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The Code of Harry: Performing normativity in Dexter

William Ryan Force Crime Media Culture 2010 6: 329 DOI: 10.1177/1741659010382333 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cmc.sagepub.com/content/6/3/329

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ARTICLES

The Code of Harry: Performing normativity in Dexter

WILLIAM RYAN FORCE, University of Missouri, USA Abstract
This article explores technologies of person production used by human actors to manage interactive exchanges in ways that are understood to be accountable to and morally compatible with the social order. I specifically explore how the eponymous character of the US television series Dexter integrates conventional face-work and stigma management with reverse marking in order to present an unmarked person. Reverse marking, following Brekhuss (1996) usage, involves perceptually attending to those aspects of identity typically regarded as mundane. I argue the role reverse marking plays in Dexters performance of identity draws attention to the mundane as the result of doing, grounding a critical reevaluation of the privileged cultural location of unmarkedness or normativity.

Keywords
Deviance; identity; mundanity; television; the unmarked

The Showtime network series1 Dexter has aired for four seasons, beginning in 2006, introducing viewers to the inner life and ethical struggles of the eponymous character. Dexter Morgan is an apparently normal guy he has a job in law enforcement as a forensic blood splatter analyst for the Miami-Metro Police, a nice girlfriend named Rita, a loving sister, and tragically dead parents. He loves pork sandwiches, he washes dishes and looks after Ritas kids when she is working late, and he regularly visits the records supervisor, a friend of his late adoptive father, to bring her donuts and chat. The twist is that he also happens to be a serial killer. To complicate things further, he is not your average sociopath: Dexter works by a very regimented set of principles or code killing only other conrmed murderers. Dexter Morgan was orphaned at a young age by a massacre in which his biological mother was slain. Discovered after waiting for days in a blood-lled crime scene with his mothers corpse, detective Harry Morgan is young Dexs deliverer from this awful

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE The Author(s), 2010. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/ journalsPermissions.nav, ISSN 1741-6590, Vol 6(3): 329345 [DOI: 10.1177/1741659010382333]

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scene. Harry and his wife Doris adopt the boy as their own, raising him alongside their biological daughter, Deb. It is after discovering a makeshift grave of animal bones near their home that Harry recognizes Dexter is different. He discovers the young man has an insatiable appetite to kill and curbs it temporarily with hunting and shing trips. But after nding the teenage Dexters knife set covered in blood from unscheduled kills, Harry knows the problem runs deeper than the occasional hunt for non-human animals can solve. Harry thus proposes a new strategy a code whereby Dex can sublimate his dark impulses into a social service, all the while passing as a normal person to avoid suspicion or capture.

METHODOLOGY
The data for this study is drawn from the rst twelve-episode season of Dexter, which is based loosely on Jeff Lindsays (2004) Darkly Dreaming Dexter. This season is largely an origin story, starting with Dexters current life and ashing back periodically to reveal events pertinent to the plot as it unfolds. It is primarily in this season where we learn the Code of Harry and are introduced to Dexters quirky, undercover take on so-called mundane social life. Dexter speaks of human interaction and emotions as foreign and bizarre, drawing the viewers attention to humorous (and macabre) inversions of our taken-for-granted ways of experiencing the world. Later seasons nd Dexter departing signicantly from the Code, critiquing it (especially as he discovers his adoptive fathers own moral imperfections) and occasionally refusing it altogether. In this article I focus closely on the Code of Harry and Dexters interpersonal attempts to enact its behavioral mandates. By analyzing the sociological aspects of the Code we gain insight into the performance and interactive work that goes into the presentation of a normal, mundane person. By examining the Code of Harry in this manner, my intent is not to present a hermeneutic read of Dexter as a text, nor an analysis of the text as a structure. Rather, I use key scenes and dialog exchanges from the program as analytic examples of interactive technologies found in everyday life. Dexter and his performance of a normative person are rendered as demonstrations of a theoretical conceptualization of identity work. Dexters self-conscious attempts to conform to Harrys code reveal technologies of person production human actors adopt through socialization. Other academic treatments of serial killer narratives in book, television, and lm have generally identied these murderers as the dark double of the normals in the society from which they derive, or a latent product of the social order (Seltzer, 1998; Simpson, 2000; Jarvis, 2007; Haggerty, 2009). Although the terrifying normality of the murderer (Jarvis, 2007: 329) is generally agreed upon as a standard aspect of these narratives, it is usually interpreted as an over-conformity of sorts to modernist and capitalist metanarratives. As Jarvis (2007: 332) points out in distilling a common feminist critique of serial killers, these murderers are almost always biologically male, and their activities can be read less as a radical departure from normal codes of masculinity than as an exaggeration of their underlying mandates. Masculinity, however, requires its everyday

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practitioners (actual men) to conceal emotions, portray an image of invulnerability, develop and master esoteric skill sets, exercise and impose discipline, and indulge in thrill-seeking behavior to conrm ones ability to endure physical and emotional pain. Individual men in the real world can and do experience these codes as external and constraining; they become visceral through hegemonic socialization, comfortable through routine, personally rewarding for their social privileges. Similarly, I view Dexter not as a deviant who fakes normality; his investment in a performance of a normative person makes him hopelessly human even if the circumstances of this identity play appear unique.

