Discussion Of Violence Research Articles

Bengal Border Revisited

This article deals with the notion of how borders have a penchant for becoming a marker of security. The moment borders become securitized the question of flows across them acquires particular importance. In the colonial period this was marked by concern over dacoits, thugees and hooligans who crossed the district border at will. In the post-colonial period concern remains over undocumented migrants and whether their arrival threatens the nation form. Against this background the article addresses the notion of flows and increasing violence at the borders, fencing as the most recent marker of such violence and how women and the evolution of their relationship to the border is shaped through the discourses of violence.

Speaking in Tongues: Metapictures and the Discourse of Violence in Caribbean Art

Violence, trauma, and memory are fundamental factors of Caribbean modernity but have thus far been underexamined within art history and criticism. This essay explores the invisible yet palpable presence of violence in the genre of family portraiture and the contemporary redeployment of this genre in Edouard Duval-Carrie's Mardi Gras at Fort Dimanche (1992) and Ebony G. Patterson's Entourage (2010). As metapictures (following W. J. T. Mitchell), Duval-Carrie and Patterson's art detonate the expectation of stillness attached to genre. Instead, these works challenge, illuminate, and reform interdiscursive Caribbean epistemologies of violence, trauma, and memory that continue to reverberate across space and time.

“I Think I Was Rape”: Black Feminist Readings of Affect and Incest in <em>Precious</em>

This essay views the most explicit scene of sexual violence in the film Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire (2009) through a black feminist optic to argue that the sequence of physical abuse, followed by the flashback of father-daughter rape, and the subsequent fantasy red carpet scene foregrounds the vexing problematics of cinematic rape representations. My discussion is structured around three related arguments. First, the possibility that the trigger leading to a flashback could be the evidence of Precious suffering from rape trauma syndrome is undermined in the narrative’s broader context. Second, the red carpet scene draws the spectator away from rape, replacing the abject spectacle of incest with glamour, celebration, and celebrity. Third, the metatextual signs within the fantasy scene unsettle the viewer’s affective reaction to the rape scene. The essay focuses on each of these premises to argue that placing the rape scene within a larger discourse of sexual violence and deploying a black feminist critique to do so serves to problematize the role of audience affect and incest narratives elaborated in Precious . Overall, throughout this essay I bring together black feminist theoretical approaches, rape cultural criticism, and affect studies, making critical interventions that both consider the role of audi ence affect in rape representation and challenge the conventions of incest narratives in African American cultural production.

Social Constructions of Masculinity and Male Survivors of Wartime Sexual Violence: an Analytical Review

ABSTRACT Male sexual violence has been reported in 25 armed conflicts in recent years. However, communities and organizations are not equipped to deal with male survivors of sexual violence because it undermines the ideals of social constructions of masculinity. Compared with females, male survivors lack access to reproductive health programs and are generally ignored in gender-based violence discourse. Yet, male survivors are known to suffer from numerous physical injuries and psychosocial disorders. In this review, we call for a move beyond the paradigm of female-only sexual violence victims and for programs that address both male and female survivors.

Polarising cultures, politics and communities and fracturing economies in Zimbabwean literature

Traditional postcolonial approaches have tended to read, imagine and construct Africa through an essentialising Manichaeism. Critical of what he describes as ‘nativism’ and ‘Afro-radicalism’ and the dangers they pose to a reinvention of Africa, Achille Mbembe (2002) suggests new ways of seeing the continent. Drawing on the search for this new grammar of reimagining the continent and the nations that constitute it, this article, with reference to selected texts in the Zimbabwean literary canon, historicises literature’s changing relationship with a traditional postcolonial imagining of the nation that produces discourses of autochthony, otherness and violence. Referencing texts by authors including Chikwava, Chinodya, Gappah, Hove, Lessing, Mungoshi, Mutswairo, Saidi, Tagwira and Vera, the article charts the connection between literature and the cultural aspect of nationalism; literature’s complicity in the production of polarising discourses through an early but unproblematised embrace of the Chimurenga discourse conceptualised as the ‘narrative of ordeal’ (Primorac 2007); the moment of celebration and recovery followed by moments of division, death and mourning and erasure and reinscription. It is the last moment that points to literature’s capacity to free itself of the stranglehold of Manichaeism in a search of reimagining the nation, especially in the context of Zimbabwe’s ever-expanding contemporary diaspora shaped by forces of polarisation.

To hear—to say: the mediating presence of the healing witness

Illness and trauma challenge self-narratives. Traumatized individuals, unable to speak about their experiences, suffer in isolation. In this paper, I explore Kristeva’s theories of the speaking subject and signification, with its symbolic and semiotic modalities, to understand how a person comes to speak the unspeakable. In discussing the origin of the speaking subject, Kristeva employs Plato’s chora (related to choreo, “to make room for”). The chora reflects the mother’s preparation of the child’s entry into language and forms an interior darkroom, the reservoir of lived experience, from which self-narratives issue. Unable to speak of their suffering, traumatized individuals need someone to help them make room for a time of remembrance, someone who is a willing and capable listener. I call such a person a healing witness. Through the mediating presence of the healing witness, fragmented memories of trauma are recreated and incorporated into self-narratives that are sharable with others. Unfortunately, opportunities for witnessing are vanishing. In the last section, I examine the failure of modern media and communication technologies to bear (“hold,” “carry,” “transport”) acts of witnessing. I argue that they perturb the semiotic. According to Kristeva, meaning arises from the dialectical tension between the semiotic (drives and affects) and the symbolic (logic and rules) and is threatened by arid discourse, psychosomatic illnesses, and outbreaks of violence when the semiotic is not represented. Unless we open technology to the imaginary, we risk losing the capacity to bear witness to one another and to create narratives and connections that are meaningful.

