In the Name of the National Multicultural Family: The Documentation of Honour Killings and the Pedagogy of Pain

Abstract

This article focuses on Shelley Saywell’s documentary film about honour killings, In the Name of the Family, which won the Best Canadian Feature Award at the 2010 HotDocs Documentary Film Festival. Saywell stated that her hope in making this documentary was that it would help educate in order to break the cycle of abuse. This goal will be explored to see if in fact this documentary can allow the audience to hear these young women who are the victims of honour killings and whether this translates into the pedagogic potential for which Saywell hopes. Saywell’s documentary is framed within a binaristic “clash of cultures” narrative, where the fate of these young Muslim women are the limit case of a crisis of multicultural tolerance. This framing obscures the material realities which underpin gendered violence and racial exclusion in Canada even as it secures the national fantasy of a tolerant multicultural society. Ultimately, this article argues that the epistemological constraining of the patriarchal violence in this film as a specific form of culturalized and essentialized patriarchal traumatic violence serves only to entrench a larger project of white settler multicultural nationalism and limits the possibilities of knowing to the primacy of the viewing subject.