IDENTITY AS DOING
Erving Goffman (1959) has famously argued that our selves are the result of carefully managed presentations in which we structure a perception of our being we wish others to accept as the real whomever. These presentations are arranged in accordance with societal demands ones presentation of person is subject to moral and social evaluation, and thus we must be wary of discrediting our performances (or lines) by failing to adhere to convention. Cahill (1998: 132) sought to stabilize Goffmans often interchangeable use of person and self, using persons to describe the collective representations which are essentially (exterior) social facts incorporated into ones interior experience of self. The person is thus a socially dened, publicly visible embodied being, while the self refers specically to a beings reexive awareness of personal agency and identity (Cahill, 1998: 135). This is the language I will adopt when referring to Dexters presentations of an unmarked identity. Borrowing the language of marking from semioticians and linguists, Brekhus (1996) explores how the human mind is socialized to attend and disattend to/from certain features of reality: we learn to note ones skin color, for instance, but rarely note ones eye color as a guiding precept for social exchanges. A lazy eye or ones racial Blackness are marked aspects of their social identity (as opposed to physical symmetry and Whiteness) and must be managed accordingly. Goffman (1963) discusses the management of lisps, a closeted homosexual identity, physical defects such as a lazy eye, and Black Americans visible racial characteristics as examples of spoiled identity markers (in these cases, socially devaluing those persons who possess an impediment to conventional speech patterns, a socially demonized sexuality, supposed ugliness, or alleged racial inferiority). The affected person, in order to pass as normal rather than be treated as a lesser social being, must hide, play down, or otherwise socially manage the facts of their selves. Matters of marked- and unmarkedness thus betray the social interaction order as a moral one. While Goffman focuses on the structure of these interactive exchanges and how they contribute to a social order with attentive implications for the moral evaluation of performances therein, the mechanics of this process are the focus of Garnkels (1967) ethnomethodology. Goffman demonstrates that we choose to reveal or conceal information about ourselves in strategic attempts to present a morally acceptable

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personhood in step with social convention; Garnkel looks to uncover these conventions by witnessing the moments of their reication (or the failure to do so) by human actors. The archetypal example of an ethnomethodological analysis of social reality and my analytic template for the Dexter Morgan character appear in Garnkels (1967) foundational text. Therein we meet Agnes: a M-F transsexual person who engages in a secret apprenticeship as Garnkel takes notes over her shoulder. A core concept behind my study is informed by Garnkels diagnosis of this process and what it says about the nature of human life more generally. That is, we can understand how the fabric of reality is maintained by locating points in which the work of mending is somehow perceivable. As a Trans person, Agness attempts to pass as a normatively gendered woman (her goal was to be 110% naturally female) involved a more conscious level of performance than if she had the privilege of being assigned her chosen gender since birth and socialized accordingly (Garnkel, 1967). Rather than being inculcated unwittingly from day one (or before), Agnes had to acquire some of this information through deception or surveillance: it was work in the truest sense. West and Zimmerman describe gender (1987), along with race and class (West and Fenstermaker, 1995), as a fateful social characteristic that is, following Garnkel, entirely real in consequence despite being the product of concerted performances it is done by work. Like our identities more broadly, our genders are informed by socially sanctioned scripts and individually reinscribed through ritualization. As genders performative work can be observed by studying those in our culture like Agnes who learn such information mid-life (as opposed to normals who acquire it unconsciously and constantly from the moment of their conception), so can we glimpse the labor involved in maintaining a visage of normal emotional attachment to other social actors by looking at the machinations of a sociopath who must learn to perform mundanity.2 Thus, Dexters ethnomethodological doing of normativity is the focus of this article. Trans people do not inform us about the nature of marginal genders alone, but speak to the social construction of gender in toto. The same is true of Dexter: his lack of inherent humanity allows us to understand how much social work it requires to present ourselves as a social being regarded as fully and normally human. Our identities are performances situated in networks of what ethnomethodologists refer to as accountability we present ourselves to others as a particular sort of person, and our identities can be challenged when others deem our performances unconvincing, contradictory with previous information divulged about our person, or somehow misinformed. In this way, we are held accountable to the structure of our social lives. Dexter Morgan represents a person who must continually learn the emotive rules of contemporary society so that he may put them into practice and pass for normal. Furthermore, he (like Agnes) is fully aware of his constant performance. The constructedness of our social reality is revealed and its accomplishment laid bare when made the subject of contemplation usually occurring as an internal dialog, never publicized. For Cahill (1998: 135), observing interactional production lends insight into impossible-to-observe beliefs and how they are (re)generated within communicative events. Unlike everyday people, we as an audience have full access to Dexter Morgans internal set of behavioral principles (through voice-over and inner

