Charging the sole woman soldier for Abu Ghraib abuses symbolically displaced institutional guilt.

Evidence

Limbaugh and his listeners, for whom an Iraqi death in detention apparently is not death, rape is not terror, sodomy with a broomstick is not abuse! And feminization of the homeland is something to be rued, while the feminized humiliation of the enemy for the sake of the fatherland is cause for commendation and celebration. That a woman was the first US soldier to be charged for these prison abuses further deinstitutionalizes the wrongdoing, symbolically displacing it to the person of a woman inherently lacking military discipline. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 268

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how scapegoating a single tokenized woman functioned to deinstitutionalize systemic military atrocities — a case study in how institutions externalize blame onto individuals.
• XREF: Connects to what I know about how museums and institutions externalize failure onto individuals in other contexts (e.g., the lone ‘bad apple’ narrative in police violence).