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NON-FICTION ARGUMENTS: GENDER, REPRESENTATION AND FORMS OF VIOLENCE

Virginia Villaplana

This text is dedicated to my mother, for so many years of words.

To Sergio, Macu, Antonella and especially for Amalia Pereira for the dialogue.

 

There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves. Andy Warhol's ideal of filming real events in real time life isn't edited, why should its record be edited? has become a norm for countless Webcasts, in which people record their day, each in his or her own reality show. Here I am waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school. People record all aspects of their lives, store them in computer files and send the files around. Family life goes with the recording of family life even when, or especially when, the family is in the throes of crisis and disgrace. Surely the dedicated, incessant home videoing of one another, in conversation and monologue, over many years was the most astonishing material in Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jerecki 2003)

Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” The New York Times, Sunday May 23, 2004.

Memory, Non-fiction Storylines and Fractures

 

The motivation that drives this text is to situate a place of action in the representation of gender violence and its fractures. A place that will open up an interpretive possibility about the narrative strategies of non-fiction storylines in film and video practices, that will situate a reflection and propose open paths, ways out related to a closed definition of gender as social, historical and political violence.

 

The investigative work begun over a year and a half ago to put together a film and video cycle, which has now produced this book, attempts to approach the problematic relation between representation and visual mechanisms, artistic practices, media discourses, violence and gender: a critical reading of how the exercise of power has deeply influenced the experience of real and symbolic gender violence in the discourse of visual culture. This perspective stems from the deep-rooted conviction that the exercise of violence, and more specifically, the symbolic representation of this violence, situated between cultural and historic memory, involves the emergence of a reality which, owing to its dimensions, goes beyond any interpretation that does not confirm the cultural failure of the modern West.

 

The manifestations of violence represented in non-fiction storylines and reflections created about violence are not recent, nor do they belong to a certain degree of media opportunism. For a long time in the memory of humanity, in its spheres of social and/or political coexistence, violence surfaces as an agent that citizens and governments must come up against. In this sense, collective violence includes social violence, political violence and economic violence.  The direct violence that women suffer from can be divided into five forms, ranging from physical aggression — many times resulting in death — to sexual, psychological, economic and symbolic violence. Structural violence is consolidated in the feminization of poverty, wage discrimination, the glass ceiling, the sexual segregation of the job market and the double-triple shift. As for social violence, it is evident in the slavery and traffic of individuals. Political violence is detected in rape as a war weapon, a widespread, traumatic practice in the history and memory of humanity.

 

In this film and video cycle, the insertion of gender violence in visual culture has led me, during my research, to reflect on a connection with non-fiction storylines. This research and the development of this cycle proposes a reflection on the aesthetics and narrative practices of film and video. To do this, numerous archive networks, authors and distributors in Europe and the United States have been referenced, including: Blickpilotin (Berlin), Video Femmes (Quebec), Film Archive Imaginaria (Bologna), Women Make Movies (New York), Cinenova (London), Electronic Intermix and Frameline (San Francisco). My thanks goes out to all of them. Thus, the core of this research is grounded on feminist practices from the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties to the present.

