Discourse Of Fear Research Articles

"The Whole World Is In Uproar": Discourses of Fear, Instability, and Global Change in West German Media, 1977-1980

After presenting a brief summary of the events leading up to the German Autumn, this article offers a close analysis of media responses in major German newspapers and magazines in the months following these violent and confusing political developments. It compares these responses to reports in January 1980, where the events of the late 1970s serve as a catalyst for fears of global change. Media articulate these fears about the stability and identity of the West German nation state in increasingly vague and generalized terms and relate them to a global situation that is "out of control." The discussions in this article suggest that these expressed fears reveal tensions, interruptions, and gaps in the conservative fantasy of the secure and prosperous Western nation state.

The mass media and terrorism

The mass media promotes terrorism by stressing fear and an uncertain future. Major changes in US foreign and domestic policy essentially went unreported and unchallenged by the dominant news organizations. Notwithstanding the long relationship in the United States between fear and crime, the role of the mass media in promoting fear has become more pronounced since the United States `discovered' international terrorism on 11 September 2001. Extensive qualitative media analysis shows that political decision-makers quickly adjusted propaganda passages, prepared as part of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), to emphasize domestic support for the new US role in leading the world. These messages were folded into the previous crime-related discourse of fear, which may be defined as the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of everyday life. Politicians marshaled critical symbols and icons joining terrorism with Iraq, the Muslim faith, and a vast number of non-western nations to strategically promote fear and use of audience beliefs and assumptions about danger, risk and fear in order to achieve certain goals, including expanding domestic social control.

“There is nothing ‘honourable’ about honour killings”: Gender, violence and the limits of multiculturalism

'Honour killings' are extreme acts of domestic violence culminating in the murder of a woman by her family or community. However only in relation to religious and ethnic communities is the concept of 'honour' invoked as motivation for domestic violence. In this paper we argue that ethnicised women are caught up in a collision of discourses. Women who are victims of honour killings are invisible within the cultural relativism of the British multicultural discourse and the private/public divide which characterises the domestic violence discourse. But since September 11, while ethnicised women have become highly visible, they are now contained and constructed in the public consciousness within a discourse of fear and risk posed by the presence of the Muslim alien 'other'. By developing an effective human rights approach to honour killings it could be possible to move away from the 'gender trap' of cultural relativism within the liberal democratic discourse on multiculturalism.

Language, Identity and Empowerment

This article addresses the relationship between language and identity and language and power. Language is viewed as an important vehicle through which empowerment can occur in society and through which social workers can contribute to the empowerment of dual language individuals and communities. Language suppression is viewed through the framework of bilinguaphobia, a term coined by Faltis and Coulter in 2004. Because of the long and unique history of Spanish in Southwestern communities, the authors suggest that true empowerment must overcome the prevalent discourse of fear of bilingualism. This article suggests that the present status and identity of Latinos in the Southwestern United States would be enhanced and affirmed by the healthy co-existence of two tongues and two cultural frameworks and that social workers should recognize and advocate for the power of bilingual discourses.

Who's Afraid of Fear Appeals? Contingency, Courage and Deliberation in Rhetorical Theory and Practice

Fear is an influential emotion whose history reveals its impacts not only on individuals, but on entire communities, economies, and political systems. Fear has been particularly important politically, and the history of republics reveals a political discourse rife with appeals to fear. But the discourse of fear has animated a great deal of controversy and debate that reveals a recurring uneasiness and uncertainty among scholars, citizens, and policymakers about the compatibility of this emotional state with effective political deliberation and policy making. Especially among scholars in the humanities, one finds frequent expressions of concern about the effects of fear and its role within communities and discourses.

‘I don’t want to catch it’. Boys, girls and sexualities in an HIV/AIDS environment

This paper examines young South African school children’s understanding of HIV/AIDS. Based on ethnographic work in two schools in Greater Durban, it explores the impact of HIV/AIDS on the ways in which gender and sexuality are articulated against the backdrop of race and class specific contexts. The first part of the paper examines the children’s discourses of sex, sexuality and HIV/AIDS. We show that young children’s meanings of sex, sexuality and are not straightforward and are actively produced and defined through a range of social processes. These processes shape the extent to which young children experience sexuality within discourses of fear and pleasure. Young children’s meanings of HIV/AIDS are explored in the second part of the paper. Here we show how their knowledge of HIV/AIDS is socially structured through class/race and gender and these forms of social relations provide the framing and reference points for children’s constructions of meanings around HIV/AIDS. We finish the paper by raising some theoretical and practical/political questions about the implications of what we have found for HIV/AIDS education in South Africa.