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monologs) in addition to observations of the Code (inter)acted out. Engaged in a heightened self-aware dialog about his performativity, Dexters narrative voice makes him something of a practical sociologist; he reveals the social orders constructedness by demonstrating its mundane accomplishment. Important but under-studied elements of social life are those features we disattend from: the social accomplishment of an unmarked, mundane personhood. The Dexter character is an exemplary site to explore interactive technologies used to communicate or mediate an unmarked person. The means of person production are those collective representations which require collaborative manufacture and must be hung somewhere (onto bodies, made into persons), while hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, examination, arranged confession, ostensibly scientic hermeneutics, and textual documentation are examples of the technologies of person production used to elicit and manipulate information about the person (Foucault, 1975/1978; Cahill, 1998: 13643). A careful reading of Dexter renders visible the technologies used to form the raw materials of reality (information, facts) into presentations of unmarkedness (Brekhus, 1996; Cahill, 1998). In this article I explore how Dexter demonstrates traditional interactive technologies face-work (Goffman, 1967) and stigma management (Goffman, 1963) and through reverse marking, or the adoption of auxiliary characteristics of unmarkedness (Brekhus, 1996, 2003). Furthermore, these technologies lead to a critical reevaluation of the privileged cultural location of mundanity or normativity. Dexter is a serial killer, but I choose not to treat him as a synecdoche for the social order or some unsavory aspect of it (Seltzer, 1998; Simpson, 2000; Jarvis, 2007; Haggerty, 2009). Dexter is simply useful in revealing the mundanity of reproducing that order. He is no more or less symptomatic of it than any of us society is a realityreproducing machine, and human beings are among its more reexive products. As Agnes (Garnkel, 1967) and other gender deviants (Robinson, 1994; Prosser, 1998; Crawley, 2002; Butler, 2004) make plain in their doing gender (West and Zimmerman, 1987), the audiences access to Dexters inner monolog bears witness to the very processes normals learn to master and endure. The anthropological strangeness of these technologies of person production (Cahill, 1998) is revealed in the unusual circumstances of their learning. Like many super-heroes, Dexter is portrayed as an outsider taken in by a surrogate family who impose an informal manual for survival in a hostile world.3 Their constant efforts to adhere to this alien social code betray the work required to perform normativity. Agnes, Superman, and Dexter simply do the very mundane work of identity under exotic circumstances.

DOING NORMAL: THE CODE OF HARRY

In the rst episode of the series we hear Harry ask, upon discovering Dexters grisly habit of killing neighborhood animals, Youre different, arent you, Dexter? (Dexter, Episode 101). Other than the fact he is a serial killer, what is it about Dexter that makes him different? In what ways is the act of appearing normal more so a performance

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for Dexter than others? In the mythology of the show, serial killers are different inside than normals. Dexter frequently refers to himself as empty or hollow; remarking, upon looking into empty donut box, Just like me, empty inside (Dexter 101). The lack is a common trope in serial killer narratives (Seltzer, 1998; Jarvis, 2007). Like American Psychos Patrick Bateman (I simply am not there [Ellis, 1991: 377]), Dexter is devoid of emotion.4 Batemans capacity for emotion is eaten away by the horrors of capitalism (Simpson, 2000) and this lack is often accounted for in popular lore centered on real serial killers by pointing to some childhood trauma or other developmental turning point gone awry. Similarly, Dexter believes witnessing his mothers brutal murder had the effect of hollowing him out emotionally.

How Dexter is different

Dexter equates his sensation of the lack with his feeling less than human, or somehow apart from humanity. He commonly says of humans that he is not one of them (Dexter 102), that as a murderer he is disconnect[ed] from humanity, an outsider forever looking in (Dexter 103). Dexter repeatedly refers to himself as a monster and speculates he was born free of all thats human on the day he witnessed his mothers murder as a small child (Dexter 112). That traumatic event triggered his change, separating him from other human beings in some fundamental way. He speaks of the isolation, the otherness he experiences because he cannot reveal his real, genuine self (Dexter 112). In this way he contradicts his supposed emptiness, betraying an alternate person he wishes to communicate but is unable to for the sake of social survival. Part of this disconnect from humanity is the absence of emotional experience, on which Dexter often comments. He displays erce loyalty toward his sister and goes to great lengths to hide his criminal nature from her, while simultaneously using his impeccable instincts to help her solve murder cases and advance her career. Yet in one of the most emotional scenes in the rst season, he claims only to be very fond of her (Dexter 112). He says elsewhere, I dont have feelings about anything, but if I could have feelings at all, Id have them for Deb (Dexter 101). Speaking of humans again as though they were aliens he says, I just cant feel their pain (Dexter 102). Though Dexter claims he may be able to recognize emotion when he sees it and even understands it at some level, he simply is not subject to it. It is clear to Dexter what this lack means for his passing as human: extra work. At a funeral, it is not death but grief that makes him uncomfortable. He says it is hard to fake, that keeping his face pinched in sorrow is a real chore, but sunglasses help (Dexter 103). Dexter also claims to care for his girlfriend Rita and her children as much as he is capable, but once again his most sentimental expression contains a sense of emotional desolation: in response to a tender expression from one of her children, If I had a heart, it might be breaking right now (Dexter 103). Though a veteran faker, physical intimacy is an altogether more complicated performance for a variety of reasons. Ritas open desire to escalate their relationship in emotional seriousness represents a problem for him in performing normal heterosexual relationships because, as he puts it, he doesnt have a next level emotionally (Dexter 105). Once Rita catches on to Dexs lack of

