Imag(in)ing Women's Agency

Redhead, Robin

doi:10.1080/14616740701259879

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…They have political dimensions, cultural biases and social prejudices, and therefore reproduce "masculinist" "visual grammars" which perpetuate "non-agential articulations of 'woman' as victim" and "[reduce] the marker 'woman' to an elaboration of sex." 66 The graphic nature of this presentation of domestic violence typifies the 'appropriate victim', which only occurs in the presence of a 'monster', disregarding forms of violence not visually conspicuous. Not only are they limited to the first two storylines that Haaken describes, they can never capture the singularity of real cases, nor the complexity of any given group of survivors.…”

Section: Beauty and The Gazing Rescuermentioning

confidence: 99%

Liminal Identities: Portraits of Surviving Domestic Violence

Campos¹,

Cappellini²,

Harman³

2019

PJCV

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The paper looks into a participatory art project developed in two women's refuges, one in Portugal and the other in England. Addressing liminality after surviving violence, the project constructs a portrait of survivors, utilising feminist pragmatist aesthetics to transfer representational agency to participants. Against a background where women who have experienced domestic violence have often been portrayed in simplistic representations of damaged beauty, the study sought to gain a deeper understanding by holding visual art workshops with participants (Portugal, England) and analysing data from verbal testimonies (England). The paper contributes to a discussion of the practical issues negotiated when establishing a representational power balance between researchers and research participants. It does this by providing a critical discussion of three ethical problems emerging in relation to the project. The first concerns the dominant representation of survivors, the second the need for participants' anonymity and the third the challenges of inequality in qualitative research.

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Section: Beauty and The Gazing Rescuermentioning

confidence: 99%

Liminal Identities: Portraits of Surviving Domestic Violence

Campos¹,

Cappellini²,

Harman³

2019

PJCV

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“…In this section I will give a brief example in order to highlight the benefits of using this approach in development studies. There is no definitive way of conducting a grammatical reading, this is just one example: other examples are Pin-Fat (2000, 2005, 2010, 2013); Pin-Fat and Stern (2005); Redhead (2007). What a grammatical reading will look like depends on what is being ‘read’; no two readings will be exactly the same.…”

Section: A Grammatical Readingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language as a middle ground: Using grammatical reading to ‘find’ theory in development practice

Read

2014

Progress in Development Studies

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It has been noted that development literature has overlooked theoretical issues, largely because theory and practice are viewed as separate. This separation is produced in language and can be collapsed. Pin-Fat's grammatical reading offers a way of thinking about development by 'staying on the surface of language'. Debates about naming development practices are not purely semantic; they reveal implicit theoretical understandings of what can and should be accomplished by those practices. grammatical reading allows us to interrogate these assumptions. Thus, enabling reading theory from practice, to challenge how possibility has been constructed, opening space for new approaches to be explored.

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“…The notion of 'victim' is also usually invested with connotations, it is feminized or alternatively infantilized: women and children are victims, men are not. The problem is even more multifaceted when 'victim' becomes synonymous with 'lack of agency' (see Orford, 2003: 179;Kihato, 2007;Redhead, 2007). The oppositional concepts of victim and perpetrator, and the attached notion of victims as having no agency, are so all pervasive in humanitarian discourse and many conflict analyses that they are difficult to completely avoid.…”

Section: Of Victims and Perpetrators?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Female Fighters in the Sierra Leone War: Challenging the Assumptions?

Coulter¹

2008

Feminist Review

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This article looks at how the category of female fighters in the Sierra Leone civil war (1991–2002) was interpreted by the local population and by the international humanitarian community. The category of the female fighter both challenges and confuses the gendered stereotypes of ‘woman the victim’ and ‘man the perpetrator’ on multiple levels. Most research on ‘women and war’ focuses on women either as inherently more peaceful or merely as victims, and often unwittingly reproduces in ‘war-affected women’ a corresponding lack of ‘agency’. In this article, I criticize such theorizing by demonstrating the diversity and specificity of Sierra Leonean women's war experiences, while also examining how the notion of and discourse about war itself is gendered. While it has become necessary to expand the inquiries into what women do in war and to critically analyse women's roles as perpetuators and perpetrators of war and conflict, this article maintains that in situations where one can talk about the violence of women, as in the example of female combatants, one often finds violence against women as well.

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Imag(in)ing Women's Agency

Cited by 9 publications

References 8 publications

Liminal Identities: Portraits of Surviving Domestic Violence

Liminal Identities: Portraits of Surviving Domestic Violence

Language as a middle ground: Using grammatical reading to ‘find’ theory in development practice

Female Fighters in the Sierra Leone War: Challenging the Assumptions?

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