Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence

KILLING WOMEN: THE VISUAL CULTURE OF GENDER AND VIOLENCE Edited by Annette Burfoot and Susan Lord Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006, 328 pp. Reviewed by Cheryl Simon There was a time, not so long ago, when discussions of women and violence were a primary focus of feminist media studies. Each new instance of gender and violence offered a measure of changing attitudes towards changing social roles and relations. When feminist struggles with abortion rights and domestic violence appeared in violently charged films such as Burning Bed feminist media scholarship responded with interrogations of melodramatic form and gender-specific reading practices. When discussions about the relations of power and pleasure found their cultural figuration in the sexualized, vengeance-seeking woman of Accused and Thelma and Louise, feminist media scholars responded with complex analyses of the social and psychological implications of these tropes. A brief review of a few key film journals over the past few years, however, shows very few instances where the subjects of women and violence are addressed. In fact, the last time this journal ran such an article was in Spring 2002, in a review of a monograph on Anne Marie Poirer's A Scream from Silence/Mourir a tue-tete. time before that was 1999, again in an article on Poirer's film. Camera Obscura hasn't addressed the topic since 2004, and then only once in that year-in contrast to 1999-2001, when questions about gender and violence were addressed in six out of nine issues of that journal. Notwithstanding the relative absence of current feminist scholarship on gendered violence, within the realm of popular culture there is no dwindling of representations of violence against or perpetrated by women. There is no shortage of stories on missing women in the news, and the CSI franchise alone produces more than enough dead female bodies in one week to prove the point. bodies racked up by The Bride of Kill Bill fame point to the perpetuation of representations of female vengeance and violence. That feminist scholarship has become more broadly diffused is not news, nor is it a lamentable situation, and most would agree that, quite the contrary, it is a welcome development. However, the fact that interest in a subject of such significance for women's studies has waned of late is certainly worthy of consideration. What is to be said of representations of women and violence now? Annette Burfoot's and Susan Lord's Killing Women: Visual Culture of Gender and Violence offers some answers and asks new questions about the relationship between social violence and its representations. Conceived in part to redress the recent absence of scholarship, this collection offers insight into the institutional and discursive means by which women's issues and feminism have come to be elided in contemporary culture. Moreover, the book promises to expand on foundational studies, and to consider this complex representational scheme as it is manifested in a broader range of cultural activity: in medical culture, in narratives of war and nationhood, and-in the editors' words-in light of problematic social and political contexts: 'postfeminism,' the discourses and technologies of dematerialized identity and globalization. Organized in three parts, the book's contributions weave together analyses of factual and fictional representations produced within artistic, museological, legal, journalistic, and cinematic contexts. first section, History, Memory and Mediations of Murder, reflects on the media and legal discourses that shape representations of female victim-hood and criminality. This is followed by Techniques and Technologies of Representing Violence, which analyzes the visual tropes that are found in a range of artistic, activist and fictional representations of women and violence. Finally, a section on National Trouble: Gendered Violence, considers instances of culturally defined productions and interpretations of women and violence. …

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