Smart on crime: The new language for prisoner release

This exploratory study of news media reports examines language of incarceration shifts from ‘tough on crime’ to ‘smart on crime’ as a feature of broader, contextual meanings about: (1) the costs and benefits of prison and incarceration; (2) the moral meanings and ‘practical reasoning’ associated with imprisonment; (3) the language of deviance and respectability. This work is linked to two long-term projects. One is the ‘discourse of fear’, the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of everyday life. The other is ‘the language of justice’, or a discourse analysis of justice speech and the construction of social control. Our aim in this project is to explore the changing discourse of incarceration. News reports were selected and analyzed using ethnographic content analysis and ‘tracking discourse’, or following certain issues, words, themes, and frames over a period of time, across different issues, and across different news media. We find that ‘smart on crime’ did promote more lenient sentences for less demonized offenders, but the message was more receptive to news organizations if delivered by claims makers associated with criminal justice organizations. Some implications for claims making and the social construction of reality are discussed.

The Mass Media, Crime and Terrorism

The mass media play a large role in the public perception and acceptance of criminal behaviour by the United States of America. Public acceptance of illegal actions by the US government in the Iraq War, as well as steps taken to combat terrorism, have been influenced by entertainment media content and media logic about crime and fear. The focus of the article is on the cultural and mass communication contexts that have promoted fear of crime on the one hand, while also justifying illegal state actions to combat crime — and now terrorism — on the other. Propaganda and news management (e.g. the military-media complex and the failure of journalism) contribute to a discourse of fear and symbolic negation of the ‘other’ — as criminal or terrorist — and, in the process, valorize criminal conduct as necessary and heroic.

Collectivism, Political Control, and Gating in Chinese Cities

This paper provides a conceptual framework emphasizing the role of culture and the state in understanding gating in different countries, and applies it to examine the long-existing and widespread neighborhood enclosure and gating in Chinese cities. It is argued that the collectivist culture deeply embedded in Chinese society and tight political control actively pursued by the government contribute to the widespread character of gating in China, whereas dominant Western-based theories such as the discourse of fear and private provision of public services are less applicable, even though they are becoming increasingly important in the new gated private housing. Gating and neighborhood enclosure in China help to define a sense of collectivism and foster social solidarity. Thus gating per se does not necessarily lead to residential segregation, although it begins to reinforce segregation in the reform era. Gating also facilitates political control through neighborhood-level governments whose jurisdiction often corresponds to enclosed neighborhoods but forms change between different political-historical periods. Thus, while the physical form of gating is similar between China and the United States, the underlying sociopolitical constructs and implications are quite different.

Untying the Gordian knot of creation: metaphors for the Human Genome Project in Greek newspapers

This article studies the metaphorical expressions used by newspapers to present the near completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP) to the Greek public in the year 2000. The analysis, based on cognitive metaphor theory, deals with the most frequent or captivating metaphors used to refer to the human genome, which give rise to both conventional and novel expressions. The majority of creative metaphorical expressions participate in the discourse of hope and promise propagated by the Greek media in an attempt to present the HGP and its outcome in a favorable light. Instances of the competing discourse of fear and danger are much rarer but can also be found in creative metaphorical expressions. Metaphors pertaining to the Greek culture or to ancient Greek mythology tend to carry a special rhetorical force. However, it will be shown that the Greek press strategically used most of the metaphors that circulated globally at the time, not only culture specific ones.

Ethical Erotics: Reconceptualizing Anti-Rape Education

This article argues that many anti-violence prevention strategies have been shaped by unarticulated discourses of sexuality that focus primarily on women managing the risk and danger of unethical behaviour of men. Sexual intimacy has therefore been dominated by discourses of fear and danger and women’s pleasure is once again invisible. An alternative conception of sexual ethics is presented based on Foucault’s work on ethics, and sexuality. The findings from in-depth qualitative interviews with 26 Australian women and men of diverse sexualities indicate that women and men regardless of erotic choice of partner have found multiple ways to explore sexual pleasure that is ethical, non-violent and where danger is reduced. This suggests a need to develop alternative ways of shaping violence prevention strategies that acknowledge both pleasure and danger.