In 1975 the artist Cara DeVito made Ama l´uomo tuo. Using early video technology she recorded the story of her maternal grandmother Adeline LeJudas who, for the first time, appears as testimony of domestic violence in the family environment, an exhibition of patriarchal rules unleashed before the camera as a way of recording the invisibilization of a generation of silenced women. The subjective production of the knowledge and memory of this experience recorded by video technology embarked on a path of visibilization with no return through the narration and exchange of intergenerational personal histories. Two other utopian moments in video were Losing a Conversation with the Parents by Martha Rosler (1977), a video made in tandem with Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (1977). After these came How to Sleep at Night or A Simple Case for Torture, 1983, where Rosler addresses, through a voiceover narration and an assortment of print media excerpts, cases related to human rights violations, unemployment and the global economy. This gathering of media fragments exposes the support of the U.S. government and its business interests of regimes that systematically use torture. Rosler challenges the American press about its role as a disinformation agent through selective news coverage, its use of language and the implicit legitimation of a point of view that justifies the use of torture. The deliberately fractured narrative strategy recalls the fragmentation of the voiceover used in Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, which situates the female body in a discursive position, in an ideological place of struggle, a psychic place of domination constructed of different levels of demands and gratifications. In the case of Losing a Conversation with the Parents, the staging of an interview that simulates the traditional codes of the television interview presents two of the problems perpetuated by Capitalism and patriarchal values: anorexia nervosa and global hunger. The staging of actors and the dialogue between a mother and a father reveal the causes that have made their daughter ill, reflecting the impossibility of comprehending the consequences of the symbolic universe that fashion imposes upon the culture of youth consumption. However, the contact of documentary forms with non-fiction storylines and the representation of symbolic violence and gender violence can be traced back to the Sixties and the emergence of the so-called New German Cinema and its ties to the women's movement. Frauenfilm was politically committed to the feminist positions of the period and its narrative forms emphasized the subjective perspective. From the mid-Seventies to the late Eighties, female German directors showed the relationship between state power and its effects on women's lives and urged them to become aware of the patriarchal structure encouraged by institutions. This was when the first women's film festival was set up (Berlin, 1973) as well as the feminist film culture magazine Frauen und Film, 1974, in which Helke Sander, Jutta Brückner, Helma Sander-Brahms and Margarette Von Trotta played key roles. The goal of these filmmakers was to create a platform for spreading film, showing feminism's inclination towards an international movement of women on one hand, and on a smaller scale, towards everyday policies about "the personal", offering a new political vision between the dichotomy body/State as a consequence of political and social disillusionment after 1968.

 

Regarding this subject, the theorist Julia Knight, in her essay Woman and the New German Cinema, recalls that the problematics that concerned women were focused on non-fiction storylines and the documentary forms that contributed to the appearance of film and video narrations tied to the production and dissemination of knowledge about the women's movement (Knight 1992). In this way, documentary forms were combined with other forms of production that were rarely "authentic" fictions with staging. This small scale production of knowledge meant, in turn, in the films of Sander, Brückner, Sander-Brahms or Von Trotta, an exploration of the relationships between state control of the body through the institution of the family and specifically through institutions such as prisons or mental hospitals. They postulated that the disciplinary institutions of the administration of power were trying to psychosomatically turn the repression of historic traumas into a mental and physical pathology. In short, they proposed the creation of an aesthetic based on this reversal of history and trauma into a process of knowledge production. Helke Sander's All-round Reduced Personality (Die allseite redurziete persönlickeit, 1977) evokes, through a series of dramatic, often ironic sequences, the difficulties encountered by a Berlin photographer who tries to apply her idea of justice to her emotional relationships. Sander's contribution was confirmed with The Subjective Factor (Der subjektive faktor, 1981), which built on the previous film by evoking the struggles of the women's movement and its demand for civil rights between 1967 and 1980.[1] The relationship between body and State becomes the key to interpreting non-fiction storylines, their relationship to everyday politics, the identities and uses of visual recording and reproduction devices through the movie and video camera. Cultural and gender memory deploy a "new subjectivity" which some experts like Michael Renov define as a personalized way of tackling non-fiction storylines (Renov 1993), enunciating that subjectivity is no longer constructed as something shameful but rather as a filter through which the Real (Foster 2001) enters the discourse, like a kind of fluctuation of the experience that guides the work in terms of the way of producing knowledge, and by extension the story. Around 1992, Helke Sander once again addressed the relationship between body and State in the film Liberators Take Liberties[2] (Befreier und befreite, 1992), based on a non-fiction storyline. That is, the systematic mass rape of German women at the end of World War II by the Red Army. The experience of brutal force shown in the first part of this documentary investigates the exhibition of trauma using the technique of in-depth interview. With regard to this, Sander explains: “Many of us begin to see with increasing clarity the connection between medium-range missiles and romantic relationships. In other words, the man-woman relationship between militarism and patriarchy; between technical destruction and the domination of nature and violence against women. Women, nature, foreign peoples and countries are the colonies of the White Man.”

 

The memory of the survivors of this story remained hidden, a repeated story although lacking any film or video representation until that moment. The second part of the commentary is about the serious consequences suffered by the affected women and the children conceived during those rapes.

