PLEASURES OF VIOLENCE International Conference 2019
March 7, 2019 - March 8, 2019 10:00am to 7:00pm Headington Campus - Room AB115a Film Studies & Digital Media Production Twitter: @PoFviolence #PoFviolence
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS - MARCH 7TH Headingon (Gypsy Lane - Room AB115a (Abercrombie Building)
09:30 AM Registration/Coffee, Tea and Biscuits 09:50 AM Welcome/Introductory Remarks 10 - 11:30 AM Getting Off or Getting Even Chair: Dr Paolo Russo From Grift to Mass Murder: Incel Violence and the Failure of Neoliberalism’s Confidence Games Prof. Sarah Banet-Weiser (London School of Economics, UK) and Jack Z. Bratich (Rutgers University, USA) Castrating the Woman: Misogyny on Reddit Dr. Jacob Johanssen (University of Westminster, UK) Scums, Dominas and Suckers Dr. Nathalie Lugan (Université Paris 13 Sorbonne Cité, France) COFFEE BREAK 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Colonial Disturbances Chair: Dr James Cateridge Neo-Colonial Violence, Julia Tinneny (Bard College, USA) (Post)colonial and (Post)Digital Violence on the University Campus, Simon Ridley (Université de Paris Nanterre, France) 12:45 - 1:45 PM Lunch
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS - MARCH 7TH Headingon (Gypsy Lane - Room AB115a (Abercrombie Building)
1:45 - 3:15 PM - Technologies of Terror Chair: Dr Antonia Mackay Terrorism in the Net: A Comparison of Confessional Videos of Islamic Terrorist Organizations Prof. Dr. Ralf Spiller, Marco Inderhees, Dan Stoschek, (University of Applied Sciences, Köln, Germany) Moral Violence and the Pleasure of Being Right Leticia Matheus (State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) Putting Women Back in their Place: Reflections around sexist hate speech and slut shaming on Italian social media Elisa Giomi (Roma Tre University), Francesca Dragotto, (University of Roma ‘Tor Vergata’) and Sonia Melchiorre (University of Tuscia, Italy) COFFEE BREAK 3:30 - 4:30 PM - Violently Happy: Fetish, Fantasy & Not-So-Guilty Pleasures Chair: Dr Diego Semerene Viral violence: meanings of HIV in the bugchasing groups online Jaime García-Iglesias (University of Manchester, UK) Pornography: Debate on Violence and Domination Raquel Pereira (University of Minho, Portugal) Keynote 4:45 - 6:15pm: CLC.1.12 (Clerici Building) Tentacles, Demons, and Rape: The Allure of Extremity in Animated Pornography Prof. Susanna Paasonen (University of Turku, Finland) Chair: Dr Diego Semerene Conference Dinner Screening
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS - MARCH 8TH Headingon (Gypsy Lane - Room AB115a (Abercrombie Building)
9:45 - 11:15 AM - Risking Resistance Chair: John Twycross The perceived benefits and risks to the well-being of women who publicly exposed sexual victimization on social media: the day after the #MeToo Dr Keren Gueta (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) "#Nofem, #Nofat, #Noblack, #Noasian" Hashtags on Grindr and Preferences as a Form of Violence Ali Atakay (University of Paris 8 Vincennes Saint Denis, France) The Affective Dynamics of Online Shaming and Liberal Moral Outrage Orsolya Bajusz (Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary) COFFEE BREAK 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM - Televisual Violence Chair: Lindsay Steenberg Death becomes her? Post-mortem dressage in the roles of forensic pathologists, Samantha Ryan and Nikki Alexander in British television crime series ‘Silent Witness’ Rachel Velody (University of Bristol, UK) ‘Man of any size lays hands on me, he’s gonna bleed out in under a minute’. The politics of representation of gendered violence in contemporary TV crime series Elisa Giomi (Roma Tre University, Italy) 12:30 - 1:30 PM - Lunch
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS - MARCH 8TH Headingon (Gypsy Lane - Room AB115a (Abercrombie Building)
1:30 - 2:30 PM - Cinematic Violence Chair: Daniela Treveri Gennari Studying Hollywood Neocolonial Violence through the Orientalist Discourse Abderrahmene Karim Bourenane (Le Mans University, France) Toward the antihero theory: Rendering violence and transgressivity in popular fiction as justified and enjoyable Dr. Igor Prusa (Metropolitan University Prague, Czech Republic) COFFEE BREAK 2:45 - 3:45 PM - Video Violence Chair: Maya Nedyalkova ‘Kiss me with your fist, it’s alright’: Deconstructing the Pleasures of Martial Arts Violence Prof. Paul Bowman, (Cardiff University, UK) Representation of violence in M.I.A.´s music video Born Free Dr. Anna Arnman, (Malmö University, Sweden) Keynote 4 - 5:30pm: JHB308 (Kennedy Room) “Fuck politeness”: A Feminist Account of True Crime in the Digital Streaming Era Dr. Tanya Horeck (Anglia Ruskin University, UK) Chair: Dr Lindsay Steenberg Drinks
PLEASURES OF VIOLENCE ABSTRACTS International Conference 2019
FROM GRIFT TO MASS MURDER: INCEL VIOLENCE AND THE FAILURE OF NEOLIBERALISM’S CONFIDENCE GAMES Prof. Sarah Banet-Weiser (London School of Economics, UK) and Jack Z. Bratich (Rutgers University, USA) In 2007, the cable channel VH1 aired The Pick Up Artist, a reality program featuring a group of men who had difficulties connecting romantically with women. The contestants were mentored by a “master” Pick Up Artist named Mystery, whose perspective was simple: learn the requisite techniques of seduction and control and you will be able to have sex with any woman you want. Just over a decade later, Alek Minassian killed 10 people in Toronto when he drove a van into pedestrians. Apparently, minutes before his attack, he posted a message on Facebook: “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” In the decade between 2007 and 2018, the pick-up artist community, with men such as Mystery working as “gurus” to teach online communities of heterosexual men to seduce women, has given way to a different online community, that of “incels,” who create homo-social bonds over their inability to become a pick-up artist. In this article, we offer a conjunctural analysis of this shift, and argue that this decade represents a decline, or even a failure, of neoliberalism’s ability to secure subjects within its political rationality. The gendered dimension of that failure manifests in the misogynistic pleasures of networked trolling, resulting in ordinary and spectacular violence against women. We argue that neoliberalism cannot cope with its failures, especially its promises of self-confidence. Confidence is exposed in these failures as confidence games, which are then rerouted through masculine rage and violence via the restorative fantasies of patriarchal subjectivity.