Us and others: Social identities across languages, discourses, cultures

Anna Duszak (ed.), Us and others: Social identities across languages, discourses, cultures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp 517. Hb $162.This interesting volume, edited and introduced by Anna Duszak, offers a range of perspectives on the construction of identity, particularly the formation and roles of contrasting reference groups, the “us and others” of the title. Disciplines in which the contributing studies are based include social anthropology, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, intercultural communication studies, cognitive linguistics, translation studies, neurolinguistics, neuropsychology, and social psychology. Contributing scholars present accounts of studies conducted in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe. The 23 chapters are grouped under the headings “Discourses in space,” “Discourses in polyphony,” “Discourses of transition,” “Discourses of fear,” “Discourses of challenge,” and “Discourses through suppression.”

Rediscovering the ‘Gate’ Under Market Transition: From Work-unit Compounds to Commodity Housing Enclaves

This paper applies two major explanations in gated community studies, namely the club realm of consumption and the discourse of fear, to examine the changing forms of urban ‘gated communities’, i.e. the transition from work-unit compounds to gated commodity housing enclaves, in urban China. While the gate has existed in China for a long time as a physical form, it has now been rediscovered as an instrument for the partitioning of derelict socialist landscapes produced by ‘economising urbanisation’ and a post-socialist imagined ‘good life’. The study highlights that the function of gating is dependent upon social and economic contexts: under socialism, gating reinforces political control and collective consumption organised by the state; in the post-reform era, the gate demarcates emerging consumer clubs in response to the retreat of the state from the provision of public goods. While the discourse of fear seems less applicable to the Chinese city, urban fragmentation is paving the way to a new urban experience of insecurity, which has begun to appear in the discourse of ‘community building’ in urban China.

Conventional Risk Discourse and the Proliferation of Fear

The academic and service provider literatures addressing risk, especially youth risk, have produced an array of theoretical and conceptual interpretations consistent with the perpetuation of fear. It is the author’s contention that conventional risk discourse serves the ideological purpose of marginalizing undesirable groups, which leads to the creation and proliferation of technological and behavioral modes of social control. The author also contends that dominant cultural interests perpetuate a discourse of fear that neglects contemporary insight into structural causes of nonnormative violent behavior. Structural precursors to violence are combined with the complex and multifaceted matrix of subjective life-world experiences and institutional arrangements that together constitute the context responsible for generating family and youth trauma, and later, risky behavior.

REVIEW: Distortions of imperialism afflict media view of Islam

For journalists in New Zealand bemused by the apparent paranoia in Australia over the issue of 'boat people' in the wake of the international incident on the high seas off the northwestern coast involving the Norwegian freighter Tampa. Peter Manning's damning monograph clears much of the fog. Through two years of textual analysis, he has laid bare how Australia's discourse of fear came to be focused on some 4000 people on board leaky boats, seeking asylum without visas.

The politics of fear in the making of worlds

This paper revisits "the Menchú controversy" by examining the relationship between "truth", politics and fear in the "making of the worlds." The author argue that "Menchú controversy" can teach us a lot about how "truth" involves a politics of containment whereby "others" are contained by the judgment that they have failed the truth at the very moment that they challenge how some "truths" are given or become givens. Such judgments are not simply about reading the testimonios of others as "perjured", but also work to construct others as fearsome and threatening, such that the defence of truth becomes "a matter of life and death." To explore the role of fear in containing others, the author offers a reading of the Menchú controversy alongside the reception given to Sunera Thobani's speech in which she criticizes the United States' "war on terrorism." She shows how Thobani's speech is constructed as an act of terror because it calls into question the very "truths" that have justified the war, by showing that they rely on an ontological distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence. The paper relates both the Menchú and Thobani cases to broader discourses of fear and anxiety that have circulated since September 11 2001 and argues that fear works to secure "truths" precisely through the narration of crisis or insecurity. Rather than considering fear as coming from within a subject, or as a characteristic of an object, the author suggests that fear works to effect the very boundaries between subjects and others, partly through the feeling that such boundaries have already been threatened by the presence of others. She also shows how fear operates as an affective economy of truth: fear slides between signs and sticks to bodies by constituting them as its objects. In making this argument, she shows how fear sticks to some bodies and not others. For example, the judgment that somebody "could be" a terrorist draws on past and affective associations that stick various signs (such as Muslim, fundamentalist, terrorist) together. At the same time, fear is reproduced precisely by the threat that such bodies "may pass (us) by." Such bodies become constructed as fearsome and as a threat to the very truths that are reified as "life itself." This paper hence shows how truth becomes an affective technique of containment in which the failure to contain is the justification of containment. The author concludes that if truth is a matter of containers and containment - about who or what gets contained to allow certain worlds to become given - then the risk taken by subaltern women, such as Rigoberta Menchú and Sunera Thobani, in speaking out against such truths is the risk of making an-other kind of world.