Renov situates the period Post-truth between 1970-1995 to show the reflexivity of the I through documentary strategies; that is, the appearance of New Subjectivities (Renov 1999)[3] in documentary enunciations. On the other hand, Post-reality defines the times that concern us, tying narrative production to the media and defining the coordinates between gender, violence and culture. As shown by the extensive research that the filmmaker Helk Sander enunciated via film technology in Liberators Take Liberties, the consequences can still be felt: "There are women who were never able to talk about this and whose husbands forbade them to do so. Then there are their children, who are now finding out that they are the product of rape. Finally, there are those who are trying to find out the identity of their fathers."

The concept of the Real beats in these documentary statements, a return that Hal Foster analyzes in his essay from the mid-1990s, The Return of the Real. Art and Theory at the End of the Century, giving two referents: one comes from Lacan's psychoanalytic theories and alludes to the reality of the obscene, traumatic and abject; that which resists the symbolic, which speaks of an injured body, a raped individual. The other involves the real in a socio-reality understood as a new field of art, in which the real functions as identity or community. To the latter, we would also add a revision of the symbolic forms of violence, history and memory.

 

The objectivization, media globalization, colonized visual codes, the panoptism of biopower denounced by the philosopher Michel Foucault; scientific taxonomization, social regulation through the visual regime and the construction of the gaze as a strategy proposed in the Seventies and Eighties were the starting point for revisions based on Laura Mulvey's 1975 text Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in which she went into the notion of voyeuristic scopophilia in fictional cinema (Mulvey 1988)[4]. With regard to this subject I would like to point out that inversely, the codes governing non-fiction storylines allude to a displacement of the politics of truth I will discuss again later in relation to Hito Steyerl's text Documentarism as Politics of Truth.

 

In parallel with these revisions, feminist visual practices started constructing autobiographies and videojournals, making use of the politics and technologies of gender which, following  Michel Foucault and Teresa de Lauretis, they took into account when considering the metaphoric use of the term "technology." Beyond any sort of techno-determinism, these theorists demonstrated that the construction of body and gender has always been technological. Therefore, I argue that politically committed aesthetic strategies should go beyond coded fantasies, both private and public, socially and visually controlled to give way to the relation between alternative figurations of subjectivity[5] and the forms of real and represented violence, so as to create new spaces for identity and culture. I believe that identity politics are still a key issue that directs and "produces" subjects and multiple, hybrid and politically differentiated codification agents. From a distant approach, video and cinema technology united with the notion of experimentation, the idea of portrait and oral portrait, embarked on a path of no return. Feminist visual practices have been developing a criticism of gender violence and following this idea, the biographical resumed a lively strategy until the 1990s. Sadie Benning's video A Place Called Lovely (1991) reveals a society in which violence and its diverse forms are a part of our everyday lives. It shows us a racist, homophobic North America. Sadie Benning uses her voice to describe the discovery of violence: one hot, humid July day in 1979, a woman walking along Niskey Lake Road in southwestern Atlanta came across the bloody limb of a corpse. When the police arrived, they found the bodies of two adolescent boys, Alfred Evans and Edward Hope Smith. The bodies of twenty-seven more boys were found in the next few years. Benning's voice explains: "I never met them but I'll never forget those boys because when those kids were murdered, all of us kids died a little." Allusions to the unsettling proximity of firearms are mixed with violent images of video games or clips from films like Psycho. The video ends with a scene in which Benning, in front of a U.S. flag, presents her discourse about the signs of a culture of violence. In another attempt at video as biography, Mindy Faber en Delirium, 1993, constructs the personal experience of the creator's mother via Jean-Martin Charcot's 19th-century classification of “feminine hysterics," which would lay the foundation for modern neurology. While at no point is her mother's position reduced to a simple explanation, Delirium relates her mother's illness to the historic position of women subject to patriarchal culture. Popular culture imaginary and humorous iconoclasm are thrown together, juxtaposing episodes of the American television series l Love Lucy with photographs of sick bodies taken by Charcot in La Salpétriére. Delirium stresses the need to understand female mental illness within a political and social context and the reactions of many women to situations of gender violence. On this note, the 1997 videographic performance La voz humana ("The Human Voice"), by María Ruido, silences and makes stammer a complex relationship between the deprivation of language and the difficulty of public enunciation of the word subordinated to enunciation. At the same time, it uses stuttering and silence to reveal the collision of the voice in the double folds of language. Ruido's performance explores the possibilities of concretion of the human voice as a way of identifying of gender roles and their mechanisms in society; what the historic mechanisms responsible for the relative dehistoricization and the eternalization of the structures of sexual division and the corresponding principles of division are. To present the problem on these terms means to advance in the order of knowledge that can lie at the beginning of decisive progress in the order of action. To remember that what, in history, appears to be eternal is only the product of a labor of eternalization by certain (interconnected) institutions such as the Family, the Church, the State, and Education is to reinsert in history and thus return to historic action the relationship between the sexes that the naturalist, essentialist view denies them (and not, as some have tried to have me say, attempt to stop history and deprive women of their role as historic agents). In this sense, Pierre Bourdieu, in the preface to the German edition of his Masculine Domination, published in November 1998, argues: “Against these historical forces of dehistoricization, a mobilizing enterprise should be directed that tends to put history back in motion by neutralizing the mechanisms that have neutralized history. This typically political mobilization that will open up the possibility of collective resistance to women, directed at legal and political reforms, opposes both the resignation that drives all essentialist views (biologist and psychoanalytic) of the difference between the sexes as well as resistance reduced to individual acts or those constantly restarted discursive happenings that some feminist theorists advocate: heroic breaks from daily routine, such as the parodic performances Judith Butler is so fond of, surely demand too much for such a small, uncertain result” (Bourdieu 2000, 8). In reality, rebellion against symbolic discrimination resides in collective forms of organization and action as well as effective tools, especially symbolic ones, capable of creating fractures in the state and legal institutions that contribute to eternalizing their subordination to forms of real and represented violence. By describing, as I have elsewhere (Villaplana 2003), the fragmented narrative forms that make up the discourse of neotelevisión[6]. These questions related to the symbolic production of mass media bring us to the educational processes that violence produces via behavior guidelines learned during childhood. In the short, intense story The Origin of Violence, 2004-2005, the filmmaker Cecilia Barriga emphasizes that subjectivated gaze through the presence of the camera:When I shot that scene in the Amazon jungle and watched that young and innocent boy playing with his kitty, I discovered the awakening of violence. What was it that turned that friendly game with the little animal into an act of pure force? Perhaps it was my gaze; perhaps it was the camera. Whatever happened stirred in that child a desire for notoriety that surely led him to force and finally to the brutality of violence, to the irrefutable demonstration of his power." Her account of the scene reveals a direct and even incisive symbolic gaze towards that much-traveled, uncertain path that are childhood games and the socialization of violence.

