Kitty Genovese and Feminist Organizing Against Sexual Violence: Successive ”Waves” Respond to A Story of Apathy

• In Event: Generational Activism: Postmemory and Social Justice

Abstract

In this paper, Marcia M. Gallo examines how one of America’s most infamous 20th century true-crime stories mobilized women to name and organize against sexual violence. Gallo utilizes postmemory theories to show the potent relational effects of the widespread story of a raped and murdered woman whom “no one helped” in 1964 to activism that challenges intimate partner abuse and rape in the second decade of the 21st century.

The 1964 rape and murder of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese in a middle-class neighborhood of Queens, New York made front-page news and fueled fears of urban decay as it focused on more than three-dozen neighbors who were reported to have witnessed the deadly assaults without intervening to help. More than fifty years later, the story continues to circulate in popular culture and has been recreated through books, movies, and graphic novels as well as taught in high school and college classrooms. Although it is now widely known that there were far fewer witnesses to the crime than originally reported, the moral of the story continues to be apathy.

Gallo challenges this myth and instead emphasizes how the crime not only led to well-known advances in criminal justice and psychology, such as the development of the 911 emergency system and numerous studies of bystander behaviors, but also to increased community involvement. She will focus on the rarely acknowledged impact that the Genovese crime and its story of indifferent witnesses had on feminist campaigns against sexual violence beginning in the 1970s and its continuing impact as a transgenerational tale of trauma and loss among 21st century feminist activists.

Author

• Marcia M Gallo, UNLV