Att skriva emancipatoriskt. Akademisk dialog för två röster

This article is an attempt to open a discussion on feminist academic writing, its obstacles and its emancipatory potential. The form of the article is a dialogue, in ten parts, for two voices. By choosing this form we want to find a strategy for avoiding the reductive and hierarchal dualism that all too often characterizes academic thinking and writing. The geography of writing in a Swedish academic context is described as a contradictory field for feminists, and Shadowland is used as a metaphor for a landscape that demands well kept secrets about the feudal conditions in academic life. This creates a split subject in the process of thinking writing- a her and me situation. The unknown story of Dr Jekyll and Ms Hyde (inspired by the more widely known novel Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by R. L. Stevenson) captures the dilemma. Stevenson's characterization of Mr Hyde as a person carrying an "unexpressed deformity" is used as a metaphor for the threefold split between "I", "you" and "she", sensed by so many female and feminist academics trying to assimilate personal, physical and emotional experiences in the thinking/ writing process. The discourse of academic writing is imagined as a discourse of fear, where traditional form is created through unspoken expectations; a no-need-toexpress- what-you-should-know infantilises alternative ways of thinking and writing at the same time as it establishes academic homogenisation. The existence of a formula for the Right Way of Writing an Academic Text, whether it be a student paper or a doctoral thesis, is one of the most eagerly reproduced illusions, also among feminists. Here is a central question - and challenge - for every discussion on emancipatory writing. The liberation of words, genre, as well as style, is a necessary step in the direction of a non-hierarchical, anti-dualistic writing strategy. The article concludes by raising the issue of the emancipatory potential of endings in academic texts and presents two possible endings and an untimely letter. The first ending is created in the form of theatre where the intention is to reconsider the construction of Other, Them, Us, We. The second ending follows the same theme in the form of an academic summary. The third ending, the 'untimely letter', describes the creative and unpredictable outcome of the process of academic writing when working with form in different ways.

Pleasures of Fear: Antifascist Myth, Holocaust, and Soft Dissidence in Christa Wolf's "Kindheitsmuster"

Since 1989 many East German intellectuals and critical writers have been faulted for their accomodationist attitude towards the GDR state and its punitive politics. While accusations and counter accusations were flying, the question emerged: what was it about German culture or, for that matter about intellectuals, about their particular brand of emancipatory cultural politics that made them such blind and willing instruments of repression?1 In an effort to explain the apparent inconsequence of enlightened doubt among intellectuals in the GDR, scholars have pointed to a variety of psychological, political, and historical mechanisms at play.2 Antifascism and its constituent idea of the unity of all social, cultural, and political forces made for a powerful foundational program that implicated intellectuals in a web of power relations which supported the regime and entrapped critical thought. In a 1990 interview Christa Wolf herself asserted that her generation, a generation that had been socialized under fascism, felt reluctant to organize resistance against people who had been in concentration camps during the Nazi period.3 But if it had yielded to a state with a stained history, ruined economy, and demoralized population, how exactly could the antifascist narrative remain cohesive all the way until 1989 when in her speech Fur unser Land Wolf invoked antifascist ideals as the basis of a new socialist East German nation? In other words, as Dorothea Dornhof put it succinctly, how is it possible that intellectuals who pride themselves on an emancipa-tory understanding would not only enter power relations of their own free will but sustain them despite increasing doubts about their ability to realize any of their emancipatory goals? (63). Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster inadvertently points to a profound desire for preservation. Re-writing the state's foundational narrative of antifascism through a discourse of empathy with Jewish victims commonly neglected in the state's symbolic ritualization of communist resistance, Wolfs project engenders a soft dissidence that avoids challenging antifascism as a discourse of power. This is not to say, however, that the text hides its increasing doubts about the legitimacy of the GDR's ideological project. Quite to the contrary, Wolfs novel invests a great deal in a discourse of fear to perpetually regenerate a dilemma of linguistic impotence. This linguistic impasse in Wolfs works has often been read by critics in the context of modernist Sprachkritik, and thus as Wolfs relevant, if limited, contribution to an emancipatory political and aesthetic discourse in the GDR.4 Instead I suggest Kindheitsmuster continuously and quite consciously restages the liminal experience necessary to sustain the peculiar intimacy that lies at the heart of a particularly symbiotic dissidence, a brand of dissidence in which critical writer and state feed on each other.5 Seen in this light, the crucial question is then no longer whether or not the critical GDR writers who decided to stay in their country undermined or legitimized the East German state, but rather how could they do it both at once? How could they both support and corrode the authority of the state? How exactly is a soft dissidence (re)generated and how does it partake in the production of ideology? Kindheitsmuster has entered the canon as the German book exemplary of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung.6 Starting out as an examination of the individual and collective psychology of subjugation under socialist conditions, the book carefully reconstructs the coercive mechanisms surrounding the complicity of Wolfs generation with the Nazi past (Wie sind wir so geworden, wie wir heute sind? Horigkeit. 248). More than any other book of the 1970s, Wolfs novel negotiates, contests, and reworks the different politics of memory that evolved in both East and West Germany since the end of WW II. In contrast to the GDR state's mythologizing of the communist resistance to fascism, Kindheitsmuster suggests that a full and truthful account of Germany's national socialist past would lead to a more conscientious socialist present and serve to guide future-oriented action. …