 

Social violence having to do with rape as a war weapon is the focus of Karin Jurschick's documentary The Peacekeepers and the Women (2003). The international intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo was coming to an end after years of war. Peace was planned with the presence of the peacekeeping forces SPOR and KFOR. One of the most lucrative areas of the new postwar economy was the trafficking of women, a process of violence that came from the Ukraine, Rumania and Moldavia. Women were forced to prostitute themselves, their clients were oftentimes the very members of the international peacekeeping forces, who earned €150 per day, half the monthly salary of a Bosnian professor. The investigation carried out by this documentary shows how the trafficking of women became an exercise of violence against the women's human rights. Testimonies from the peacekeeping forces and nightclub owners and the individual testimonies of the women clearly describe that the presence of the international forces in Bosnia and Kosovo was an important factor in the rise of prostitution. On their part, Calling the Ghosts by Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelincic, 1996, and Daughters of War by Maria Barea, 1998, are two other documentaries which, in the mid-Nineties, suggested the need to fight for the political violence of rape to be recognized as a war crime. Calling the Ghosts tells in first person the story of two women, Jadranka Cigelj and Nusreta Sivac, who lived in Bosnia-Herzegovina until they were captured and deported to Omarska, one of the Serb concentration camps, where they were systematically raped and humiliated by their Serb captors along with other Croat and Muslim women. The documentary Daughters of War explores the context of the Peruvian guerrilla war, where norms of coexistence have been  destroyed and violence and abuse of women have become new social norms of conduct. Through the lives of Gabriela and a group of friends made up of 17-year-old girls in Ayacucho we see how these survivors reflect on the effects of the civil war that took place in Peru during the Eighties, where drugs and poverty marked an entire generation wrapped up in the trauma of their country's war-ravished history.

