Kendall Thomas reads Pickett case
Public performance at
Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, Harvard University, 1998.
The excerpts from the criminal proceedings against William Palmer for the murder of Chanelle Pickett raise a number of questions about the intersections
among race, gender and sexuality in American law. I think it useful in this
connection to point up similarities between the defense Palmer offered in the
Pickett murder trial and the defense strategy in the first of the celebrated
Rodney King trial. Although the specific legal issues and factual contexts of
the two cases differ in important respects, I am struck by the way in which
the terms of the defense in both the Chanelle Pickett case and the Rodney King
case seek to "blame the victim". In much the same way that counsel for the
LAPD officers charged in the Rodney King case placed primary responsibility
for King's beating on King himself, Palmer and his counsel blamed Pickett for
the events which led to her death. On Palmer's account, Pickett went "mental"
or "berserk": "[He was] just bouncing off walls and knocking things over and
the light, jumping on the bed." Palmer recounts that after he punched
Pickett, Pickett continued to go "haywire, so that the punch didn't do much
damage. It couldn't have. It might have phased him or whatever, but he was
still going nuts." Palmer stated that after he punched Pickett, he still
feared that "this thing is going to jump up again." Like King, Pickett is
portrayed here as a superhuman, freakish body, "like [in] that movie Alien."
Like King, Pickett possesses inhuman strength: "This guy was as strong as an
ox," says Palmer. "She knocked that lighting right in half." By the end of
the excerpted police interview, this image of the (cocaine-filled) black male
body converges with the figure of the transsexual body to create a vision of
the victim as a kind of monster who belongs to the order of the natural world:
the police interviewer refers to the dead body of Pickett in his final question as an "it" who does not merely straddle the boundary between masculine and feminine, but overruns that boundary altogether. To my mind, the social vision that underwrites Palmer's testimony (and indeed, the terms of the questions he is asked) can be grasped only if one is alert to the ways
in which Pickett's transsexuality gets framed in the rubric of race. Like the
homosexuality with which it is so often associated, the dominant image of
transsexuality in the normative heterosexual imagination is one of enfeminized weakness. Standing alone, the image of the transsexualized body cannot do the exculpatory work that Palmer's testimony is so clearly seeking to do. Palmer in a sense needs to deploy the language and imagery of race in order to persuade the criminal justice system that it was he, and not Pickett, who should be seen as the victim in this case. Like King, Pickett was in control
during their encounter, and it is she who should be deemed responsible for the
injuries that lead to her death: it is as though Palmer was forcibly
conscripted to participate in the "crazed" Pickett's suicide. What the
success of this discursive deployment of race in the Pickett case brings home
for me is the complex mediations through which sexuality and gender get
expressed and acted out in the modalities of race.