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GEC08
Looking Back: Memory, Time and Gender
PP 720
Femicide or Honour Crime? Gender and Ethnicity in the Media Representations of Male Violence Against Women in Italy (1997–2013)
A. Pogliano
1
1
Università del Piemonte Orientale, Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza e Scienze Politiche- Economiche e Sociali, Alessandria, Italy
In the second half of the 1990s and again in the first decade of the 2000s Italy experienced two media moral panic on violence against women, both having
migrant males as the“folk devils”(see Cohen 1980).The two waves of news were partially different in content, with the first wave in the 1997 concentrating
on sex crimes against Italian women committed in public spaces by Albanian migrants (see Maneri 2001), and the second wave, related both to sex crimes
in public spaces committed by Roma and Romanians in 2006 and 2007, and to domestic violence within Muslim families, from 2006 to 2010 (see: Giomi
and Tonello 2013; Pogliano 2014). These were years during which neo-nationalist and anti-immigrant forces, playing the moral entrepreneurs have created
an increasingly strong link between gendered violence and race/ethnicity within the public debate, in order to promote“Law & Order”agendas. Parallel to
these explosions of news coverage, was the usually low coverage of domestic violence within native Italian families and the absence of any“thematization”
of gendered violence. Gendered violence was only debated under the umbrella of the migratory issue. At the beginning of the second decade of the 2000s,
data show an inversion of the trend in media coverage about male violence against women, with a great increase of news about domestic violence within
“native families”and a decrease of news about violence against women committed by migrants. Notwithstanding this inversion – which is mostly related
to switch in public attention about migration from urban security to refugee problems, economic crisis, changes in governments and, last but not least,
the rise of the“feminicide debate”as a consequence of the 2011 UN CEDAW Report concerning Italy – two very different news stories are in play, depending
on whether the violence is committed by native Italians or by migrants/ethnic minority members. Despite a common topic (gendered violence), there still
is very rare contamination between the two news stories, one involving only natives and the other involving only migrants. This paper will analyse these
differences in the frame-building of news, discussing news sources, news images, and discourses employed to keep a symbolic burden clearly separating
these two news stories.The qualitative analysis is the occasion for looking closely at the intersection of gender and ethnicity in order to understand the ways
Italian media produced symbolic materials to reproduce cultural stereotypes about issues such as integration and social cohesion, and to strategically keep
culture in or out the“violence debate”. It means that, as a result of media production, the cultural framework at the core of the feminicide debate in the in‑
tellectual field of production tend to disappear in one story and to be key in the other, by taking an explicit ethnic/racial connotation.The paper’s conclusion
is that, in so doing, the Italian mainstreammedia influenced parliamentary debate about“feminicide”and silenced critical debates about a law (the 119/13
Italian law) which accord very little to prevention and focus primarily on deterrence to counter feminicide.
PP 721
Visibility Patterns of Age and Gender in the Media Buzz
M. Edstrom
1
1
University of Gothenburg, Journalism- Media & Communication, Gothenburg, Sweden
Age and gender are important visibility factors in the media. Other factors are class, elite status, ethnicity and whether the person belongs to the majority
population or not. This paper investigates visibility in the media buzz, the flow of mass media images surrounding us. Earlier studies indicate that youth
and youthfulness are important capitals, especially for women in the media. Older people are almost invisible, and what is more, regardless of gender.
The lack of voice and visibility of the growing numbers of elders limits both for the public debate and level knowledge about ageing. It also affects the elder
themselves, since their lived experiences and opinions are not heard. This can be interpreted as a lack of visibility, or with the word of Tuchman, a symbolic
annihilation (Tuchman 1978). The question is then if age and gender are reinforcing each other when it comes to visibility in the media. This paper spe‑
cifically address the intersections of age and gender, with a special focus on the representation of the older people in the media over the last 20 years in
Sweden. The empirical study investigates the dominant gendered images in Swedish mainstream media by analysing media content from 1994, 2004 and
2014. The main focus in the first study from 1994 was how age, class and ethnicity influenced the visibility of women and men (Edström & Jacobson 1994).
The study indicated that women and men were equally present in numbers, but their doings were distinctly different and often stereotyped. While men
could have many roles, both in the private and public sphere women were mostly private, young and engaged in their personal needs. The contemporary
study will build on the earlier study by exploring new data from media content 2004 and 2014 collected with the same criteria as in 1994. The idea is still
the same, to reveal the visual patterns of representation of the media. With a growing number of older people in society it is crucial to relate their media
representation to the overall gender representation in the media. The first level of the new study is quantitative and examines visual representation in
the largest media outlets in all genres (news, factual and fiction, press and television, a total of 34 products) in Sweden during one day. Added to that ma‑
terial is the most popular cinema film, the most rented film and public advertising on the streets (billboards). The second level of analysis extracts patterns
from the representation study and use qualitative analysis to pinpoint the visibility structures of women and men, relate them to other visibility factors and
how the interact with discourses/policies concerning diversity and discrimination.