Race, gender, violence and media

Karen Herland

Yasmin Jiwani (Communications) arrived in Montreal from British Columbia in 2001. Watching events unfold post-9/11 helped her articulate the theme and title of her book, Discourses of Denial: Mediations of Race, Gender and Violence.

This March 8, International Women’s Day, she will launch the book’s paperback edition in the Loyola’s CJ atrium at 5 p.m.

“I really wanted to explore the everyday encounter, and the links between private forms of violence (like intimate violence), public violence and state-level violence,” Jiwani said. “I wanted to show how the media plays a role in circulating representations of violence, which then inform everyday thought and talk, legitimizing certain actions or inactions.”

Jiwani stresses that presenting violence in this way is challenging, “to confront the violence of racism necessitates a recognition of the links between that which we call ‘violence’ and that which we call ‘racism’ — the violations inherent in both.”

Jiwani studied psychology, sociology and communications in B.C., and spent some time as principal researcher and coordinator at the Feminist Research, Education, Development and Action Centre (FREDA), one of five Canadian centres devoted to analyzing violence against women and children. “I wanted to be able to combine my work at FREDA with other seemingly disparate events, and draw out the linkages.”

Discourses of Denial combines primary research with media representations of events. In one chapter, Jiwani researches how young women experience racism. “The girls were really savvy and had a language to describe their experience. What they didn’t have was any validation that what they experienced was really true.”

This research is juxtaposed with the media coverage of Reena Virk, a young South Asian teenager who was murdered by a group of teens in suburban Vancouver, and a horrific case of domestic violence in Vernon, B.C., involving an Indo-Canadian family.

Discussing these events and experiences, Jiwani returns over and over again to the ways in which gender, race and violence interlock, influence each other and in many ways, cannot be separated.

“I am interested in how bodies are valued and devalued and how racism itself becomes a way of communicating power – of differentiating those bodies that count against others who don’t,” Jiwani said. The book articulates how “both race and violence were culturalized in the Vernon case.”

Culture, she argues, constitutes a discourse of denial. Meanwhile, racism was completely erased in coverage of Virk’s murder even though the accused, the court and the media discussed her body in racialized terms.

Jiwani is very clear about how these issues affect her own life. “Race is a signifier. When it interlocks with gender, you have a different reading of the racialized and gendered body.”

She is all too aware that “when I walk outside on the road, no one knows I’m a university professor. In that place [in public], my body is coded as a woman of colour and this invokes a whole range of connotations which are anchored in a complex confluence of racism and sexism, not to mention a history of colonialism.”

The book is capped off with a chapter on gendering terror focusing on The Gazette’s coverage of race and gender, post-9/11.

“I was interested in exploring this because The Gazette portrays itself as a minority paper in a majority landscape, and thus its coverage of minoritized, racialized and gendered bodies becomes all the more revealing, especially in terms of how terror itself gets [presented].”