Jack Bratich is Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture, and the co-editor of Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality. Sarah Banet-Weiser is Professor in the Media and Communications Department at the London School of Economics. She is the author of Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture, and the forthcoming Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny.
CASTRATING THE WOMAN: MISOGYNY ON REDDIT Dr. Jacob Johanssen (University of Westminster, UK) This talk is based on preliminary data analysis from a research project on online misogyny on social media. I will focus on the Incel community. It consists of men who refer to themselves as ’involuntary celibate’, (or incel), because they have not engaged in romantic or sexual encounters for some time (or never in some cases). I present some exemplary discourses from a Reddit forum by drawing on Sigmund Freud as well as Klaus Theweleit’s two volumes Male Fantasies. He analysed the male fantasies of the Freikorps soldiers during the Weimar Republic and what they thought of women and fe/male bodies. Many of the narratives by Incels are about naming women as sluts who are only interested in being with good looking men. Consequently, the users resort to symbolically castrating and destroying such women. This gives them a sense of agency and pleasure over their own (libidinal) frustration. However, at the same time there are many narratives that show self-pity and a kind of self-destruction. Users describe how ugly they are, detail mental health conditions, and a general hatred of the world. Yet, such narratives are often coupled with a description of how they would like to be. Many posts discuss genetics, specific bodily shortcomings, and how cosmetic surgery and exercise can help. What then are the pleasures at the heart of the Incel community? I argue that the male fantasies of the Incel community bear some resemblance to Theweleit’s theorisation of the proto-fascist male body. A male body that destroys women, while at the same time appropriating them. A male body that is obsessed about its own embodiment and signs of masculine strength.
Jacob Johanssen is Senior Lecturer in the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), University of Westminster (United Kingdom). His research interests include psychoanalysis and digital media, audience research, affect theories, digital labour, reality television, psychosocial studies, and critical theory.
SCUMS, DOMINAS AND SUCKERS Dr. Nathalie Lugan (Université Paris 13 Sorbonne Cité, France) In this panel, I will describe a new practice: Financial Slavery on Facebook. This is a form of virtual domination, where men take pleasure in satisfying women financially. This practice is criticized by BDSM members for its dimension of financial incentive. Practiced by young women who often come from the working classes and/or belong to specific racialized groups, it reveals the intersection of heterosexual sexuality with hierarchies of class and race. There is an active current debate around a new racialized figure of women stigmatized as whores: Scum’s Dominas. We will frame our analysis using the sociological approach of Green’s “sexual fields” (2008c) which links the situational negotiations of Goffman to the presentation of one’s self in combination with Bourdieu’s model of routine practices in order to propose a set of tools to identify the structures of collective sexual life. Using online ethnographic studies and qualitative interviews conducted in France, the presentation will reveal how the ideal of the white/bourgeois dominatrix is constructed thus effectively disqualifying women of other races by stigmatizing them as whores (Pheterson). First, an interview with a submissive man will show how hatred and guilt arise from colonization by a masculinity torn between the hegemonic ideal (Connell) and its minority status. In conclusion, I will analyze the sexual fantasy of being «victimized» as an avatar of neoliberalism. Nathalie Lugand has a doctorate in social psychology and is a member of the UTRPP (transversal unity of psychogenesis and psychopathology) at the University Paris 13, Sorbonne cité. She defended her thesis entitled Female domination in heterosexual BDSM sexuality in November 2017. Her axes of research focus on the questions of sexuality, gender, sex, and work. Her theoretical research addresses more specifically the gender analysis of the process involved in the relationship between creativity, work, sexuality, and mental health. Her empirical researches refer particularly to BDSM sexualities, sex work, and sexual harassment. She is now working on a new project which seeks to understand how to make the various interventions of organizations and companies in the support of victims of sexual harassment in the workplace more effective.
NEO-COLONIAL VIOLENCE Julia Tinneny (Bard College, USA) This research looks at how colonialism and neo-colonialism affected and affects the production of visual images depicting Black femininity and sexuality. Specifically, this project focuses on the distinctions of British and French styles of colonialism, using selected cultural analysis case studies of popular culture magazines, film, and photography in order to gauge different manifestations of the respective colonial empires in the reception and projection of the African woman’s body. This builds on the work of critics like Richard Dyer, who wrote of the racial imagery depicted in the film the 1950s British imperial war film, Simba, a film that is also analyzed in these case studies, which took place in East Africa. My research expands on Dyer’s to consider representations of Black sexuality as a site that depicts further subjugation in the colonial era. For example, within Simba and films produced of the same era of British films, Black women are virtually absent or are hypersexualized in violent settings when present. However, representations of Black women in French colonial and post-colonial popular media appears differently. How can this be explained? The French mission to civilize, for example, used advertisements and literature to propagate assimilationist ideology towards colonial subjects in Senegal made for a post-colonial French presence that encouraged behavior and physical modifications onto African women in the former empire. Within this examination, I also analyze Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire de to consider the issues he recognized and resisted with regard to gender and labor in postcolonial Senegal. How have these issues transformed over time, where are they situated contemporarily? The final leg of this research takes considers contemporary artists like Zanele Muholi, whose projects in South Africa work to queer the photo through playing with notions of the gaze and subjectivity. This exploration critically takes into account Muholi’s reception among Western audience, which I argue falls into neocolonialism of a new world order, one that holds sentiments of the French mission to civilize but one that has transformed to work towards transnational ideas of human rights and international development, led by NGOs. Among the theorists cited in this research are Richard Dyer, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Laura Mulvey, LH Stallings, Wendy Webster and Andrew van der Viles.
