This article focuses on how the violation of female bodies in the case of mass harassment of women is rendered intelligible by the Western media and the refugees. Violation of female bodies is approached as a site for politicizing possibilities of becoming a subject in the Western media. Informed by Deleuzian notion of “becoming” and the subjectivation of the refugees, I argue that the understanding of “violation” is a central component in contributing to possibilities of becoming affirmed as a subject in the Western media. Empirical material subjected to critical text analysis includes a key text form the Finnish daily newspaper <em>Helsingin Sanomat </em>and refugee interviews. The analysis suggests that the repression of irreducible conceptions of “violation,” and the subsequent erasure of the uncertainty of a “self” in the process of becoming, yields to offering possibilities of becoming primarily in Western terms and the affirmation of Western ideological certainty in understanding mass harassment of European women by the refugees.

This entry focuses on news reporting on women, war, and conflict, and introduces views that explore the related crossroads from the perspectives of newsroom cultures and news coverage of wars and violent conflicts as gendered and gendering. Informed by contemporary understanding of the relationship between wars and gender, works that criticize the traditional reproduction of gender binarism in the news are foregrounded. Sample cases are highlighted to explore the discrepancy between material “reality” of wars and conflicts in the global context and how they unfold in the news.

This paper focuses on virtual reality (VR) engagements of migration in reference to the Girardian notion of mimetic desire and the embedded notion of rivalry, which are considered as informing possibilities for intimacy in virtual worlds. Possibilities for intimacy, in terms of turning to another and transcending the conditions of one’s existence, are here considered as becoming transformed by the digital. VRs subjected to analysis, by means of virtual cartography, consist of The Displaced (2015) and The Fight for Falluja (2016), produced by the New York Times. I argue that, while expressing something that cannot really be talked about is specifically enabled by discursive, affective, and corporeal experiences of VR, “the unspoken” at the same time eliminates the possibility of transcendence for various subjects involved in the making of a “reality.” The “political” in VR most visibly manifests itself in terms of rivalry over how to attain and behold the desirable, which becomes normalized beyond mores; inequalities thus produced are not rendered as constituting an injustice to any significant degree. This article is part of the special issue “Media, Migration, and Nationalism” of the journal Global Perspectives, Media and Communication, guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.

A significant body of literature focuses on gender and media on the one hand and gender and globalization on the other, but less on the relationship between globalization, gender, and media. Yet globalization as a material and discursive phenomenon closely intersects with gender and media analysis in contemporary contexts. This literature review aims at identifying the role of globalization in gender and media literature, and traces shifts in interest in economic, cultural, political, and technological aspects of globalization in that context.

This chapter examines the relationship between the body, globalization, and the media. It discusses how the female body is subjected to being “played” in the global media and what that reveals of gender and minority–majority relationships and of global aims and fears. The cases presented in this chapter serve as samples of “sexy violence” imagery that cannot be thoroughly explained by theories of objectification, liberation, or commodification of women but, rather, are considered in reference to the socially constitutive role of globalization. Although the female body may function to discursively dissolve, enforce, or alleviate conflicts embedded in the processes and discourses of globalization, the preoccupation with “sexy violence” imagery in the global media does not necessarily offer a solution to global concerns but, rather, plays out the fears, aims, and anxieties about globalization through violence and aggression.