Violence and translation discourse

In translation, the natural response to the challenge of making sense of the relatively unfamiliar and less preferred way of expression would be to resort to appropriation, which results in distorted performances. Thus translation as a form of (re)production is compounded by the necessity for ownership and control. The purpose of this article is to explore and expound how violence of any kinds perpetuates literary translation, with particular reference to English-Chinese translation. It argues that irrespective of the original design or intention, translation results from cultural displacement, where alienation is made concrete. The questions of cultural dominance and subordination further complicate perceptions and misperceptions of the nature of cross-cultural communication. The inevitable intrusion of the foreign, if viewed as an assault on the target culture with its traditional ways, may seem disconcerting, particularly if it is presented in a coercive manner. On the other hand, mediation aimed at reconciliation, though necessary, or even desirable, cannot avoid a certain arbitrariness, and in addition, since translation is susceptible to the changed and changing power relations between the source and target cultures, some forms or degrees of violence are bound to feature significantly in shaping translation discourse.

The cool, the bad, the ugly, and the powerful: identity struggles in schoolboy peer culture

Drawing upon a one-year-long ethnography of boys' constructions of their gender and sexual identities in one South African high school, this paper seeks to empirically explore and theorise how 58 grade 10 and grade 11 working-class boys create and seek out spaces among their male peers from which to cultivate their masculinities through heterosexual discourses, including being ‘at risk’ of getting AIDS. In this study, boys' daily struggles of trying to straddle the divide between hypersexual versus homosexual/effeminate versions of masculinity both subverted and reinforced hegemonic gender/sexual relations in the school context. Being caught up in this restrictive grip of heteronormativity meant that there were few spaces in male peer culture to resist hegemonic masculinity. The ‘responsible male/controlled’ position is indicative of one such space in which boys attempted to resist forms of hyper-sexuality. While this position cannot really be viewed as progressive, it nevertheless allowed boys to re-position themselves as moral agents through an assertion of control over their sexuality. Given the presence of these identity struggles, this paper, in general, suggests that interventions with boys need to cautiously explore these tensions/contradictions in identity making as opportunities to cultivate more gender sensitive and less violent discourses on masculinity.

The Reconstruction of Domestic Violence Discourse: the Discourse of Domestic Violence Victimization and Empowerment Continuum

The Reconstruction of Domestic Violence Discourse: the Discourse of Domestic Violence Victimization and Empowerment Continuum

Circulating Communities Online: The Case of the Kauhajoki School Shooting

Circulating Communities Online: The Case of the Kauhajoki School Shooting

Gendering violence in the school shootings in Finland

Within barely a year, two school shootings shook Finland. The school shootings shocked Finnish society, forcing media, academics and experts, police and politicians alike to search for reasons behind the violent incidents. Focusing their analysis on the two main Finnish newspapers, Helsingin Sanomat and Hufvudstadsbladet , authoritative sources of information for Finland’s two language communities, the authors maintain that the Finnish case contributes to research on school shootings by evidencing the intimate linkages between the state, gender and violence. The authors argue that violence is to be understood through different discourses about the Finnish state. In particular, they discern three discourses about the state that produce gendered discourses of violence: the welfare state, the realist state and the neoliberal state. The authors conclude that these discourses produce different notions of rational and irrational violence thereby providing different legitimizations for male-embodied/masculine violence.

Changing Discourses of Marital Violence in Sweden from the Age of Reformation to the Late Nineteenth Century

This article analyses how public attention to marital violence in Sweden changed from a question of maintaining good order and ambitions to discipline self-indulgent house tyrants into responsible masters of households in the seventeenth century, to the vanishing of the house tyrant as a cultural stereotype in favour of the female shrew in the eighteenth century, following the formal abolition of the husband's legal right to chastise his wife and an equalisation of liabilities and responsibilities. It also traces the beginnings of the social marginalisation and silencing of marital violence in the nineteenth century as a phenomenon associated with the lower classes and regulated by the law as a case for private action only when committed within the household circle.