Julia Tinneny is a recent graduate of Bard College (BA), where she studied Global & International Studies with concentrations in Africana Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies. She has worked at organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Independent Filmmaker Project, and the Bard Prison Initiative. Tinneny received the Davis Project for Peace Prize in 2016 and was a Global Citizen Year Fellow from 2013-2014, while also selected as a Nike Foundation Girl Effect Champion. She currently works for Bard’s Global & International Affairs Program as Student Affairs Coordinator.
(POST)COLONIAL AND (POST)DIGITAL VIOLENCE ON THE UNIVERSITY CAMPUS Simon Ridley (Université de Paris Nanterre, France) The whole word was in shock after the Charlottesville riot saw clashes between two opposing violent movements coined “alt-right” and “antifa” that left one counter-protestor dead. Through a genealogical approach mixed with ethnographic research within these two movements in France and the USA, I wish to shed some light on new digital behaviors as well as long standing attitudes – of classism, racism and sexism – ingrained within the institution. It is important to trace the history of these two opposing factions from the campus clashes in the 1960s to the culture wars of the 1980s and the rise of a culture of cruelty (Giroux) that has been empowered by digital networks. The university campus has long been an arena for various types of violence ranging from everyday organized forgetting, to mass strikes and eventual riots. Furthermore, the university is both a disputed territory and a stage for the expression of violent speech and acts. One of the key debates has been that of freedom of expression in the context of a heightened market university. I shall use the Berkeley “free speech wars” as an example of how violent movements are using digital tools to flip the script and use colonial aphasia (Stoler) to further the agenda of conspiracy theorists that thrive in a (post)modern environment that has participated in the dislocation of theory and practice. Particular attention shall be given to violence portrayed as humor, or performance art. I wish to open discussions on academic anxieties in the world of (post)colonial and (post)digital mob behavior, with very real dangers to academic freedom and scholars that go against the grain. Here, the sharing of experiences of academia in a collaborative autoethnographic approach that seeks to overcome the (post)colonial aphasia on campuses may be a step towards the fight and/or repair of the violence on campuses by the exercise of simple observation applying more ethics not only to our theory but also to our practices.
Simon Ridley is a sociologist at the Université Paris Nanterre. His dissertation, focused on free speech, examines the history of two student movements (the Free Speech Movement and the Mouvement du 22 mars) with a multi-sited ethnographic approach of student movements today. He teaches history of sociology at the Université Paris Nanterre and Cultural Studies at the Nouveau Collège d’Études Politiques. He is also vice-president of the Cité des Mémoires Étudiantes. He will publish a chapter in the forthcoming book When Students Protest, as well as an article in Terrains. He is also writing a book on the alt-right.
TERRORISM IN THE NET: A COMPARISON OF CONFESSIONAL VIDEOS OF ISLAMIC TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS
Prof. Dr. Ralf Spiller, Marco Inderhees, Dan Stoschek, (University of Applied Sciences, KĂśln, Germany) Terrorists, whether of political, religious or other kind of motivation, depend on the media. Because only the reporting of an event or the processing of the content, which is published by the organizations, allows the motivation and the message to reach the masses (Christoph, 2015, 147-148). Â And only when the public is informed by the media coverage of the motives, the behavior becomes meaningful and becomes "from mere occurrence to an event." (Christoph, 2015, 148). Comparing the results of the analysis of the three confessional videos, one topic seems to stand out: The justification of the crime and the call for the jihad. However, the directly targeted audience is different in each video. It can be stated that the terror organizations pursue different goals through the videos. The organizations try to assert the legitimacy of their actions and make demands on their opponents. It should be emphasized that the legitimacy in each video is formulated in such a way that the act of the terrorists is presented as a reactive act. In addition the videos contain threats for further attacks, should the demands not be met. The videos are also a kind of self-expression. The terrorist organizations try to position themselves in the jihad so that they are in the role of the oppressed. For this reason, they usually describe who they are and for what final goal they fight for. Via this positioning, they try to convince potential supporters to join or otherwise promote the organization (for example through financial donations). Parallels can be seen in the image structure of the three confessional videos. The main character of the video is a representative of the organization itself. He is in the visual center of the video and talks directly to the viewer. In order to counteract the success of the terrorists the media would have to refrain from exploiting the material produced by terrorists. As a result, only the physical violence would be left over from the attack itself and the communicative goals of the terrorist organization would not be met. Stoschek, Dan, B.A., studied media management from 2013 to 2016 at the Macromedia University for Applied Sciences in Cologne (Germany). He then joined one of the biggest public relations agencies in Germany, Achtung Kommunikation!. Inderhees, Marco, B.A., M.A., studied media management from 2012 to 2015 at the Macromedia University for Applied Sciences in Cologne (Germany). He then completed a master's degree in media and communication management at the same university. He is now a research assistant in the Media Faculty working on his Ph. D. thesis on co-creation in Social Media. Spiller, Ralf, PhD, Prof. for Media and Communication Management, Head of the Macromedia Graduate School at Cologne campus, Germany. Studies of law and political science in Constance, Salamanca and Freiburg. PhD in political science. After graduating from the Georg von Holtzbrinck School of Economic Journalism, editor at Germany`s biggest financial newspaper. Later he joined the Practice Group Telecommunication Media & Entertainment of the international consulting firm Capgemini before complementing the Macromedia faculty. Research interests: digital media, online journalism, corporate communications and negotiation management.
