Abstract:This article analyzes how news photographs and textual accounts of the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder and its 38 witnesses formulated the problem of crime in the city as one of failed witnessing in urban conditions. It analyzes the press images of Austin Street in Kew Gardens and a police portrait of the victim as facialized surfaces that journalists and editors used to interpret the failure of witnesses who were said to have watched or heard Winston Moseley's assaults on Genovese. In years since, the number of wi… Show more
“…Indeed, as intervention programs promote bystander approaches as an advance over those focusing on victim–perpetrator characteristics, it is instructive to reflect on how the bystander trope worked its way into popular discourse as a cautionary tale. In her analysis of the construction of the Kitty Genovese story as a social psychological phenomenon, Carrie Rentschler () reviewed many of the inaccuracies in the original reporting that continue to be included in social psychology textbooks. The report of 38 people passively watching as a woman is raped and murdered outside of her apartment has achieved the status of a collective memory, inscribed with the fantasies and fears of the era.…”
Section: Intervention Strategiesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The person of Kitty Genovese herself—a lesbian Italian American woman who confronted a mentally ill stranger on her way home from work—has been virtually erased by the centrality of the passive observer story:Her murder became a story of urban anomie and crime fear cast against an emergent racialized threat construction that, by the late 1960s, federally deployed discourses that defined criminality as “Black” and “of the street.” Sitting on the cusp of the 1968 declaration of a U.S. war on crime, the murder of Kitty Genovese offered a narrative of crime where the victim and the scene of the crime functioned as a backdrop, a facial screen and mask against which another collectivized face, that of the 38 witnesses, would be projected. (Rentschler, , p. 325)…”
In 1994, the feminist journalist Katie Roiphe published a book titled The Morning After in which she argues that the women's movement had become obsessed with victimization. With many of her case examples centered on campus sexual politics, Roiphe laments college women's demands for the very forms of patriarchal protections that second‐wave feminists fought to overturn. In the two decades since the publication of this book, campus activists have gained considerable ground in bringing sexual assault into public awareness, insisting (contra Roiphe) that victims have been all too silent. This article presents an appraisal of this historical legacy and draws out key lessons to be learned from the history of feminist organizing around sexual assault on campuses. The author explains how radical, liberal, and socialist feminist politics offer different lenses for framing sexual assault and discusses the value of a psychoanalytic feminist optics for thinking through dilemmas at the level of political practice.
“…Indeed, as intervention programs promote bystander approaches as an advance over those focusing on victim–perpetrator characteristics, it is instructive to reflect on how the bystander trope worked its way into popular discourse as a cautionary tale. In her analysis of the construction of the Kitty Genovese story as a social psychological phenomenon, Carrie Rentschler () reviewed many of the inaccuracies in the original reporting that continue to be included in social psychology textbooks. The report of 38 people passively watching as a woman is raped and murdered outside of her apartment has achieved the status of a collective memory, inscribed with the fantasies and fears of the era.…”
Section: Intervention Strategiesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The person of Kitty Genovese herself—a lesbian Italian American woman who confronted a mentally ill stranger on her way home from work—has been virtually erased by the centrality of the passive observer story:Her murder became a story of urban anomie and crime fear cast against an emergent racialized threat construction that, by the late 1960s, federally deployed discourses that defined criminality as “Black” and “of the street.” Sitting on the cusp of the 1968 declaration of a U.S. war on crime, the murder of Kitty Genovese offered a narrative of crime where the victim and the scene of the crime functioned as a backdrop, a facial screen and mask against which another collectivized face, that of the 38 witnesses, would be projected. (Rentschler, , p. 325)…”
In 1994, the feminist journalist Katie Roiphe published a book titled The Morning After in which she argues that the women's movement had become obsessed with victimization. With many of her case examples centered on campus sexual politics, Roiphe laments college women's demands for the very forms of patriarchal protections that second‐wave feminists fought to overturn. In the two decades since the publication of this book, campus activists have gained considerable ground in bringing sexual assault into public awareness, insisting (contra Roiphe) that victims have been all too silent. This article presents an appraisal of this historical legacy and draws out key lessons to be learned from the history of feminist organizing around sexual assault on campuses. The author explains how radical, liberal, and socialist feminist politics offer different lenses for framing sexual assault and discusses the value of a psychoanalytic feminist optics for thinking through dilemmas at the level of political practice.