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emotionality (he fears she views him as a science experiment), he assumes from prior experience she will inevitably leave him (Dexter 105). This absence of emotion in his inner world is compounded by a lack of recognizable sexual desire. Dexters lack of sexual desire is further underscored by his response to a female coworker winking at him: I wish shed stop that. Its one of those mating rituals which I really dont understand (Dexter 101). In the same episode he claims to recognize within himself an occasional physical response to women and that he carries the proper sensibilities about men, but that sex acts are undignied, and he nds relationships particularly uncomfortable. Homosocial male bonding, based so often on heterosexual performances for other men in the form of bragging and sharing lurid (typically apocryphal) tales of female subjugation (Grazian, 2007), thus presents an obstacle to performing a normative (straight male) person. In response to one such instance he laments, Many times in life I feel like Im missing some essential piece of the human puzzle (Dexter 103).

Managing the (killer) self

Of course, all of these traits pale as mere foibles when compared to the underlying fact that Dexter is a serial murderer. If Dexter feels anything, it is a nagging, nascent impulse to kill: he refers to it as an appetite (hungry) and a compulsion (cant help myself) (Dexter 101). As a detective who witnessed murderous criminals evade the justice system through corruption and technicality alike, and who because of familial affection wished to prevent Dexters incarceration or execution, Harry prepared Dexter to exist in society as a normal person (masking his lack of emotions, his disinterest in sex and intimacy, and his deep ennui), while sublimating his homicidal instinct into a social service. Harry did so by formulating and teaching Dexter a code, referred to in the show as the Code of Harry. I argue that the Code can be understood sociologically as the identity technologies that provide Dexter with the tropes to act out an unmarked, normative personhood. Through a series of ashbacks, inner monologs, and even the occasional bit of dialog between Dexter and his prey, the viewer is familiarized with the Code of Harry: a set of Goffman-esque rules for passing as a normative, feeling citizen despite being a serial killer. This code has a dual service: by concealing his dark nature Dexter can rst survive and ourish in human society while, secondly, engaging routinely in serial murder without getting caught. His passing as normal is meant to avoid raising suspicion that could lead to his eventual capture. Dexter says of the Code, [Harry] taught me how to cover my tracks Im a very neat monster (Dexter 101). His appetite for destruction is harnessed by Harrys rules, described in various episodes as a code or set of principles (Dexter 108), lessons (Dexter 103), and standards (Dexter 101). The primary rule which emerges in the Code is, Dont stand out. The question for young Dex is not, Is what I am doing moral and right? but Thats what normal people do, right? During an early instruction, Harry catches Dexter engaged in group bullying of a weak member of his little league team. Dexter thinks he is going along with the group as he was taught, but Harry provides a corrective, You cant be a bully ...

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people remember bullies. So ...? Blend in, Dexter responds (Dexter 104). This reveals a tacit assumption of the social order: hyper-aggression in children is read as a sign of potential criminality. In turn, Dexter learns to align his behavior with the middle the mundane: not too aggressive, not too passive. Fit in, but not too much. Young Dexter also prefers solitude to courtship, and ignores the obvious irtation of a girl in his neighborhood. Harry witnesses this interaction and asks Dexter about his refusal of her advances (Dexter 105): H: Most normal people dont [like to be alone all of the time]. Its important that you seem normal. D: Even though Im not? H: Because youre not. Another value of the social order is hinted at here: being too independent is equated with an antisocial personality. Those who are perceived as not needing the group are not viewed as being a part of it. Though this is actually true in Dexters case his survival requires hiding this fact. Heterosexuality, as the only sanctioned sexuality in the West, becomes a signier of mundanity. It is a marker of unmarkedness, an auxiliary characteristic of normative identity (Brekhus, 1996.) Gay men in the suburbs may more or less consciously adopt visual indicators of their allegiance to heterosexual cultural norms in order to play down their markedness (Brekhus, 2003). In the same vein, Dexter uses Rita as his beard. Speaking of normative expectations that adult men (and women, at that) should date, Dexter acknowledges I have to play the game (Dexter 101). When pushed, he chooses Rita because her ex-husband was a crack addict who raped and beat her. This means she has no desire for sex at rst, and that works for [him] (Dexter 101). Similar to our cultural skepticism of the isolated or asexual person, the average Westerner immensely distrusts the morose or moody. Any antidepressant ad can attest to the importance of being happy as a marker of normativity, especially in US culture. When Dexter refuses to smile in a family photo (the sun is in his face and the sand grosses him out), Harry teases this out for young Dexter: When somebody takes your picture, you smile. It doesnt matter if youre happy or not. You just do it, to t in (Dexter 104). In this exchange, smiling is illuminated as an auxiliary characteristic of normativity. This token gesture of civil courtesy we extend to one another demonstrates our mutual regard, and refusal to engage in such conventions can produce interactive complications (Goffman, 1959). Harry seems to understand the ritual necessity of such social acts in contributing to the performance of an untroubled personhood, and advises Dexter accordingly. Related to the mandate to t in, the Code of Harry is more explicitly about not getting found out as a murderer. Yet the selection of murder victims must be in conformity with Harrys code. Dexter often checks with himself, asking, Would Harry approve? Before he may use their death as a deviant indulgence, he must conrm his victims deserve it by being lawless killers themselves. Knowing what police look for when pursuing suspected murderers, Harry instructs Dexter in the methodical killing and