MORAL VIOLENCE AND THE PLEASURE OF BEING RIGHT Leticia Matheus (State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) This paper analyses a sample of comments from YouTube videos about lynch mobs in Brazil in order to understand the kind of reasonableness the audience attributes to them and how the attitudes of the perpetrators are praised. The aim is to comprehend the meaning of the recent increase in the consumption of lynching videos spread through social media. The argument begins with an analysis of the recently launched documentary produced by the Brazilian TV channel Futura, “A Primeira Pedra” (First Stone, 2018, 56’), which discusses the perception of a wave of lynching mobs as well as tells the story of some of their survivors. Later, the article compares the film’s approach with the results that were found on YouTube. This intertextual web of discourses is observed through a semantic framework analysis and discussed from a theoretical point of view concerning notions of hatred and resentment. The commentators of the videos are biased by a far-right political speech and they claim the right of committing such a violence as morally acceptable. Although there is no official register of this type of crime in Brazil, the country is thought to have one of the highest rates of lynching cases in the world. In December 2016, the British newspaper The Guardian stated there was a lynching epidemic in Brazil. Far from the spotlight of the newspapers, almost daily there is a new case circulating in the underworld of social media, outnumbering 22 thousand results on YouTube during this research. However, it is not possible to say whether this crime rate has been boosted or not. The fact is that, by now, the audience can witness the crime and, thus, take part of the mob at a distance. What does sharing these videos mean? Does it always signal outrage or would the audience be in fact assuming a moral duty to punish by watching? One should remember that this phenomenon comes about in a period in which Brazil has elected to the Presidency an extremefar-right populist candidate whose campaign slogan was “a good thief is a dead thief” and who proposed an agenda that included bills to harden the penal code, loosen gun ownership rules, and criminalise Human Rights advocacy.
Leticia Matheus is a former journalist, PhD in Communication Studies, Leticia C. Matheus is an adjunct professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ-Brazil), member of the Postgraduate Programme in Communication Studies, where she coordinates the Centre for Hate Studies (NEO).
PUTTING WOMEN BACK IN THEIR PLACE: REFLECTIONS AROUND SEXIST HATE SPEECH AND SLUT SHAMING ON ITALIAN SOCIAL MEDIA Elisa Giomi (Roma Tre University), Francesca Dragotto, (University of Roma ‘Tor Vergata’) and Sonia Melchiorre (University of Tuscia, Italy) Compared to racist and ethnicist discourses, sexist discourses as hate speech are relatively underinvestigated (Lilian 2007). This is partly due to the tendency to minimize accusations of sexism (Worth et al. 2016) and to reframe misogyny as ‘acceptable’ by constructing it as a sort of humour (Drakett, Rikett 2018). Such a tendency, even though it is spread all over the place, is particularly strong in Italy as it colludes with ‘anti-politically correctness’ rhetoric, which dismisses accusations of sexism as moralism or attempts to restrict freedom of speech. We decided to focus on slut-shaming, one of the most virulent forms of hate speech, which has always existed but boosted by social media, becoming a stable ingredient of today’s rape culture (Phipps et al. 2018). We propose to consider the online slut-shaming as a form of ‘technologyfacilitated sexual violence’, where digital technologies are used to facilitate both virtual and face-to-face sexually based harms (Henry, Powell 2018). According to feminist analysis of sexual violence, this would be a matter of power rather than sex (Brownmiller 1975): sex is the weapon, not the motive (Vachss 1993). The domination and the annihilation of women is the ultimate goal. We believe that such analysis applies to slutshaming, a practice of sexual violence, an act of power, especially when performed on-line. We contend that slut-shaming pleasure consists of ‘putting women back in their place’: besides humbling women, slut-shaming is meant to remind them they are women, whose primary function is providing sex. We have tested this research hypothesis by focusing on the Italian reception of the MeToo campaign, triggered by Asia Argento’s denunciation. 830 tweets and retweets produced in five months have been examined by means of a quanti-qualitative methodology and by web scraping (R packaging), in order to individuate the most widespread interpretative keys and to reconstruct the underlying narratives. Francesca Dragotto is Associate Professor of Linguistics at University of Roma ‘Tor Vergata’. Her vast field of interest includes semantics, lexicon, and pragmatics, both synchronic and diachronic. In recent years, her interests have been focusing on text analysis, considered as a cognitive, cultural and social whole, where each speaker re-builds their representation of the world and the social roles and norms interacting in its context. She has written more than 80 papers and books, and she contributes as author or editor to several blogs and sites finalized to the dissemination of linguistics and linguistic culture. Elisa Giomi is Associate professor at Roma Tre University, where she teaches Sociology of Communication and Advertising. She also teaches Media in a double degree in Cultural Leadership with Groningen University. She is member of the editorial board of AG. AboutGender-International Journal of Gender Studies and she has coordinated several international research projects in the field of women and the media. Elisa’s interests focus on gender and the media, with particular reference to the representation of gendered violence in popular culture. Elisa has authored and co-authored books, chapters included in internationally-circulated collections and articles that have appeared in either national and international peer-reviewed journals. Mrs Sonia Maria Melchiorre, National Habilitation as Associate Professor in English Language/Literature; Researcher at the University of Tuscia; Most recent works: Genius Prevails and Wits Begin to Shine. Forgotten British Women Writers of the Eighteenth Century; “Weirdly.Wired.Women. The Language of Female Experts in Recent Television Crime Series”; “Watch Your Language! Love Speech and Lesbian Investigators in Supergirl and Los Hombres de Paco”; “Dubbed and Mainstreamed in English. Performing Language in Two Cinematic Portrayals of Queen Christina of Sweden; “As public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation: food and the construction of gender identity in contemporary advertising”.