Reconstruction of memory and violence tied to history have been studied by the theorists and historians Barbie Zelizer (1998) and Marita Sturken (1997). Both examine how the process of  memory and its images have in this case been constructed by filling in the gaps of oblivion. The memories of the survivors come from their own experiences or from documentary photos or Hollywood films. This means that the photos, filmed or videotaped images can capture and create memories but that they also have the capacity, through the power of their presence, to substitute experience. This is why for Sturken it is necessary to examine the role of the image in the production of both memory as well as amnesia, cultural memory as well as history. In the case of gender violence as explored in the videographic works Syntagma by Valie Export, (1984); A Room of Her Own by Teresa Serrano (2005); and Deshaciendo nudos by Beth Moysés (2000), memory and amnesia take on contradictory meanings: both can be active, voluntary, traumatic or culpable. With these contradictions, it is hard to trace how far the media's capacity to construct identities has gone: if the media acted as reproducers of the official discourse, is it possible to separate the two? Or is that traumatic fracture always present in subjects constructed in this way?

 

At the same time, it might well be that the reflection on the relationship between memory / media and cultural identity necessarily departs from any possible nostalgia and makes more evident something that is often obscured in other discourses. Along these lines the short film Consolation Service by Eija-Liisa Ahtila (1999) shows how identities are constructed by contradictory elements. What constitutes us as subjects is subjectivity and that which memory organizes in the form of a story which, giving memories continuity, is often tainted by nostalgia and therefore cannot be evaluated any other way. The circle of domestic violence in Fathers, Husbands, Sons by Kevin McCourt and Gabriel Martínez, 2002, and The Eye of the Needle by Terry Berkowitz and Blerti Murataj, 2004, which involves the features of the process of aggression, would not require any further clarification if it weren't for the omnipresence of a media discourse — let us recall the Lorena Bobbitt case back in 1993 — that confirms the existence of the notion of testimony before it questions it. In The Eye of the Needle, Lorena Bobbitt's testimony of reproaches and pain is interspersed with subtle, sensual images which show that in the domestic, marital sphere in the United States, not all is what it seems. Regarding this subject, Fathers, Husbands, Sons is established as a complement to an exploited version, symbolized by the mass media; this is the pattern of the behavior of violence against women which some call the "Cycle of Violence," and which is generally divided into three phases: tension-building, the acute or explosion phase and the "honeymoon" or romantic reconciliation.

 

The relationship between memory / media and identities demands to be questioned. The media hegemony keeps functioning retrospectively and the accumulation of memory fragments should not be a legitimation in itself. It might be said that the conservative belief that cultural museumization can compensate for the ravages caused by accelerated modernization in the social world is too ideological. It does not recognize that post-industrial culture and the production of visual representation through the mass media destabilizes any kind of security that the past might offer. The juxtaposition is disheartening. However, it can also give us a clue: now more than ever, memory and amnesia are not opposite or contradictory terms. They are found in the same places and it is essential to consider their implications simultaneously.

 