Orígenes del terrorismo global: una propuesta de análisis

El presente artículo pretende analizar las causas lejanas del terrorismo procedente de países islámicos. Los orígenes del terrorismo global de hoy en día están bien anclados en la guerra contra la ex Unión Soviética que se desarrolló en tierras afganas. La gestión de la posguerra por los diferentes actores políticos involucrados en el conflicto contribuyó en la consolidación del yihadismo que se propagó aprovechando el vacío político y el abandono de Afganistán después de la guerra. Por otra parte, la represión del islamismo moderado en los países árabes provocó un proceso de radicalización que se alimentaba directamente de un discurso violento que vino a sustituir el discurso tradicional del islam político. La gestión del campo religioso por los regímenes de los países árabes e islámicos no aportó ninguna solución al problema del radicalismo, pues los ulemas oficiales no estaban capacitados para contrarrestar el avance del extremismo ni para sustituir a un actor político importante como los islamistas, cuyo discurso necesita actualmente una reforma profunda.

Journeying through a Discourse of Violence: Elias Khoury's Yalo and Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game

The multiple forms and layers of violence which were created, sustained and perpetuated during the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990) have constituted a recurring theme in numerous novels and other for...

ANC Decline, Social Mobilization and Political Society: Understanding South Africa's Evolving Political Culture

This article examines the evolving political culture in contemporary South Africa. It draws on elite culture, neo-patrimonialism, and revisionist institutionalist perspectives to understand state weaknesses and patterns of politicization confronting South Africa's developing democracy. While it accepts that the democratic political system and its constituent institutions are in place and function formally, a discourse of violence or threats of violence to rival political actors is commonplace. The article is structured as follows: the first part describes the increased social mobilization of disgruntled citizens who rely on a discourse of violence rather than articulating grievances through political structures; the second part focuses on those factors that ferment this kind of political culture. The article discusses the deepening economic inequality and its expression in class conflict under conditions of democracy. It then discusses the politics of the ANC as a dominant party, and in particular intra-elite conflict, ANC factionalization, and the consequent weakening of state institutions. These factors, the paper argues, encourage a politics in which political society, rather than civil society, becomes the main terrain for expressing conflict.

Youths in Violent Extremist Discourse: Mediated Identifications and Interventions

This article examines the discursive strategies employed by violent extremists to build a persuasive collective youth identity, drawing from strategic communication, social movement, and membership categorization theories to analyze youth references from texts disseminated by Al Qaeda from 1996–2009. “Youth” is constructed via (a) ascriptions of allegiance to a common belief system whereby militant actions are directed toward establishing a new sociopolitical order, (b) descriptions of pious youth as “true believers” apart from “apostate” state regimes, and (c) references to hagiographies of extremist martyrs that serve as moral exemplars. This article concludes with research directions to facilitate counternarrative interventions.

A Truth Commission for Northern Ireland?

1 A report published by the Consultative Group on the Past (Consultative Group) in January 2009 recommended that a ‘Legacy Commission’ be established for Northern Ireland that would fulfil a reconciliation, truth-recovery and justice mandate. The work of the Consultative Group highlights how international justice norms are interpreted at a local level in a way that takes account of local histories and priorities. This article critically examines the proposed Legacy Commission and finds that the framework outlined by the Consultative Group does not sufficiently challenge discourses of violence that hinder the bedding down of positive peace in Northern Ireland. Universal human rights and justice concepts remain peripheral to this framework, which avoids the type of profound conflict analysis that might advance societal stability and harmony. Instead of challenging the structural and institutional inequalities that underpinned the violence of the conflict in Northern Ireland and opening up new pathways to accessing truth and justice, the Consultative Group's report advocates a truth-recovery process that is not open to public scrutiny and is couched in the language of forgetting, which begs the question whether this is a genuine attempt to explore sidelined or dissenting narratives of conflict, or merely another forum in which to contain them.

The Mosaic of Violence – An Introduction

Bakonyi, J., Bliesemann DeGuevara, B. (2011). The Mosaic of Violence: An Introduction. In B. Bliesemann de Guevara, & J. Bakonyi (Eds.), A Micro-Sociology of Violence: Deciphering patterns and dynamics of collective violence. (pp. 1-17). Routledge.

“Mercyfull Warres agaynst These Naked People”: The Discourse of Violence in the Early Americas

“‘Mercyfull Warres agaynst These Naked People’: The Discourse of Violence in the Early Americas” explores how several early modern propagandists for colonial expansion construct Indigenous peoples and promote specific action. Working from the textual collections of Richard Eden and Richard Hakluyt, this paper examines how each writer takes specific steps to control terminology. By configuring Indigenous people as either violent or docile, they, in turn, become candidates for extermination or conversion respectively. The paper argues that Hakluyt's more complicated, contradictory, and subtle framing of colonial progress in fact urges a significantly more imperious and universal colonial project, invested in a widespread homogenization of culture and identity.

Partner Violence, Technologies of the Self, and Masculinity in Mexico

This article discusses qualitative research conducted with a group of Mexican men working against their violence toward their female partners. Using a Foucauldian analysis based on concepts of subjectivation and ethics of self, I argue that in this psycho]educational intervention a new subject is produced through these menfs embodiment of the technical language of the discourse of violence against women: the violent man. In the program, adopting such an identity is regarded as the necessary condition for stopping violent behavior. From that starting point a whole technology of self is implemented in order to work with menfs emotions and bodies. Pain is regarded as the true substance and antidote against all other undesirable emotions, including anger.