VIRAL VIOLENCE: MEANINGS OF HIV IN THE BUGCHASING GROUPS ONLINE Jaime García-Iglesias (University of Manchester, UK)
Bugchasing, the fetishization of HIV infection, has been the focus of much academic research (e.g. Dean 2009). Bugchasers contribute abundantly to social media (Twitter, Tumblr, forums, chats, etc.). Their online interactions have been considered by researchers as evidencing an underlying narrative of self-harm, abuse, and sex addiction to the bugchasing groups (e.g. Moskowitz and Roloff 2007). This reading is sustained by frequent visual imagery depicting rough, unprotected sex, non-consensual sex, BDSM and fisting, among others (Lee 2014). However, no research has been conducted in how users themselves consume these materials, interpret them and negotiate their meanings. This paper explores how bugchasers engage with these materials through a lens of fantasy and playfulness (see Dean 2015, Paasonen 2018). The product of twenty in-depth interviews with self-identified bugchasers, this presentation showcases several users’ personal narratives of their use of Twitter and other online sites to consume and create pornographic materials. In particular, I explore how these users critically engage with these materials, their awareness of its constructed character and their views of the commercial and material politics that underlie their interactions online. These personal narratives explicit the potential of ‘fantasy’ as a way of conceptualizing these online engagements with violent materials. In so doing, I complicate simplistic assumptions of mindless consumption and instead propose a model where online violence is produced and consumed in nuanced, fluid and, at times, paradoxical ways. Overall, this paper evidences the value of empirical engagements alongside media analyses to better comprehend the role violence plays in online spaces and its relationship to sexual pleasures.
Jaime García-Iglesias is a PhD candidate in Sociology at The University of Manchester. His research focuses on exploring bugchasers’ emotional relationships to their fetishes and their use of social media. He has a BA in English from the University of Oviedo (Spain) and an MA in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies from the University of Nottingham. He has published on masculinities, HIV history, and internet use by gay men. Other areas of interest are autoethnography, sexual ethnography and art history.
PORNOGRAPHY: DEBATE ON VIOLENCE AND DOMINATION Raquel Pereira (University of Minho, Portugal) Pornography is nowadays widely consumed by people of different ages, occupations, and social-economic backgrounds, as it so is easily accessible through the internet, tv, and even literature. Due to this, it seems pertinent to question the effects it could be having on those using it, and, consequently, if these effects should be relevant from an aesthetic and creative point of view. This paper will strive to defend that, despite the correlation between the use of pornography and sexual behaviours or expectations, as observed by Ana J. Bridges et al. in “Pornography and the Male Sexual Script: An Analysis of Consumption and Sexual Relations” (2014), the epistemic responsibility of distinction between fiction and reality doesn’t lie with the producer and, therefore, the production of pornographic material, particularly BDSM and other “hardcore” and fetish categories, shouldn’t be, at its core, shaped by possible misinterpretations or biases held by the consumer. To argue the latter point, I will be seeking support from philosophical texts such as “An Aesthetics of Transgressive Pornography” (NEWALL, Michael: 2012) and “On the Ethical Distinction Between Art and Pornography” (COOKE, Brandon: 2012). Furthermore, a comparison will be drawn between the ethical liability of Pornography and other forms of entertainment media, like video games and films. During this process, counterpoints to the position defended will also be addressed, as are those posed by, for example, anti-pornography feminist Catharine MacKinnon, as well as the Cristopher Bartel’s and Anna Cremaldi’s paper “It’s Just a Story: Pornography, Desire, and the Ethics of Fictive Imagining” (2017). Finally, some practical suggestions on how to approach the issues associated with this everchanging world of digital sexuality will be attempted.
Raquel Pereira has received her BA in Philosophy by the University of Minho (Braga, Portugal). Although she’s not presently in education, she plans on returning to the same university later on this year, to obtain a Master’s Degree in Political Philosophy.Her main interests are Philosophy of Art, specifically pornography’s relationship with art, as well as other topics within Applied Ethics and Political Philosophy.
THE PERCEIVED BENEFITS AND RISKS TO THE WELL-BEING OF WOMEN WHO PUBLICLY EXPOSED SEXUAL VICTIMIZATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA: THE DAY AFTER THE #METOO Dr. Keren Gueta (Bar-Ilan University, Israel)
In recent years, as access to social media and technology has increased, there has been a rise in awareness of sexual assault, driven by campaigns that encourage victims to publicize their experiences. As an example, during the #MeToo campaign, many women shared their stories through various media channels, such as Facebook and television. However, despite the importance of this social movement in generating global change in the awareness of sexual assault, research has not explored the perceived benefits and risks of public exposure of sexual assault for the victims. The proposed talk will present the findings of qualitative research based on in-depth interviews with 14 women aged 23-63 who shared their stories of sexual assault in various social media, such as television, movies, or personal posts. Analysis of the interviews revealed public exposure as a process of identity change, where strength stems from the exposure and a sense of meaning is generated by participation in social activism. However, the findings also revealed risks to the recovery process entailed in the public exposure of the sexual assault, specifically the mental and physical toll the process has on the participants due to feelings of regret and the need to cope with negative reactions to their experience and public exposure, such as criticism, blame or disbelief, and the threat of legal action against them. Thus, the results provide a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the perceived motivations, benefits, and challenges that victims of sexual assault might experience during public exposure of their victimization. Keren Gueta, (PhD.) is a Lecturer in the Department of Criminology at Bar-Ilan University. Her major areas of research are drug addiction among women, motherhood on the margins and gender differences in crime. In addition to her academic roles, Dr. Gueta is a clinical criminologist and worked for the Israeli prisoner rehabilitation authority. Major contributions: The Experience of Prisoners’ Parents: A Meta‐Synthesis of Qualitative Studies. Family Process. A qualitative study of barriers and facilitators in treating drug use among Israeli mothers: An intersectional perspective. Social Science & Medicine.
“#NOFEM, #NOFAT, #NOBLACK, #NOASIAN” HASHTAGS ON GRINDR AND PREFERENCES AS A FORM OF VIOLENCE
Ali Atakay (University of Paris 8 Vincennes Saint Denis, France)
This paper explores how certain stereotyped races and physical characteristics are preferred over others on the dating application, Grindr, within the discriminating economy of the colonial mentality. The paper recognizes the preference as a depiction of favoring one subject over another while excluding the non-preferred one. It also suggests that choosing a partner largely upon racial or physical factors has a long historical background within the exclusive colonial discourse. To what point colonial gaze upon racialised subjectivities orients subject’s desire? The use of discriminating syntax on Grindr in the form of hashtags reveals unconscious racial or physical discrimination. With the biased disposition towards certain races which cannot pass through hashtags, race becomes a repetitive gendered act which is reformulated on Grindr within the performative field. The hashtags on Grindr that seems to express preferences turns into a form of violence towards certain gendered races. Racialised desire and marginalised races influence the orientation of the sexual identities of subjects within that space. To what is the racialized subject exposed via such hashtags? A subject reformulates colonial discourse through the representation of identity on Grindr, and the proclivity of colonial gaze as a form of violence to the non-preferred other is inscribed as preferences in hashtags.