Media stories, Overrepresentation and The Politics of Truth

December 1997 must be regarded as a before and after in the media representation of violence against women in Spain. Prior to this date, this problem had never regularly appeared on the front page of newspapers or opened news programs on television, despite mobilizations by other social agents such as women's organizations for whom the issue of violence against women had been the object of attention and mobilization since the Seventies. In December 1997 was the case of Ana Orantes (Altés 1998), the woman who told her story as a victim of domestic abuse on an Andalusian television channel. A few days later, she was burned alive by her husband, who she was separated from. This incident, no more serious than many acts of violence against women before it, became a salutary lesson that the media slapped on the front page. Some of the media kept featuring on the issue in the two months following the Orantes story, reporting on new cases of murdered women. The reasons for this change of direction have to do with the endogamous nature of the media's news agenda: television offers a woman's live confession; in doing so, television becomes the source of information so it is able to show a post-produced document of the real, whose construction and coverage would multiply the effect of “reality.” It was not an anonymous woman who was killed, but the woman who had appeared on the small screen. To the extent that she had been socially represented by the media, she lingered in the media memory far longer than any other kind of structural, everyday violence. Gender violence as political violence has multiple, heterogeneous problematics. It includes the physical, sexual and psychological violence that occurs within the family or any other interpersonal relationship. It also includes rape, abuse, sexual abuse, sexual harassment in the workplace, educational and/or public health institutions as well as violence exerted because of the victim's ethnic group or sexuality; torture, the trafficking of individuals, forced prostitution and kidnapping, among others. In the media news discourse, the stereotype of the victim[7], just as the sexual stereotype, appear as an overrepresentation of women within gender conflicts. Women are more personified, more close-up shots are taken of them and they are more likely to be the focus of sensationalist coverage. As Marian Meyers points out in her book News Coverage of Violence Against Women,[8] the news is part of the problem of violence against women if it represents victims as being responsible for the abuse (Meyers 1997, 117). When the news excuses the aggressor because “he was obsessed,” “he was in love" or some other such thing; and then it represents the aggressor as a monster or a psychopath when it report on this situation of conflict, ignoring the systematic nature of violence against women. In these cases a norm of visibility of violent acts is established, considered as "natural," whereby the public — violence as a reality people suffer from — intermeshes with the private — the privacy of abused individuals. The story — whether in print, radio, advertising or television — becomes ostentatious, almost obscene when it promotes a hypertrophy of listening and watching. The works of Beth B. call into question this voyeuristic tendency to become fascinated with film and video: Belladona (1989), for instance, stresses this fascination by transforming characters into puppets somewhere between fiction and documentary. Likewise, Sabine Massenet, using the videographic micro-narrations gathered in Sans titre (2002), revises the media landscape offered by advertising as a violent object of delight and consummation. The growing popularity of reality and talk shows and the tendency of certain television and radio news programs displace the site of gender violence, inserting it into the lives of those who watch or listen to it as just another event. However, focusing on the use of physical force overlooks other acts of violence that we have explored in this project, those acts where physical force is not used, but social or psychological pressure is imposed: emotional, invisible, symbolic and economic violence, which cause as many or more damaging effects than physical violence. These different forms of violence can be seen in the dichotomy trauma-history[9] and their investigation in gender studies has allowed them to be identified and tied to cultural and social norms. Naming forms of violence —- what is not named does not exist — and continuing to work on symbolic violence is essential so they are given a social and critical existence and are not reduced to individual and/or coincidental experiences. On the other hand, omitting them can be understood as a strategy of gender inequality: if the violence is considered "invisible" or "natural," arbitrary action is legitimated and justified as usual in the relation between the genders. Therefore, defining political violence against women involves exposing a multiplicity of acts, events and omissions that harm them, have damaging effects on various aspects of their lives and are a violation of their human rights.

 

