Provocative collection of essays designed to give students an understanding of media representations of women’s experience of violence and to educate a new generation to recognize and critique media images of women
Through the lens of feminist criminology, this volume examines the complex interrelationship of women, violence, and media presentations. The book is divided into three sections. The first, “Gendering Constructions,” lays the groundwork for the volume by examining the print media’s presentation of gendered violence, female killers on Law and Order, African American women in Hollywood films, and women in media, crime, and violence textbooks. The second section, “Debating the Issues,” explores aspects of femicide, including mass murder incidents, domestic violence in Bangladesh, and wartime sexual violence in reality and on television. The final section “Changing the Image,” focuses on efforts to replace masculine assumptions with constructive approaches to imagining women.
Designed for course adoption, Women, Violence, and the Media emphasizes the key themes and critical skills required for media literacy, and the volume offers guidelines for readers on conducting their own research.
Endorsements:
“This book offers a much needed documentation of the variety of ways that women and violence are framed in a broad range of both fictional and non-fictional media accounts. Women are analyzed as both the victims and perpetrators of violence through a gendered, raced, classed and global lens.”—Joanne Belknap, Sociology, University of Colorado at Boulder
“Crime stories tend to function as the morality plays of our modern era. Because of this, media coverage, particularly corporate media coverage, of criminalized and victimized women play central roles in the construction of some women as virtuous and others as venal. And because crime has become a code word for race in America, it is crucial to document, as this important collection does, the critical role that the media has played in the demonization of women offenders, particularly African American women and Latinas as hyper violent and masculinized. Likewise, the media tends to construct the “legitimate” victim in extremely narrow ways that often means that women who have survived horrific violence find themselves and their behavior on trial rather than finding any advocacy and support in the criminal justice system.”—Meda Chesney-Lind, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Click here for TABLE OF CONTENTS
|
|
DREW HUMPHRIES is Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice, Rutgers University–Camden and the author of Crack Mothers: Pregnancy, Drugs, and the Media (Ohio State University Press 1999).
|