Ali Atakay is M.A. student in Gender Studies department at University of Paris 8 Vincennes Saint Denis. His research interest focuses on queer theory, digital cultures and the intersect of bodily orientation and sexuality on virtual space. Ali received a Bachelor of Arts in Translation Studies and Film Studies from the University of Boğaziçi.
THE AFFECTIVE DYNAMICS OF ONLINE SHAMING AND LIBERAL MORAL OUTRAGE Orsolya Bajusz (Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary) I look at instances of online shaming within a complex network of media hosting the interplay of various actors. My argument is that openly sadist trolls do only the 'dirty work', but the triggers are often through dehumanising discourses framed within moralist liberal agendas, wherein the subjects' otherness and moral inferiority is explained, as the subject is shown to deviate from liberal-bourgeois social norms. I look at the affective dynamics of such moral outrage, and within it the utilisation of displays of pity, hand wringing, fake compassion,  or the call for interventions such as psychotherapy and how these passive aggressive affects trigger further actors through the dehumanisation of their subject. I focus on mostly visual media and its commentary, photographs of subjects and the adjacent descriptions. Those framing and narrating such outrage do political work by relegating issues concerning difference and antagonisms to the moral domain (see postpolitics, Chantal Mouffe). I try to describe some of these discursive strategies. I conclude that the treatment of difference is the core issue- those outside the liberal consensus about social norms have their autonomy and humanity stripped away. Through this gesture  online shaming becomes a matter of stomping out "moral wrongness", so there is no need for remorse for those partaking and performing the codes of their own superiority. I draw comparisons with internet porn and military drills- as means of setting triggers and lowering thresholds.
Orsolya Bajusz lives and works in Budapest. She works with art collectives, and researches the political work done on affective and visual registers.
DEATH BECOMES HER? POST-MORTEM DRESSAGE IN THE ROLES OF FORENSIC PATHOLOGISTS, SAMANTHA RYAN AND NIKKI ALEXANDER IN BRITISH TELEVISION CRIME SERIES ‘SILENT WITNESS’ Rachel Velody (University of Bristol, UK)
As the longest running female-centric British television crime series ‘Silent Witness’ provides material ripe for textually analysing fashioning as part of the signifying processes of the forensic pathologist. In this paper, I contrast the first lead of the series Sam(antha) Ryan played by Amanda Burton (from 1996 to 2004) and the subsequent female lead Nikki Alexander played by Emilia Fox (2004 onwards). It is the tension between progressive and conservative visions within and between these two characters I want to consider. Shifts, for example, in the representation of (pathologist) uniforms from series to series, imbricate new realisms and arguably produce the intellect and objectivity associated with Sam and Nikki’s roles. By comparison, the onus on distinctive ‘fashion looks’, on body typologies of the two female pathologists and the performers status as television stars provides evidence perhaps of an ambiguity towards fictive representations on television in which women are both scientist and detective. To explore this tension, I adopt a crossdisciplinary approach, combining textual analysis, fashion and feminist studies to read the role of the female pathologist in this television crime drama.
Rachel Velody was for many years course leader for the Fashion Media degree programme at the London College of Fashion. Her areas of expertise concern genre and representation of the body within British and North American television drama. A recent article ‘The Career Woman and the Princess’, Fashioning Black-American Female identity in ‘Scandal’ (2012-17) is published in Meccsa’s 2018 Special Publication: ‘Exploring the intersections of fashion, film and media’. Rachel’s ongoing doctoral project in the department of Film and TV studies, University of Bristol, explores the fashioning of the female detective in contemporary British television crime drama.
‘MAN OF ANY SIZE LAYS HANDS ON ME, HE’S GONNA BLEED OUT IN UNDER A MINUTE’. THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION OF GENDERED VIOLENCE IN CONTEMPORARY TV CRIME SERIES Elisa Giomi (Roma Tre University, Italy) This paper is situated at the crossroad of Critical Television Studies and Feminist Media Studies and explores the representation of violence in popular female-led crime shows that have been produced in different countries over the last ten years. The shows considered here are Forbrydelsen/The Killing (Denmark, DR1, 20072012), The Fall (UK/Ireland, BBC, 2013-2016), Non Uccidere/Do not Kill (Italy, RAI3, 2015-2018) and True Detective 2 (USA, HBO, 2015). I contend that these programmes are paradigmatic of the new politics of representation of gendered violence which is increasingly found in contemporary ‘peak TV’ series (Lotz, 2018). Such novelty has its kernel in the relationship between violence and pleasure and concerns both male violence against women and female violence against men. All the programmes in the corpus, examined through discourse analysis, set themselves at a distance from the fetishising aesthetic (defined as ‘fleshography’, Pinedo 1997; ‘autoptic vision’, Tait 2006; ‘cadaverization’, Clarke Dillman 2014) that has been made pervasive in contemporary crime series as well as in most popular culture forms, by the speeding up of various media flows (Parikka 2015). In these series, specific formal devices are used in order to ‘deny’ scopophiliac pleasure, avoiding any exploitation of violence against women without sanitizing or worse, merely removing it (which would compromise the necessary visibility of gender violence as a public issue, Higgin, Silver 1991). The representation of the heroines’ violent acting is ground-breaking too: instead of aligning to that commonly found in liberal narratives of equality and female empowerment (Shepherd 2012), it appears to be moulded to the radical feminism perspective. Three out of four of the series rework the widely criticized ‘victimturned-avenger’ trope (Clover 1992) in a way that prevents the normalisation of female violence. At the same time, its discoursive and narrative framing enables a complex aesthetic experience: far from being a ‘guilty pleasure’ (O’Neill, Seal 2012), what is offered to the viewers potentially represents a weapon against rape culture and an experience of ‘physical feminism’ (De Welde 2012).