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disposal of remains: he uses ample plastic wrap and heavy-duty biodegradable garbage bags, for instance. Dexter remarks, Preparation is vital, no detail can be overlooked, and the ritual is intoxicating (Dexter 101). This comment on ritual and its effervescence can serve as an unintended metaphor: for Dexter who hides his killer self most of the time, murder is perhaps the closest thing his person (outward expression) comes to the ritual communication of his (deviant) self (momentarily, between he and his victim). This ritual also joins him to society as a good person as he engages in the afrmation of respect for the moral order by eliminating social impurity (Haggerty, 2009). Two levels are clearly present in the Code. In the plotted universe of Dexter, its primary concern is literally getting away with murder. At an analytic level, the Goffmanian nature of the performative demands involved in advancing a normal personhood become more interesting. The emphasis on a methodically impenetrable homicidal practice literally preserves evidence in order to evade capture; at the symbolic level, this boundary work is a prophylactic between social worlds: Dexters marked (killer) and unmarked (citizen) identities. These identities can be brought into collision by evidence of a murder, a break in the social contract. Dexters ceremonial precision in containing and disposing of evidence is a literalized ritualization of maintaining information boundaries between different audiences: inscribing an enduring, thus apparently natural division between the marked (criminal) and unmarked (legitimate).

MARKING THE NORMAL, PRESENTING THE UNMARKED

Each social audience can be understood as an identity world (akin to Zerubavels [1997] notion of a socio-mental community) wherein an individual manifests a particular person (a collective representation embodied by performance). A discrete individual can be responsible for myriad personal presentations (identities) dependent upon different realities (worlds). When Dexter says of Harrys code Im just a collection of learned behaviors (Dexter 104), his comment applies to people generally. All socialization is the forced appropriation of overarching codes for normative behavior in a given society. Returning to an earlier example, all human actors perform (or do) gender (West and Zimmerman, 1987). This gender assignment is initiated so early, and its learning takes place so consistently and diffusely, that it is often experienced as an expression of ones nature (Garnkel, 1967; Goffman, 1977; West and Zimmerman, 1987). Trans folks, those individuals who must consciously and surreptitiously re-learn these prescriptive demands mid-life and often without institutional support, simply cast light on mundane practice through exotic circumstance (Garnkel, 1967; Prosser, 1998; Crawley, 2002; Butler, 2004). What Trans individuals illuminate for normative gender, Dexter does for normative identity in general. Harrys code is clearly a form of alternate socialization meant to preserve a marginalized self: just as Jews in hostile lands have learned to hide their Jewishness without obliterating it (Jacobs, 2002) or stone butch Lesbians occasionally pass as men outside of queer communities to avoid social censure (Crawley, 2002). He taught me that none of us are who we appear to be on the outside, but we must maintain appearances to

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survive (Dexter 103; emphasis added). Despite their important differences, religious outsiders, gender deviants, and Dexter engage in similar strategies for identity concealment. The ability to change codes for audience represents a crafted sensitivity (Crawley, 2008) that non-mundane individuals must develop and deploy in order to be read effectively in social space. All socialization is a matter of conforming to arbitrary standards upon pain of social extinction whether enacted in the form of symbolic (pariah status), civil (disenfranchisement), or physical death (capital punishment). Donning a normative personal front is a matter of survival rather than a psychic homecoming (Crawley, 2002: 20). The key for Dexter is manipulating others impressions of him adequately: this is the sociological level of Harrys code. Various technologies of impression management enact the principles of behavioral codes (Goffman, 1959). All human actors engage in this management as social life is fundamentally performative, but analysts have generally studied the most amboyant, deviant, contested, or perverse demonstrations of communicating identities the exotic. Despite being a serial killer, Dexter demonstrates what is most difcult to make anthropologically strange: the so-called normal (Brekhus, 1998). By illustrating in detail the interactive work and technologies feeding into the production of a normal personhood, he ethnomethodologically and interactively marks the normal. The technologies of person management (Foucault, 1975/1978; Cahill, 1998) in which Dexter engages face-work wherein he presents a normal person (Goffman, 1967) and stigma management to conceal the contradiction between his unmarked identity and marked activities or characteristics (Goffman, 1963) involve the conscious adoption of auxiliary characteristics of unmarkedness (Brekhus, 1996, 2003).