Domestic violence in Spain has of late taken on a greater public dimension than in the past due to the profusion of interpretations made by different sources; this is what is addressed in the documentaries 10 años con Tamaia by Isabel Coixet (2003); Amores que matan by Icíar Bollaín (2000); and Empezar de nuevo by Lisa Berger and Claudia Hosta (2001). A similar situation occurs in Mexico and Latin America, where preventative, non-punishable laws have  proliferated, although it is the only region in the world with a Convention Against All Forms of Violence Against Women. This is where the phenomenon of femicide has broken out, the murder of women for reasons related to their gender. "Femicide is the most extreme form of violence based on gender inequality, this being understood as violence exercised by men against women in their desire to obtain power, domination or control. It includes murders produced by intrafamily violence and sexual violence. Femicide can take on two forms: private or non-private femicide.”[10] The experience of working with women who have suffered from different forms of violence opened up a whole new host of questions for me. These questions made me realize that the theoretical and technical tools available to contemplate the forms of political violence were insufficient in a historical moment in which violence has various presences through the mass media and especially because the motivation was also going to be centered on the added value of that media exchange.[11] This is the social value that symbolic violence exerts on this flow of disorganized codes and messages that also showed different outcomes, knowing that these experiences and stories would continue in the production of the “real” (Friedman 2002). I had to include and articulate the theoretical contributions about memory and trauma, subjective and technological, in which film narrations, videographic stories and incomplete stories were presented like an unfinished story via interdisciplinary counterimages positioned against the overrepresentation that the media focus from a single point of view. In other words, it is a question of considering other cycles where the representation of the relations between violence and gender are situated between the narrative strategies and the telling of the facts via non-fiction storylines. Regarding this subject, the documentary by Frederick Wiseman, Domestic Violence, 2001; Macho by Lucinda Broadbent, 2000; and the animated documentary short film Survivors by Sheila M. Sofian, 1997, explore the cycle of domestic violence in two different societies, the United States and Nicaragua. These works, which employ documentary strategies, suggest dynamics of social support via the monitoring of work groups on domestic violence. The oral source is an excellent access route to notions of collective historical memory and political culture in the history of the present. Its importance increases insofar as the recent past has not yet crystallized as autobiographical memory. The weakness of autobiographical literature to depict the most recent past can only be supplemented by oral sources. Accessing the autobiographic and collective experience of a member of a social group or human association in the present depends, to a large extent, on resorting to the oral source. What's more, it must be taken into account that generations are more permeable to grafts of historic memory at the time they are formed, that is, formed as a generational group. That memory then acts as a form of representation by which an invisibilized collective history is reconstructed in the circle of blood and shit. Intrafamily violence and childhood violence are the central themes of the documentary Loud and Clear / Laut und deutlich by Maria Arlamovsky, 2001. In them, the interview space is defined as an area of therapy and appropriation of experience through biographic narration in front of the camera, without showing the dialogue between interviewer and interviewee. Family and violence, tradition and cultural memory come together in Jean-Marie Teno's Le mariage d’Alex, 2002. The dramatic and veiled reality of polygamous marriage in Cameroon are revealed through a delicate look at the wedding ceremony and the wedding night. A ritual of customs and rites that speak of submission and the position of women and men in patriarchal society. Tracey Moffatt also addressed this situation around 1987 in Nice Coloured Girls, through an experimental  fiction exploring the attitude of urban, aborigine women in Australia and male supremacy. In this film, Moffatt develops a postcolonial criticism based on the urban ritual of picking up white men. The film contrasts the relationships of Aboriginal women with their "colonizers" some 200 years ago with the attempts of urban Aboriginal women to reverse their fortunes. Nice Coloured Girls uses the plausible juxtaposition of images and a voiceover that reads extracts from the diary of a colonizer to question the representation of the so-called "Aboriginal Cinema." By trying to avoid a specific narrative style, Moffatt extracts the film account from the realist tradition of traditional ethnographic documentaries and traditional Australian Aboriginal plays. Nice Coloured Girls alludes to ethnographic films through the use of subtitles and avoids the cliché of the so-called realistic reconstructions. The documentary Señorita extraviada ("Missing Young Woman") by Lourdes Portillo, (2003) explores a system of gender violence outside the family, centered on the idea of disappearance. Since the film was shot in 2002, over 100 women have died and the disappearances continue. As a result of the publicity that the film is starting to get, now the bodies of the disappeared women are simply not found and both Portillo as well as the organizations involved in this struggle have received threats. In this sense, gender is a place where — or through which — power is articulated and as Joan W. Scott proposes, gender is involved in the actual construction of power (Scott 1992)[12]. Señorita extraviada does not offer solutions, it only presents the facts; it is the Mexican government that has to provide a solution. Thus, Portillo issues an appeal to sign a petition to be sent to the president of Mexico and the governor of Chihuahua: “solve the terrible crimes committed against our women in Ciudad Juárez, which both levels of the government are avoiding.” The Ciudad Juárez murders are currently being repeated with identical characteristics in Chihuahua, Nuevo Laredo, Nogales, Zihuatanejo and Guatemala: non-fiction storylines that keep popping up in a dramatic way, and which behind these lines you the reader are now interpreting mark this plot.

 

