Representing Gender-Based Violence

Widespread media and academic attention to sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has resulted in a huge influx of funding for victims and activism on behalf of women’s (sexual) rights. Such singular attention has, however, caused concern among some scholars. Often portrayed as unparalleled, never seen before, or exceptional, the DRC has become known as the ‘Rape Capital of the World’ (Wallström 2011). The various international accolades of Congolese gynecologist, Dr Denis Mukwege, which include the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize, serve to exemplify this view. While the prize rightly acknowledges the extraordinary work of Mukwege and brings global attention to an otherwise invisible conflict, it also reinforces the synonymization of the DRC with sexual violence.

Drawing on feminist and postcolonial theory, this chapter offers a discursive analysis of the news coverage of Dr Denis Mukwege’s Nobel victory in 4 online newspapers: Le Soir (Belgium), Le Monde (France), The Guardian (UK) and MediaCongo (DRC). The analysis reveals that women are represented in the coverage through a phallocentric frame which sees them as objects or even currency to be possessed and exchanged by men. This phallocentrism is embedded within a broader narrative of ethnocentrism which sees Africa as a troubled, indescribable, unknowable place in which sexual violence is inevitable and can only be prevented by Western civilization.

This chapter scrutinizes the rationales for omissions and denials of the ‘comfort women’ in wartime historiographies in Japan. By demonstrating how the contracting argument reduces the comfort women’s subjugation to regular business transactions to privatize the responsibility for the ‘comfort women’ system and how the controversial Yasukuni Shrine and its adjacent Yūshūkan War Memorial Museum contextualize the war as a product of Japan’s pre-war history of humiliation to reframe the comfort women issue as a question about resisting international subjugation, the chapter suggests that the contracting argument’s denial of gender violence and the Yasukuni and the Yūshūkan’s omission of the comfort women establish the nation-state at the survivors’ expense and that human rights activism involuntarily ends up serving the populists’ ends no matter which actions they undertake.

Acid attacks in Italy became the object of political attention following the extensive media coverage of two landmark cases in 2013 and 2017. This attention culminated in Senator Laura Puppato’s 2017 bill aimed at introducing the crime of ‘omicidio di identità’ [identity murder] into the Italian penal code, framing acid attacks as a specific form of gender-based violence committed by men against women. This chapter examines the criminal patterns of the acid attacks reported between 2011 and 2020 by the online version of the widely sold newspaper la Repubblica, and how the gender identity of victims and perpetrators is constructed. We argue that the 2017 bill was a response to a selected number of cases which received wide media coverage solely because their victims fit into gendered constructions of ideal victimhood (Christie, ‘The Ideal Victim’. In E.A. Fattah (Ed.) From Crime Policy to Victim Policy, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986). Consequently, we consider the limitations of the resulting 2019 law that introduced the crime of ‘Deformazione dell’aspetto della persona mediante lesioni permanenti al viso’ [Deformation of a person’s appearance by permanent injuries to the face].

Domestic and intimate partner violence are among the most spread types of gender-based abuse suffered by women worldwide. In Ireland and other English-speaking countries, this form of violence is endemic and widespread. According to a survey carried out by Women’s Aid, 1 in 4 women living in contemporary Ireland have been abused by a current or former partner (Women’s Aid 2021). Similar numbers have been registered in the United States (Smith et al. 2017: 117), in England and Wales (Office for National Statistics 2019), in Australia (AIHW 2019: vii). Femicide, which is to say, the lethal victimisation of a woman for misogynous reasons (Radford 1992: 3), is often directly connected to the practice of domestic or intimate partner violence, as demonstrated by figures collected by the Irish Femicide Watch, according to which 1 in 2 women killed in the country is murdered by her current or ex-partner (Women’s Aid 2019: 9). Notwithstanding the worrying pervasiveness of intimate partner violence, gender-related crimes are often undervalued or deprived of their gendered connotations by the media, by the police and in a judiciary context (Dunne 2016; O’Halloran 2015; Women’s Aid and Mazzone 2019). This chapter discusses the podcast West Cork (Bungey and Forde 2018 ) and, by comparing it with its antecedent Serial (2014), it analyses its ability to expose the issue of gender violence in the Irish context, where it is set, and beyond.

