Curating Violence: Display and Representation—An Interview with Jonathan Ferguson and Lisa Traynor (Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds)

Perpetration, Gender and Performance

“…Indeed, in the interview with the curators of the Royal Armouries Museum, Bielby contends that 'perpetrator is quite a loaded term that implies a moral value judgement.' 18 Its loadedness is reflected in the extensive scholarly discussions around the helpfulness or accuracy of categories of perpetration, bystanding, complicity, etc. Increasingly, critics across disciplines have pointed to the limitations of understanding 'perpetrator' as a subject position, pointing to the importance of people's behaviours, often contradictory, in the context of social practices, institutional roles and processes of normalisation at the time that violence is committed and afterwards.…”