Safe distances and unbearable closeness: cliché representations of violence against women in Canada

ABSTRACT

This article analyses two visual representations of highly publicized cases of violence against women in Canada by drawing on innovative bridging of Gramsci’s hegemonic common sense and Deleuze’s cliché. I argue that as elements in the representational assemblage surrounding these cases, both cultural productions contributed to the construction of such acts of gendered violence as national events.

Both images exploit the capacity of cliché to move images towards meaning and to move the audience into and out of affective proximity with those being represented. The first case study, a series of paintings by Pamela Masik entitled The Forgotten, fails to close the distance between the viewer and the marginalized women depicted. By contrast, the effect of cliché in the second case study, an episode of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s series, The Fifth Estate, is to create subjective distances, reinstating dominant common sense about the boundaries between strangers and neighbours and upholding the sanctity of the community. I highlight these images to demonstrate the role of cliché in conditioning and drastically limiting our ethical and political responses to violence against women. I conclude by attempting to add friction to the slippery surface of cliché, expanding the moments where representation fails. My contention is that spending more time in zones of incomprehension creates the potential for counterhegemonic memory-images to take hold.

KEYWORDS:

• cliché
• violence against women
• cultural representations
• Canada

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. While Masik painted 69 portraits and repeatedly states this as the number of women who went missing from the DTES, in fact the number is less clear. While four of the women on the missing women’s poster were confirmed dead of ‘natural causes’, one woman was found alive. Curiously, this woman remains as part of The Forgotten. Masik justifies this inclusion on her website, stating, ‘Over the year’s [sic], some women removed off the poster,/ But I stuck with the original number./ These women are still gone’. I agree more with Marlene George, the Chair of the Missing Women’s Memorial March, who stated the following in an interview: ‘for some reason, Pamela still chose to keep their five images as [part of] her 69 portraits. I don’t know why. But did she ask the living women if it was okay to paint them as if they were deceased? I don’t know. I’d be pretty upset (as quoted in Parkatti 2011, 2)’.

2. Following the work of Amber Dean (2015), who compelling links the violent disappearance of so many Indigenous women with the state-sponsored violence in Argentina, I use the term ‘disappeared’ to refer to the many women abducted and murdered across Canada. As opposed to the more common ‘missing’, ‘disappeared’ conveys action on the part of a (male) perpetrator. By contrast, the term ‘missing’ implies that the women are responsible for their own disappearance (as was implied by Vancouver police when the women were first reporting missing) or simply vanished into thin air.

3. The topic for the 24 October 2010 episode of the weekly call-in show Cross Country Checkup was ‘What’s Your Reaction to the Colonel Williams Case?’. On this episode, a number of women called in from across the country to share their fright, sadness and disgust about both Williams’ violence and the media coverage of the criminal trial. I was struck by the level of embodied terror the women callers reported. This fear moved women, causing them to take what they felt were preventive measures against intrusions into their home.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarships].

Notes on contributors

Caitlin Janzen

Caitlin Janzen is a PhD candidate in sociology at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her doctoral research focuses on the role of cinematic perception and identification in women’s psychic responses to representations of violence against other(ed) women. Janzen has published in Hypatia, Violence Against Women and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society and is co-editor with Donna Jeffery and Kristin Smith, of Unravelling Encounters: Ethics, Knowledge, and Resistance under Neoliberalism (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015).