Face-work
In accord with Goffmans (1967) description of face-work, Dexters inner monologs often center on his identity as a performance the managed efforts to present a particular person. In these narrative revelations Dexter echoes Goffmans metaphor by describing his public face as a mask, and says, I love Halloween the one time of year when everyone wears a mask, not just me. People think its fun to pretend youre a monster. Me, I spend my life pretending Im not. Brother, friend, boyfriend: all part of my costume collection (Dexter 104). The notion of his personhood as a wardrobe with identities removable and replaceable at whim is hardly an exaggeration of the facts of human existence. A given individual can be a physics professor, cigarette smoker, sister, punk, astronaut, and Chicana, but deploy only certain dimensions of her self in varying levels of emphasis (from extremely visible to virtually non-existent) to present an appropriate person dependent upon social circumstance (Goffman, 1959; Robinson, 1994; Crawley 2002; Brekhus, 2003). As mentioned previously, this lack that Dexter vocalizes is a common trope in serial killer narratives (Seltzer, 1998; Jarvis, 2007). In sociological terms, however, normals delude themselves into a sense of stable self from which Dexter has been disabused; the originary presence we experience at the core of our being is the result of routine social manufacture (Goffman, 1959) or doing (West and Zimmerman, 1987).

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Acting as a practical sociologist, Dexter openly dissects the sense of faking through everyday life. He says, People fake a lot of human interactions, but I feel like I fake them all. And I fake them very well. And thats my burden, I guess (Dexter 101). The possession of information about another person is notoriously hard to verify though most human interaction is centered on the exchange of such tenuous data. An instructor of mine is fond of saying paranoia is a heightened sense of reality, and this suspicion is founded if you put any stock in Goffman (1959, 1963). One may claim to have read a book to not lose status as a good student in the eyes of a professor or colleague, or lie about a mild irtation so as not to rupture the identity of faithful romantic partner. Such activities are accepted (even if begrudgingly so) as parts of daily life; Dexter merely bemoans them as an outsider forced to engage in our taken-for-granted minutiae. Dexter does not fake hobbies and polite niceties strictly with strangers all human beings are strangers, all emotions and attachments are contrived. He does not obscure inconvenient facts or blemishes: he risks exposure as a grade of deviant considered deserving of death for transgressing the social and legal orders.

Stigma management
A marked individual (be they racial minority or criminal outlaw) typically employs technologies of stigma management to obscure personal discord with normativity (Goffman, 1963). Boundary work between identities, such as the prophylactic methods used to preserve Dexters murders in an isolated identity world, abound. Dexter keeps an apartment to himself, has autonomous transportation by land and sea (his boat is aptly named Slice of Life), does not discuss his murderous activities with others, and does not seek even dubious recognition for his work. Dexter also frequently employs double entendre to avoid lying (so as to be honest) while purposefully allowing others to (mis)interpret the facts of his life as in line with a socially legitimate self (i.e., not being a serial killer). Particularly when his character comes under indirect suspicion as a murderer, Dexter circumvents admitting to certain facts so as to present an unproblematic face. Similarly, Dexter uses open comments to obscure truth about his self: he says his foster father understood he had special needs (Dexter 110) when chatting informally to a social worker and tells Rita he wants to be comfortable like everyone else, and to have a normal life in the context of discussing their potential future together (Dexter 105). The audience picks up the subtext to which the other characters are oblivious, and smirks for Dexter when he cannot. While relaxing in the ocean, Dexter fantasizes himself alone on a post-apocalyptic Earth, with no one left to act normal for. No need to hide who I really am. It would be [pause] freeing (Dexter 105). He often references hiding and states that survival depends on obscuring his true nature from everyone; he bemoans put[ting] up a front of emotional vulnerability (Dexter 102). Dexters self-description of his existence as a performance, a front, a series of masks and costumes, and participation in a game illustrates the technologies of impression management required to achieve the natural fact of normal personhood. Rather than understand his behaviors as emanating unproblematically from some nonpathological originary presence, however, Dexter has no choice but to regard his social

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identity as concerted and its acceptance by social actors as deeply dependent upon seamlessly blending in with mundanity.

