Reading Scandal: Civic Gothic as Genre

This article proposes that recent media accounts of the "priest pedophile" employ a conventional Gothic mode as frame. The binary split into sentimentalized victims and demonized adults stabilizes a narrative that verges toward incoherency for reasons of genre form, readerly investment, and factual inaccessibility. In addition, because of a bias built-in, as it were, to all genre narrative, the Gothic frame silently consolidates political or cultural conclusions that are sometimes far removed from the sexual drama supposedly under investigation. Such genre "flattening" undergirds most media forms in commodity exchange culture; it is not specific to scandal or unique to this cycle of priests and children. Nonetheless, the rubric of scandal-and the priest-child trope in particular-displays the effects of genre-manipulation in a concentrated form. Thus, in "reading scandal," more important than the predictable division of heroes and villains, monsters and innocents, are the mechanics of representation by which a public ceremony of outrage and shame positions itself as a neutral agent of civic work while erasing the implications of this positioning.