc. This marks an incident like the one at Fort Hood military

base as especially imbued with nationalist politics. The national subject is in its ideal

form as a hetero-masculine soldier, and the division between proper citizen and

deviant. This normative subject is defined primarily as hetero, male, able-bodied,

and rational/able-minded, which implies the capacity for self-reflection and self-

awareness. Deviations from such norms imply a threat to the very dualisms

themselves, and thus to the hegemony of the norms. In the West, an age of

individualist liberal subjecthood, violence has come to function as the ultimate

threshold of intelligible humanness--the violent mentally ill person is seen as

fundamentally different from the non-violent (maybe mentally ill) person with


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whom we are supposed to empathize and for whom "coming forward" for treatment

for mental health problems is increasingly coded as "brave." Doing “violence” (what

is coded as violence is of course fundamental to this discursive framework) to

“another” (who qualifies as another to whom violence should not be done is also

important—often violence is condoned, but only against certain beings) becomes

the event that distinguishes the subject from the outsider-threat. This is apparent in

discussions of how incidents of gun violence like this one (note that incidents

deemed not like this one, such as gang-related shootings on the south side of

Chicago, are depicted as of a completely different kind) ought to be prevented

through the anticipation of which subjects are most predisposed to such violence.

The mentally ill person, the terrorist, and the unruly Puerto Rican who does not talk

to his wife are somehow already-almost violent all along. The threshold of

human/less-than-human is no longer madness/sanity itself, but the (propensity for)

violence; A discourse of prevention and the preservation of a specific type of

heteromasculine subject of the military is thus central.

I have concerned myself with how the coverage positions the mentally ill, the

terrorist, and the insufficient citizen (all intersecting categories) as people who need

to be controlled prior to their act of violence, so that everyone else (all the sane,

intelligible citizens of America) can be protected. I have tried to show, through an

analysis of four online news reports about a recent incident of gun violence in Fort

Hood, how lines are drawn to delineate who we as readers are supposed to care

about, and when/why/in what ways, as well as how violence is constructed as a

locatable, definite marker of tragedy of a certain kind. The articles’ fixation on


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“making sense” of Lopez’s actions, finding intelligibility in his motive, and

(re)constructing a temporally linear story of what “really” happened, function to

explain an incident that disrupted normative heteronationalism and, if only

momentarily, exposed the instability of that line between violence and non-violence.

This is especially interesting considering that this violence has taken place within

the bounds of military space, the military being key to the state monopoly on

violence and, as Holly Allen has argued, to the particularly concentrated project of

delineating the nationalist subject in the U.S. (2000).

The articles indicate that Lopez must be framed in some way as a deviant,

whether through mental illness, terrorism, or masculine rage. The failure of these

explanations makes the incident totally “baffling”—an unintelligible mystery.

Lopez’s act of violence is made intelligible within a discourse that, in marking his act

as violence of a certain “baffling” and “explosive” kind, implicitly normalizes all

other forms of violence (such as military violence, or the symbolic and physical

violence of the normative project of heteromasculinity in general) as always-already

intelligible and necessary for the safety of the national population. This facilitates

and secures the very norm/deviant paradigm on which the articles and their

sources draw to “make sense” of the incident.


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Articles Analyzed

Article 1: Coto, D., Mohr, H., & Weissert, W. (2014, 04 03). Ivan Lopez, Fort Hood gunman, baffles hometown with rampage. Huffington Post: Crime. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/03/ivan-lopez-fort-hood_n_5086815.html

Article 2: FoxNews.com. (2014, 04 07). Fort hood shooter snapped over denial of request for leave, army confirms. Fox News: Military. Retrieved from http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/04/07/fort-hood-shooter-snapped-over-denial-request-for-leave-army-confirms/

Article 3: Montgomery, D., Fernandez, M., & Southall, A. (2014, 04 02). Iraq veteran at fort hood kills 3 and himself in rampage. New York Times: U.S.. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/us/gunshots-reported-at-fort-hood.html

Article 4: Fernandez, M., & Blinder, A. (2014, 04 07). Army releases detailed account of base rampage. New York Times: U.S.. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/08/us/officials-give-account-of-fort-hood-shooting.html?ref=forthoodtexas&_r=0

Additional Sources Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. (D. Heller-Roazen, trans.). Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press.

Allen, H. (2000). Gender, sexuality and the military model of U.S. national community. In T. Mayer (Ed.), Gender Ironies of Nationalism (pp. 309-327). London and New York: Routledge.

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. (pp. 1-36). London: Verso.

Elliston, D. A. (2004). A passion for the nation: masculinity, modernity, and nationalist struggle. American Ethnologist, 31(4), 606-630.

Mayer, T. (2000b). Gender ironies of nationalism: setting the stage. In T. Mayer (Ed.), Gender Ironies of Nationalism (pp. 1-22). London and New York: Routledge.

Nagel, J. (1998). Masculinity and nationalism: gender and sexuality in the making of nations. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21(2), 242-269.

Peterson, V. S. (1999). Sexing political identities/nationalism as heterosexism. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 1(1), 34-65.

Scull, A.T. (1992). Social Order, Mental Disorder: Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective.

Stachowitsch, S. (2012). Professional soldier, weak victim, patriotic heroine. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 15(2), 157-176.

Heteromasculine Nationalism and the Threshold of Violence in the U.S.: How deviance is made intelligible in representations of the Fort Hood shooting

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