On Tuesday, October 21, Dr. Suzanne Enck inaugurated the UNT Women’s and Gender Studies Program’s new lecture series for a room packed with eager students and faculty, primed to ask thought-provoking questions about Suzanne’s talk, “How Ray Rice Discourse Distracts Us From Domestic Violence.” In this lecture, Dr. Enck critiqued how we culturally make sense of football player Ray Rice’s widely publicized abuse of his partner, Janay. Suzanne placed into conversation textual fragments from disparate corners of the social media landscape, along with official press conferences sponsored by the Baltimore Ravens and National Football League, and news media accounts of Ray Rice’s abuse. Ultimately, Dr. Enck wove together an argument that asked her audience to consider the larger contexts of domestic violence as a system of power and control that are ignored when we focus specifically on high-profile sports stars—especially stars who are racially marked as Other and compete in physically aggressive contact sports—who are exposed for exceptional episodes of physical abuse against intimate partners. Dr. Enck asked her audience to take seriously the charge of disrupting larger structures of patriarchy that reward hegemonic masculinity and perpetuate cycles of power and control in intimate relationships, while not scapegoating individual victims of abuse, or crystalizing our understanding of abusive partners as being hyper-masculine, physically threatening men.