Women with albinism in sub-Saharan Africa are among the most vulnerable members of their societies. However, the impact of gender-based violence on women with albinism has received little critical attention, and the same is true of its cultural representation. This chapter focuses on the work of two women writers from South Africa and Zimbabwe who have produced innovative works of fiction that explore the impact of gender-based violence on women with albinism. Meg Vandermerwe’s Zebra Crossing (2013) and Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory (2015) portray forms of gender-based violence, which range from verbal and psychological abuse and humiliation, to physical harm. While the selected novels highlight the realities confronted by many people with albinism in Southern African contexts, they are also a powerful expression of the need for political action to address the particular challenges faced by women with albinism and the wider social issues that shape their experiences. This chapter examines the narrative strategies through which Vandermerwe and Gappah explore the multiple forms of gender-based violence their protagonists are faced with, and underscores the counter-discourses they present.

During the Bosnian War (1992–1995), mass rapes were used as an instrument of ethnic cleansing and received extensive local and transnational media coverage. The paper examines transnational feminist art interventions that strive to give voice to rape survivors and to contest the dominant local and international media representations of women victims of violence, namely Šejla Kamerić’s poster and art installation Bosnian Girl, Eve Ensler’s play Necessary Targets, and Jasmila Žbanić’s fiction films Grbavica and For Those Who Can Tell No Tales. These interventions touch upon a variety of ethical issues, such as the power imbalances between Western and local actors, the risk of reproducing discursive victimization and ethnic essentialism, and the contested interpretations of rape as an instrument of genocide or as an expression of universal patriarchy.

The chapter focuses on the feminist protest cycle against gender violence in Spain between 1997 and 2019 through a selection of case studies. It argues that these protests and their challenging of silenced stories are deeply rooted in Spain’s historical, socio-political and cultural context. Abolishing women’s rights was one of the cornerstones of Francoism and gendered violence was used systematically against left-wing women during Spain’s Civil War (1936–39) and the early years of the Franco dictatorship (1939–75). The chapter analyses the strategies employed by women’s rights activists by drawing on Rancière’s notion of ‘dissensus’ and mobilising Keck and Sikkink’s scholarship on transnational activism network; it contends that performance protests expose and challenge those cultural, social, and political norms and power relations that often remain invisible in a society.

This chapter revisits the issue of media representation of gender-based violence with a focus on social media on the Istanbul Convention in Turkey. After summarizing the similar anti-gender debates and policies throughout the world, the chapter first reviews the research literature on gender, violence, and the media. Then, the historical context of the Istanbul Convention in Turkey is summarized. The analysis of Twitter reveals that a wide coalition of feminists, the LGBTQI movement, leftists, and social democrats defend the right to live while pro-AKP and pro-Erdoğan Islamist populists frame the issue as a crisis of family and traditional values with the conspiracy about the West. After discussing the research findings, the chapter ends by listing the future challenges.

El Tendedero is a living work of art where women who encounter it can hang their testimonies of the different forms of violence they have suffered during their lives on Mexican pink papers. Throughout this chapter we will see how this performative installation by Mexican visual artist Mónica Mayer was conceived, as well as its transcendence in the feminist art movements of the twenty-first century. First, the context in which the work was born is presented: during the 1970s, an incipient second-wave feminist movement organized its first demands in the public space and most of these actions acquired a performative character. Monica Mayer begins her feminist and artistic militancy in this scenario of ephemeral installations, street theater and political proposals that stood out for their innovation compared to other mobilizations of the traditional left. In a second moment, we will see how the first two Tendederos were linked to Mexican conceptual art on the one hand and, on the other, to the proposals against rape and gender-based violence carried out by the American feminist artists who were formed, together with Mayer, at the Woman’s Bulding in Los Angeles. We will then look at the various “reactivations” of El Tendedero in different countries and their adaptations. Finally, we will analyze the aesthetic-political strategies developed by El Tendedero: the collection of a multiplicity of testimonies that link the spectator with the material reality of gender-based violence and the use of El Tendedero as a living archive that, in each new reactivation, collects the feelings of women regarding gender-based violence in a specific context. We will conclude by pointing out that the transcendence of El Tendedero lies in the fact that the diverse aesthetic strategies it employed condense a large amount of historical and artistic elements that were inseparable from its political history.

This chapter analyses the 2019 music video, ‘Sinca Misa’, by queer feminist hip-hop duo, Krudxs Cubensi, which provides an innovative example of both the dynamic activism that resists sexist abuse, and the resulting mediatic resources. Taking a decolonial approach, I apply theories such as erotic agency, compulsory heterosexuality, and disidentification to show that the violence implicit in gendered policing of bodies in public space reinforces the same system that apologizes for more extreme forms of violence. By considering the specificity of the Cuban context and Lxs Krudxs’ subjectivity as non-binary, I map the subversive potential of this cultural product by combining analyses of lyrics, movement, music, and visual production, asserting that an ethical conversation around gender-based violence must include trans narratives.