Reverse marking
Of Dexters attempts to carefully conceal his deviance, his most analytically provocative technology involves reverse marking (Brekhus, 1996): because he lacks the necesary psychological hardware for moral sentimentalism (by his own account) he must infer from others apparent mundanity which social characteristics to adopt in presenting a normative person. Presentation of a normal person and the concealment of a spoiled identity are two aspects of a larger process for Dexter where the normal cannot be taken for granted. Individuals generally view themselves as decent and mundane unless proven otherwise: an entire ocean view of reality (Brekhus, 1996) wherein people understand their idiosyncratic departures from the norm as the innocuous spice of life and treat others accordingly. Dexter, hyper-aware of his deviant status, must remain vigilant of any apparent difference that might betray his stigmatized self. He is wrong only in the belief that other normals acquire these normative scripts intuitively; hegemonic identity incitements are merely so ubiquitous and diffuse they appear to be effortless. It is this fact that produces his most sociologically interesting technology for identity management: the adoption of markers of unmarkedness. For social deviants, accumulation and appropriate display of mundane auxiliary characteristics becomes a primary technology for presenting a normal person. Brekhus (2003) discusses how marked (or stigmatized [Goffman, 1963]) individuals often belonging to identityoriented subcultures share auxiliary characteristics that symbolically link human actors together under an identity type. Wearing a crucix, for example, may signify one is Catholic; donning a heavy, well-worn leather jacket usually indicates a biker afliation; and an afnity for show-tunes could mark a male as homosexual. Less obvious in everyday life are the auxiliary characteristics, or markers, of unmarkedness. We are taught socially to attend to certain features of self-presentations as conveying a moral meaning darker-than-European skin or a Southern accent may mark someone as a member of what are considered morally inferior races or geographically bounded cultures. Conversely, we are socialized into accepting European skin tones and nonregional diction generally as unworthy of our social attention, thereby rendering those individuals unmarked, and thus morally normal. As Brekhus (1996) notes, the relational status of identity is obscured as the social markedness of certain characteristics is reied through language and interaction and thus experienced as the inevitable product of human consciousness. Demonstrating the relational nature of social identity problematizes normativity and undermines the taken-for-grantedness of the moral order. The Code of Harry betrays the adoption of unmarkedness as a concerted effort. Dexter purposefully communicates normativity by incorporating the presentation of several auxiliary traits that render one mundane: markers of heterosexuality (Rita), niceness or decency (smiling), and law abidingness (job with Miami PD). Always trying to shake off perceptions of being a loner, Dexter openly aunts when he has a date with

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Rita his blonde, White auxiliary marker girlfriend (who is further legible as normal because she is evidently capable of reproduction having two children a requisite for membership in heteronormative femininity). Coworkers respond positively to Dexters mentions of his girlfriend, conrming Dexters normativity vis--vis heterosexuality. Against his own lack of interest, Dexter also goes on a double date with his sister and her boy du jour what else would a good, protective, patriarchal, heterosexual brother do? Niceness, politeness, and decency are communicated interactively in a variety of ways: making a Thank You card for a blood transfusion as a young boy, forcing a smile in photos, playing well with children, performing household chores at Ritas home, maintaining a close relationship with his sister, making small talk with and knowing all his coworkers names, and bringing donuts to work. An extension of his general decency is perhaps his most brilliant auxiliary characteristic: a job in law enforcement. His is (purposefully) in an unglamorous post he is not out solving crimes and getting quoted in papers instead he demonstrates law-abidingness, a respect for moral order. Similarly Dexter voices his ethical conict between his love for eating while driving and maintaining the 10 and 2 position on the steering wheel (Dexter 101).

CONCLUSION
It is common to view serial killers as reproducing conservative standards of social desirability by systematically choosing victims from disparaged groups (Haggerty, 2009: 1803). Dexter ts this prole in that his sole criterion for choosing prey is their conrmed status as a fellow murderer. Likewise, the terrifying normality of the murderer is a trope common to nearly every popular representation of serial killers (original emphasis; Jarvis, 2007: 329). This has been linked together to argue that a serial killer can be viewed as either a double of the normals in the society from which he derives (Simpson, 2000) or the latent progeny of that social order (Seltzer, 1998). Dexter does not pause to ask, Is what I am doing moral and right? Instead, he asks Thats what normal people do, right? His habitual killing is experienced as part of his awed condition, and he works carefully to subsume it into the social contract. In this way Dexter can be viewed as the ruthless embodiment of modernity and its adherence to conventions of normativity. He consciously works to present a normative person, conscious that he carries discrediting stigma, as do most human actors. Rather than representing the dark potential of adherence to cultural norms, Dexter illuminates its gritty mundanity. Goffman (1959) argues that all social interactions comprise the transmission of social information. In this view, identity is the social product of information exchange, consisting of a ritualized practice of display and reception. Human interaction is a communicative ritual conventionalized action where one transmits or processes social information about another. Bringing Goffmans (1959) analysis of interactive exchange within a social order together with Foucaults (1975/1978) theorization of discursive disciplinary power, Cahill (1998) discusses how performative demands of the person have become explicitly linked with power relations, resulting in various technologies

