Scapegoating follows an ancient ritual template of gendered communal sacrifice.

Evidence

On her journey, the Doll comes to a realization of her position on a historical continuum of gendered scapegoating and sanctified retribution. In Frank Moretti’s library, she finds in a book a photograph in which a French female collaborator at the end of the Second World War is getting her head forcibly shaved as a mark of shame, to the delight of laughing, mostly female onlookers (174). Later, a cable-channel documentary records the discovery of a preserved three-thousand-year-old female body in a Swedish peat bog: “The fossil woman had been drowned, weighed down with stones tied to a noose around her neck, Her head had been shaved. A ritual death, a German expert said, for some crime that no one could know” (199). Feeling a sense of kinship with these historical female outcasts, the Doll makes preparations for her own ritual death by shaving off her hair before embracing her position as the blood sacrifice this warped society demands. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 374

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Girardian scapegoating mechanics and connects to the reader’s ADDENDUM article on sacrifice — ritual death demanded by a stratified society to stabilize itself. — connects to: Anthropologists hold that destruction of the victim defines sacrifice — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 734; Sacrifice displaces a community’s internal violence onto an outside victim. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 428
• ADDENDUM: Directly extends ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — the Doll’s ritual casting-out and self-prepared sacrifice is a modern, quotidian enactment of the same stabilization-through-community-exclusion pattern.