Elisa Giomi is Associate professor at Roma Tre University, where she teaches Sociology of Communication and Advertising. She also teaches Media in a double degree in Cultural Leadership with Groningen University. She is member of the editorial board of AG. AboutGender-International Journal of Gender Studies and she has coordinated several international research projects in the field of women and the media. Elisa’s interests focus on gender and the media, with particular reference to the representation of gendered violence in popular culture. Elisa has authored and co-authored books, chapters included in internationally-circulated collections and articles that have appeared in either national and international peer-reviewed journals.
STUDYING HOLLYWOOD NEOCOLONIAL VIOLENCE THROUGH THE ORIENTALIST DISCOURSE Abderrahmene Karim Bourenane (Le Mans University, France) While Appling Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory in cinema, ‘neocolonialism’ refers to an artistic and esthetic practice that has dominated Hollywood’s cinematographic productions to maintain Western supremacy since its creation. The discursive violent discourse that has “Othered” the Arabs for more than a century signifies the media’s use of colonial policies adopted to control people in the Middle East and North Africa and its continuity into a neocolonial discourse that aims at manipulating them by reducing them to a source of exotic violent pleasure. Cinematographic productions such as The Mummy (Alex Kurtzman, 2017), Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012), Taken 3 (Olivier Megaton, 2014), American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014) among others, appropriate the orientalist stereotypes into a violent neocolonial discourse that undergirds the oppression of Arabs under the pretext of Western superiority over the East. Recent series like Homeland (Howard Gordon et Alex Gansa et Gideon Raff, 2011), Arrow (Andrew Kreisberg et Greg Berlanti et Marc Guggenheim, 2012-today), Jack Ryan (Carlton Cuse Graham Roland, 2018) and American Odyssey (Peter Horton, Adam Armus, Kay Foster, 2015) convey the imagery of Western violence inflicted on the Orientals be they male or female- in the name of dislodging terrorism and fighting the war on terror. The principal aim of this paper is to highlight the use of the orientalist stereotypes as a neocolonial tool to justify the production of scenes of pleasurable violence and domination over the Middle Eastern population.
Abderrahmene BOURENANE a 2nd year Ph.D. candidate at Le Mans University – France-. Working actually on the Orientalist Discourse in the English speaking films. The Ph.D. title is The Orientalist Heritage in the Anglophone Cinema. Holding a Master and BA in English Language Literature and Civilization.
TOWARD THE ANTIHERO THEORY: RENDERING VIOLENCE AND TRANSGRESSIVITY IN POPULAR FICTION AS JUSTIFIED AND ENJOYABLE
Dr. Igor Prusa (Metropolitan University Prague, Czech Republic) This talk deals with popular anti-heroic archetypes. It differs from previous research, because by exploring narrative structures of anti-heroic fiction, it shows that essential parallels exist in transgressive heroes of both East and West. This is important since in recent decades we register general decline of “moral perfectionism“ (term by Stanley Cavell) in popular fiction at the expense of morally ambiguous, violent, transgressive-but-enjoyable heroes. These characters are often honorable and “culturally permitted” despite their antisocial inclinations, extralegal violence, or motivation by vendetta (e.g. Robin Hood versus Nezumi Kōzō, or Al Pacino in Godfather versus Kitano Takeshi in Brother). Various culture-specific heroic archetypes are analyzed (cowboy, samurai, yakuza, gangster, social bandit) as they appear in popular mainstream narratives. I will further argue that rendering a certain violent/transgressive behavior as enjoyable is realized via three main narrative mechanisms: 1) positioning of the character, and the perspective from which a narrative is developed, 2) motivation of the character (i.e. set of adequate reasons he behaves as he does), and 3) charisma, appearance and aura of the character/actor. Apart from offering an interdisciplinary methodological framework, this research represents a significant departure from Friedrich Nietzsche (i.e. the dichotomy of Dionysian versus Apollonian ideal of conduct) in order to illuminate the fascination by heroes that are located beyond the conventional categories of good and evil.
Igor Prusa is currently affiliated with the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (Oriental Institute) and teaches a course on Japanese Media Culture at Brno’s Masaryk University (Faculty of Arts). In 2010 Igor received his first PhD in Media Studies (Charles University of Prague) and in 2017 he defended his second dissertation titled Scandal, Ritual and Media in Postwar Japan at the University of Tokyo. Igor’s research interests include Japanese philology, media scandals, and fictional anti-heroism. Igor’s publications include Heroes Beyond Good and Evil: Theorizing Transgressivity in Japanese and Western Fiction (Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies 2016) and Megaspectacle and Celebrity Transgression in Japan: the 2009 Media Scandal of Sakai Noriko (Palgrave MacMillan 2012). Apart from his academic activities Igor Prusa is a music composer and guitarist.
‘KISS ME WITH YOUR FIST, IT’S ALRIGHT’: DECONSTRUCTING THE PLEASURES OF MARTIAL ARTS VIOLENCE Prof. Paul Bowman, (Cardiff University, UK)
This presentation will use one theoretical/philosophical approach and two media texts to set out and unpack the complex relations of pleasure and violence in martial arts fantasies, practices, performances and forms of consumption. Specifically, it will deconstruct the implications of the music video for The Wombats’ 2015 song ‘Be Your Shadow’ and the 2006 French Connection TV advert known as ‘Fashion versus Style’ using an analytical approach based in Derridean deconstruction. When viewed in terms of violence and pleasure, what is perhaps most remarkable about The Wombats’ text is that the video carries out a ‘double defusing’ of violence and sexuality: whilst the lyrics convey an abusive domestic relationship (organised by the refrain ‘kiss me with your fist, it’s alright; wrap your hands around my throat, I won’t mind’), the video translates this into the realms of wrestling. However, in doing so, it is forced to navigate what could easily appear to be an obsessive homosexual relation. It solves this by way of comedy. Conversely, the French Connection advert moves in exactly the opposite direction: two women fight with impressive martial choreography, one fights for Fashion, the other for Style. The violence is eroticised from the start. By the end, the women abandon the fight and transform it into sexual passion. There is an enormous amount to be unpacked here about the status and relations between the pleasures of violence, the violence of certain pleasures, and the negotiations of these fields in both media culture and the discourses of, in and around martial arts. This paper will touch on as much as space and time allows, informed by (and contributing to) current debates in media studies, cultural studies, gender studies and martial arts studies.