“…Consulting work within feminist media studies, criminology, and art history, scholars outline how to map female subjects as social constructions. Through visual media like painting (Nead, 1988;Berger, 1972), portrait photography (Rentschler, 2011;Simkin, 2014), films (Simkin, 2014), and surveillance technologies (Hall, 2015), scholars illustrate how women are Knox's arrest, imprisonment, and trials, it is one source among many that perpetuated Knox's criminal celebrity status, and the weight of Simkin's analysis is on the UK tabloid's discourse. Related to this point, I question how Simkin selected the three 'hallmark moments' defining Knox as a femme fatale, as it is not clear in the description of her methods if they were considered iconic.…”
Section: Piecing Together Feminist Methodological Foundationsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Knox and Arias' image circulations -and the notoriety emerging from this process -therefore speak to discursive rules of race, class, gender, and sexuality. I called on the works of Simkin (2014), Carrie Rentschler (2011), Kirsten Emiko McAllister (2010, and Carol Payne (2014), who similarly employ discourse analysis of visual sites to adapt my own unique methodological approach. These scholars illustrate how I can approach photographs through multiple layers of analysis, through close readings of specific images that are situated institutionally and historically.…”
Section: Chapter Three -Constructing a Visual Archive: Applying Discomentioning
confidence: 99%
“…with various kinds of photographs that feature the suspect, the project also denaturalizes cultural assumptions of photographic realism (Sekula, 1982;Tagg, 2009) -a central belief in photojournalism (Payne, 2014;Sontag, 1973Sontag, /2001, criminal justice (Finn, 2009;Horn, 2003;Lalvani, 1996;Moore, 2015;Wright, 2013), and crime news (Miller, 2011;Rentschler, 2011).…”
Section: P 6) Questioning How Violent Women's Notoriety Is Prmentioning
This dissertation examines the visual and discursive production of female notoriety through the multi-mediated circulation of five images of Amanda Knox and Jodi Arias, who were both convicted of murder; Knox was eventually acquitted. This project employs visual discourse analysis to trace the movement and cultural use of widely shared and debated photographic images by consulting a broad visual corpus of mainstream American media content produced from 2007 to 2016. I argue notoriety is produced out of a necessary general relation of speculation that is (re)produced in processes of mass mediation. I illustrate the visual formation of notoriety by following the cultural use and spread of the selected digital images. Here I claim contemporary notoriety is fueled by repeated calls to speculate and judge images that seemingly resist full understanding while they are also used as evidence of perceived legal and sexual transgressions. This continual play to investigate, interpret, and define ambiguous imagery are key cultural practices that generate notoriety, for these relations compel further judgment and scrutiny. The dissertation draws critical attention to the cultural and visual practices tied to the creation of notoriety in contexts of digital mass media circulation, and questions the types of knowledge and spectatorship that are encouraged as images circulate over time and medium.Through the visual discourse analysis, I conclude these five images are continually used to define and assess Knox and Arias relative to shifting norms of acceptable white femininity.Treating the images as performative sites, I outline their compositional and thematic patterns within the visual corpus (e.g. within news broadcasts, newsmagazine episodes, made-for-TV true crime dramas and documentaries, and literary exposés) that constitute discourses of sexual deviancy, inappropriateness, obsession, vanity, and image management. Through these discursive lenses, Knox and Arias are positioned as sexually transgressive, desirable, and excessive -yet remain debatable and highly scrutinized women because they seemingly iii transgress middle-class white heteronormativity. Taking an intersectional approach, I explore how this constellation of visual discourses works to uphold sexist, classist, and racist logics while also encouraging viewers to see, judge, and consult the familiarly ambiguous images for meaning.iv Acknowledgements I am incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to be a part of the Carleton Communication community, and there are a number of people I wish to thank for their support, guidance, and encouragement. Thank you to my supervisor, Dr. Miranda Brady, for your assistance, patience, and reassurance every step of the way through this project. No question was ever too big or too small, and words cannot express how thankful I am for your mentorship throughout this process. I am grateful to my committee members, Dr. Sheryl Hamilton and Dr.Ummni Khan for their continued guidance. You offered new and exciting perspectives o...
One of the clearest signs that Psychology has impacted popular culture is the public’s familiarity with the Rorschach ink-blot test. An excellent example of the Rorschach in popular culture can be found in Watchmen, the comic/graphic novel written by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1987). In the mid-20th century Psychology had an especially contentious relationship with comics; some psychologists were very anxious about the impact comics had on young people, whereas others wrote comics to subvert dominant norms about gender and sexuality. Yet historians of Psychology have had almost nothing to say about this popular and critically acclaimed novel. We read Watchmen here for its narratives that most concern the history of Psychology. We focus on such themes as anti-psychiatry, sexual violence, homophobia, lesbian erasure and social psychological research on bystander intervention. We argue it is possible to align Psychology and comics more closely despite their sometimes contentious history. In doing so we demonstrate the active role of the public in the history of the Rorschach, and the public engagement of Psychology via comics, and also reveal what is possible when historians consider comics within their histories.
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