CTE Meets #metoo: Violence and Victimhood Reconsidered in Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy

• In Event: Injury and Invisibility: Empiricism and Anti-Empiricism in Knowing Damage and Regeneration - II

Abstract

CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) is commonly known as the disease that football players, hockey enforcers and soldiers get from having their "bell rung" too many times. Without downplaying the seriousness of the concussion crisis, I argue that the binaries guilt/innocence and victimizer/victim have so far played out too simply in the case of CTE. The minute an autopsied brain is made to offer up its dirty secrets, the deceased are born again as tragic victims of violence. Their biographies are rewritten and erstwhile personal failings, such as domestic violence and sexual assault, are swept under the rug of medicalization. I seek to complicate this picture with an uncomfortable detail: from a very young age these boys and men were recruited, honed and lavishly rewarded for doling out violence while playing their sport and otherwise. What evidentiary registers could account for the effects of doing violence on the material of their brains? And why is nobody talking about it? My empirical methods in this paper are two-fold: I compare pre- and post- CTE biographical accounts to assess the ways in which the disease and its looping effects are altering narratives of violence among men who play violent sports. And I also bring into the CTE conversation something that (as far as I can tell) is invisible so far: the neurosciences of inhabiting social worlds of heightened aggressive masculinity.

Author

• Aryn Martin, York University