Paul Bowman is Professor of Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He is author of many books on cultural theory, film and popular culture, including studies of Derrida, Laclau, Žižek, Rancière, Rey Chow, and two books on Bruce Lee. Most recently, he has written Martial Arts Studies: Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries (2015) and Mythologies of Martial Arts (2017). He is founding co-editor of the journal Martial Arts Studies and editor of The Martial Arts Studies Reader (2018). His next book, Deconstructing Martial Arts, is forthcoming from Cardiff University Press. He is currently writing a book on martial arts in British media culture.
REPRESENTATION OF VIOLENCE IN M.I.A.´S MUSIC VIDEO BORN FREE Dr. Anna Arnman (Malmö University, Sweden)
In my paper I investigate representation of violence in music video and how graphic and brutal assaults are depicted and communicated in M.I.A.´s video to Born Free (Romain Gavras, 2010). Parts of the video are based on the extra-judicial killing of Tamil males by the Sri Lankan Army, filmed on mobile phones. It is a political video depicting how ginger boys and men are being brutally abducted and executed in the desert. It visualizes the consequences of oppression and the violence that could happen to anyone, if we were at the wrong place at the wrong time. The video was released online in 2010 and was immediately debated and discussed due to its explicit depiction of violence. The video´s portrayal of brutal military force was banned from YouTube in the US and UK. Music video has for decades been a controversial form of visual culture dismissed, as Diane Railton and Paul Watson write in the introduction to Music Video and the Politics of Representation, as the trash can of popular culture or the by-product of capitalist business practice (2011:1). Music video has primarily been studied as a promotional device, which has had a number of significant consequences regarding how it has been analyzed and conceptualized. The contemporary music video is very visible and accessible as a cultural expression depicting everything from gender issues to socio-political standpoints. Born Free is an example of the music video´s potential to be a powerful political tool reaching new audiences online, depicting violence in a realistic and explicit way.
Anna Arnman is a senior lecturer in Visual Communication at K3 (School of Arts and Communication) at Malmö University, Sweden. Arnman defended her doctoral thesis in Film Studies at Lund University on Clive Barker´s Hellraiser and the horror genre in 2005. She is a former editor-in-chief of Film International (Intellect) and a former board member of Lund International Fantastic Film Festival (LIFFF) part of the European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation (Melies.org). Her research is primarily concerned with the visual in horror and popular fiction.
RAPE, REVENGE AND BOLLYWOOD: THE JOURNEY AND CREATION OF A GENRE WITHOUT RETRIBUTION Tirna Chatterjee (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India) I would, in this paper, like to seek out the journey of the rape-revenge genre in the Hindi film industry from B films to mainstream and art cinema locating primarily the visual depiction of violence and the violence of the narrative which takes away the power of revenge from the victim through media archaeology. The attempt would be to trace the changing aesthetics of violence and the trajectory of its consumption. Following the global B-film trend of 1970s/80s, exploitation films, especially raperevenge films found their way into India with a twist. The global three part structure of the rape-revenge films is commonly typified by rape/torture of the female protagonist who survives and then exacts revenge on their perpetrators. Carol J. Clover in her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film praised the genre for changing traditional portrayal of gender roles in cinema as the victim transforms into the avenger. But as the genre is moulded into the terms of Bollywood the rape-revenge drama becomes a territory of the man to exact the revenge for the violence committed on women, who are reduced to nothing but a plot-point. Mithun Chakraborty emerged as the poster child for rape-revenge dramas up until the late 1990. And even in a post #MeToo moment the power to avenge the violation of a woman has been retained by the man in blockbuster hit Simba (2018) while the visual depiction of the violation has become more graphic and realistic. Cinema allows endless voyeuristic gratifications, multiplying further in the new media moment with clips featuring rapes from 80s B films, which have otherwise slipped into obscurity, circulating in different porn websites. The genre across the world has wriggled out of the B film aesthetic and has been implemented into the mainstream or art cinema by directors like Ingmar bergman, Quentin tarantino, Tom Ford and Gasper Noe but the exploitation of violence and violation of the female body have remained as the main plot device. Representation and realism add to the scope of how violence is prefigured into cinema, a gendered and sexualised violence under the moral terms of justifying it by revenge and denouncing scenes depicting forced sex as perverse but the imagery and its consumption plays into the tropes of the pleasure derived from voyeuristic consumption of violence exacted on a body.
I, Tirna Chatterjee am a research scholar in the department of Cinema Studies in the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. I did my MPhil dissertation on the status of cult in Bollywood Cinema from the angle of definition of cult, production reception and creation of cult across three techno-historical moments from the cinema going moment to the DVD-VCR/Television moment to the digital moment. The main area of interest for me is the broad philosophical scope of aesthetics through the discipline cinema and new media which are primarily intersubjective disciplines. With a background in Sociology, I opine that politics and aesthetics as mediums of thought are of quintessence to the process of research.
LOCATION
Oxford Brookes University Headington Campus Oxford OX3 0BP Room AB115a - First Floor Abercrombie Building. Keynotes held: CLC.1.12 - First Floor Clerici Building. JHB308 (Kennedy Room) - Third Floor John Henry Brookes Building. See Map Below: Abercrombie Building (Red) Clerici Building (Blue) Please follow the signs displayed around the Oxford Brookes University Campus.
PLEASURES OF VIOLENCE International Conference 2019