Children and the Discourse of Fear

The news media, a dominant source of information about social issues, use entertainment formats to organize reports that audiences will understand. Part of this organized effort is the use of a discourse of fear, or the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are central features of everyday life. Reliant on formal agents of social control as news sources about fear, news reports tend to repeat certain words, themes, and perspectives that support more social control. Although associated with crime, the discourse of fear includes other topics and concerns as well. A qualitative content analysis approach, “tracking discourse,” permits a mapping of discourse over time and across various topics. Analysis of the use of fear in three major newspapers during 1987–1996 shows that it has increased; that a large part of the discourse of fear includes children and the spaces they occupy (e.g., schools and neighborhoods); and that it changed from a focus on specific events in the 1980s to a more generalized, pervasive perspective in the 1990s, peaking in about 1994. It is argued that this is important for making claims about “necessary” social action to protect children, as well as protect us from children.Fear is the path to the dark side.—Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace

The Securitization of Migration in Western Societies: Ambivalent Discourses and Policies

What shall we become now without the barbarians? Those people were a solution, weren't they? C. Gavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians The last decades of the twentieth century were marked by a dramatic change led by the development of globalization, the enhancement of transnational flows, and the end of bipolarity. The construction of the European Union, the emergence of new economic agreements such as NAFTA, the deterritorialization of markets, physical borders, and identities, the increase of migration flows, the construction of the Schengen area, (1) and the fragmentation of major states (e.g., the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia) have raised questions about many old assumptions, including those made about Westphalian state sovereignty and identity. These phenomena significantly affected the forms and the meanings of borders, individual and collective identities, and the sense and nature of state sovereignty and authority. In the meantime, these changes have recast the domestic order, challenged traditional structures, modified social arrangements, transformed the forces of integration and fragmentation, and accelerated the dynamics of inclu sion and exclusion. In consequence, Western societies are witnessing the emergence of many existential and conceptual anxieties and fears about their identity, security, and well-being. As Martin Heisler asserts, (2) migration is at the focal point of the interrelated dynamics of identity, borders, and orders. By its transnational character, its dynamic, and its impact on people and institutions at all levels, migration is perceived as posing a serious challenge to the long-standing paradigms of certainty and order. One of the prominent features of Western societies in the post-bipolar era has been therefore the production of a discourse of fear and proliferation of dangers with reference to the scenarios of chaos, disorder, and clash of civilizations. It is easily noticeable in the public sphere that the fear is mainly about the different, the alien, the undocumented migrant, the refugee, the Muslim, the non-European, the Hispanic. These different expressions converge on the figure of the migrant, which appears as the anchoring point of securitarian policies and fierce public debates that gained momentum in the 1990s. Because of the widespread publicization of preventive and repressive immigration policies, a politics of fear was generally considered as being developed specifically in the European context and not in the United States, which was presented as being more tolerant and open to migration. But the production of similar discourses and the adoption of securitarian policies in the United States as well, made it difficult to argue the singularity of Europe. Indeed, although with differences in social and economic contexts as well as in immigration and integration policies, both the EU countries and the United States have been marked, since the 1980s, by a reversal of the image of migrants and asylum seekers in the public space. In both cases, migrants, who were welcomed after World War II as a useful labor force, are now presented in political discourses as criminals, troublemakers, economic and social defrauders, terrorists, drug traffickers, unassimilable persons, and so forth. They are demonized as being increasi ngly associated with organized crime. They are accused of taking jobs away from nationals, taking advantage of social services, and harming the identity of host countries. Introduced in public debates as a political hot-button topic, migration is thus transformed into a threat not only to the state but also to the security and the identity of the host society. What is important to stress here is that through such a presentation, the migration issue, which was not at the origin inherently securitarian, became one involving new actors and leading to stricter public policies and to new surveillance and control devices. …