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of person production. Implicitly present throughout the points raised here is Barthes (1957/1972) notion of myth. Each technology conventional face-work, stigma management, and reverse marking betrays some prescriptive aspect of normative identity: the expectation of a coherent and consistent self, widely shared notions about the unsavory character of certain types of people, and playing along with the status quo, respectively. In reviewing the Code of Harry and my analytic position that it is a Goffmanian one it becomes apparent that the Code is as much about reproducing the mythology of everyday life convincingly as it is about staying out of the electric chair. Furthermore, even the most mundane human actor performs normativity using the same technologies. The essential difference is that Dexter is evading physical extinction for a failure to conform, while the average person faces only social death (from snubbing to excommunication) for their transgressions. As a structuring element in our semiotically mediated reality, myth refers to the ooding chain of signiers/eds which lie behind particular symbols (Barthes, 1957/1972). These symbols, or markers, represent complex networks of social meanings truncated through ritualization into immediately perceivable mythologies that imbue every instance of comprehension from common sense to abstract logic. In this article I explored how apparently mundane reality is in fact a heavily manicured aspect of social life. Dexter Morgans conscious appropriation of markers of unmarkedness underscores the manufacture of normative identity. His interactive strategies largely center on obscuring certain facts of his self (a murderous impulse, his lack of emotionality) while concertedly constructing a front of normality. To do so demonstrates the constructedness of allegedly natural or morally neutral aspects of culture and identities. Dexter engages in the reverse marking of reality (Brekhus, 1996) by consciously adopting those ancillary features normals acquire perfunctorily: gender-appropriate spouses, respectable occupations, and the willingness to exchange social niceties with a multitude of nearstrangers and acquaintances for whom we may actually care very little. For Dexter, all of these qualities are markers of unmarkedness: auxiliary characteristics relating to decency, law-abidingness, and a mundane heterosexuality; boundary work between identity worlds; and honesty veiled through irony and open comments to obscure unpleasant facts of his self. The mythology of deviance vs. normality where the former is marked so as to result in institutionalization or social expulsion (as described by Foucault [1975/1978] and Butler [2004]), and the latter is typically an unmarked trait (Brekhus, 1996) is part of a larger project of hegemony, whereby power coalesces to support dominant interests through a cultural equilibrium. Essentially, cultural demands shape the nature of our social identities in ways that afrm the preexistent interactive/moral order, thereby preserving power asymmetries in that structure. Our obsession with normality is tied up in this nomos interactively, resulting in power-laden identity categories brought to bear in the moral evaluation of our interactive productions of personhood (whereby normal expectations become normativity). Only some categories receive academic scrutiny. Historically, sociology and other social sciences have sought to dissect reality by focusing their gaze primarily on the marked. The comparatively recent theorization of Whiteness as a construct in studies of race and the inclusion of masculinities as a target

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for feminist analysis, however, underscore the importance of not allowing the unmarked to remain a conceptual blindspot in sociological study (Brekhus, 1998). The default categories of identity hierarchies must be deconstructed alongside the maligned: the interpretive work which grants Whiteness and maleness, for instance, a position of moral superiority in the social order can be usefully disrupted by empirically demonstrating the constructedness of such categories. The relational nature of these identities typically remains muted in mundane perception (Brekhus, 1996). This socio-mental sleight of hand establishes their privilege at a cognitive level, their mythological charge owing into the perceptions and denitions of social situations that establish our everyday reality. Like Agnes (Garnkel, 1967) and other gender deviants (Prosser, 1998; Crawley, 2002; Butler, 2004), Dexter reveals the tenuous reality we inhabit as an outsider looking in. His identity performance demonstrates interactive technologies of person production (Cahill, 1998) with both the Goffmanian (1959) and Foucaultian (1975/1978) implications in full view: Dexter asserts the performed nature of cultural reality in his self-conscious adoption of an unmarked social identity as a survival mechanism. That a performance of a particular identity can be driven by survival further highlights the functioning of power implicit in our identity categories such that entire classes of persons are socially damned through the socio-mental, cultural privileging of certain traits through marking and unmarking. This is further reied in academic practice: deviance and criminality become the subject of analyses as examples of learned behaviors and skill sets, whereas normativity is left unmarked as an uncontested product of socialization. This analysis leads to a critical reevaluation of the privileged cultural location of mundanity or normativity in demonstrating the technologies of person production and their relationship to identity categories. The conventional focus of sociology and of social sciences in general has tended toward the unusual or strange, thereby neglecting the constructedness of normalized identities and activities. This dogged insistence on analyzing the exotic results in blind spots throughout our scholarship and precludes the advancement of our knowledge of the social worlds full variety, as noted by Brekhus (1996, 1998). Casting attention on the normal denaturalizes those unmarked categories of persons and phenomena and deepens our understanding of the cultural context of identity formation and deployment. Rather than seeing identity work as something largely done by deviants, Dexter and other practical sociologists encourage us to recognize the concerted efforts human actors undertake to arrive at what would be socially regarded as a mundane, unexceptional person. This turns our everyday assumptions about reality and personhood on their ear and makes visible the relational nature of all social life.

Notes
I would like to thank Wayne Brekhus and Cozette Lehman for their invaluable feedback; credit must also go to TSS, JVG, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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1 I follow US convention for terminology, wherein a series refers to the entire run of a given television program and the shorter sequences of episodes which comprise the series are called seasons. 2 This comparison is strictly analytic, not moral. 3 I would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing to this parallel, and noting that both Superman and Dexter work in careers that ironically threaten to reveal their hidden identity. 4 Dexter even uses Dr Bateman as a pseudonym when ordering tranquilizers (Dexter 106).

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WILLIAM RYAN FORCE, Sociology Department, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA. Email: wrfrz9@mail.missouri.edu

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