In this range of approaches, the notion of gender (Colaizzi 1990)[13] appeared as a key element in gender studies, political theory, cultural studies, film narrative, sociology, studies deriving from communication theory and social education, cultural anthropology, aesthetic critical theory, post-Western and post-colonial studies, studies of visual culture and the positions of queer feminist criticism recently revisited[14] centered on violence. Failing to take gender into account in the study of political violence is a dead-end road as today, gender violence continues to be a democratic practice. Gender entails looking at sexual difference considered as social construction, it means an alternative interpretation to the essentialist interpretation of feminine and masculine identities. The concept of gender makes the socio-cultural organization of sexual difference the central axis of political and economic organization of society. That is, gender discourses have constructed the various cultural representations that have originated and reproduced popular archetypes of femininity and masculinity. Over time, these played an important role in the reproduction and survival of social practices, beliefs and behavior codes  differentiated according to sex. However, the gender discourse of this new century, despite its chance to adapt to socio-cultural changes, is still not founded in the principle of equality. And this inequality is one of the central causes of violence. The center of the definition of gender will lie in the all-embracing connection of two propositions: that gender is a constitutive element of social relations based on the differences perceived between the sexes and that it is a primary way of representing power relations. In this sense, documentary work during the Eighties and the Nineties meant exploring the concept of gender. Red Sari by Pratibha Parmar, 1988, portrays the racial and cultural conflict in Europe's major cities. On a cultural level, the film offers a post-Colonial reflection of the murder of the young Kalbinder Kaur Hayre in 1985. Violence against Asian women in European cities is taken from the public sphere to the private sphere. To do this, the voiceover is constructed as an intersubjective enunciation of the denouncement of racism. Unlike approaches about sex that have spread around queer theory, it is interesting to note that queer feminist texts, in this case explored in Red Sari, underlines the question of race, gender and class through verbal enunciation, adopting a poetic register. To do this she constructs a voiceover that acts as the focus of the account of violence, showing that representation of violence comes from both gender and social conflict, and in this case race conflict as well. In the Nineties, he director Pratibha Parmar adapted, using documentary forms, Alice Walker's novel Possessing the Secret of Joy. This film, Warrior Marks, 1993, examines female genital mutilation without presenting the women as victims, but as strong fighters who have managed to survive and keep surviving despite the mutilation of their bodies, articulating ways of fighting against imposed tradition. Warrior Marks tries to draw attention to the cultural and political complexities surrounding this subject. Through interviews with women from Senegal, Gambia, Burkina Faso, the United States and England who have suffered genital mutilation, Parmar tries to show her personal vision of this situation in terms of a conflict that remains unresolved, as shown in the recent Kim Longinotto film The Day I Will Never Forget You, 2002. The concept of “violence” indicates a way of proceeding that offends and harms someone though the exclusive or excessive use of force. Violence comes from vis, force, an etymological origin shared by the worlds “violent" and “violently.” “Violate” means to exercise violence upon someone to overcome their resistance; to force them to do something that they do not wish to do. Real violence, then, acquires, in postmodern cinema, forms of representation that lead to the violence being represented as a code transferable to diverse images, from big-screen cinema to television hyperreality, interactive video games and even Internet hyperlinks. The impact of information and communication technology on social realities are folds in the relations between violence, gender and power, violent behavior, just as the treatment that the media gives violence and gender relations involves a structure of rules. We wish to fulfill the task of intervening in the social debate, questioning apparent certainties about the relation between the media and violence, when the political and journalistic discourses have concealed one of the social problems closest to everyday violence. The realm of the symbolic and the relation between real and represented violence serve as a connection to Ursula Biemann in Writing Desire, 2000. This videographic essay on the ideal screen of the Internet shows the global circulation of bodies from the Third World to the First World. The emergence of new technologies and with them, Internet, has accelerated these transactions. Biemann proposes a reflection on the political, economic, and gender inequalities obvious in these exchanges, simulating the gaze of one looks for a docile, traditional, pre-feminist partner on the Internet, the observer's implication in a new voyeurism replete with sexual consumption. The documentary forms of the last decade of Post-Vérité are defined as a site of conflict, which have correctly shown two mutually exclusive questions: that the ambition driving the documentary is that of finding a way to reproduce reality without detours or manipulations, and that this pursuit of a non-adulterated reality is useless. Not only in recent years, but throughout history, the task of formulating ideas, values, symbols, metaphors and rhetoric, the task of appropriating reality —both on the imaginary and symbolic level as well as on the practical and emotional level — is tied to a more violent, traumatic, and long-lasting task, many times invisible and unrepresentable as social psychologist point out, which is that of disciplining: the production of sensual-sexual features, the production of the necessary bodies-spaces, the amnesias, the fears, in short the historical production of human bodies, which enables us to speak of the production of sensibilities and aesthetics — the colonial aesthetic, modern aesthetic, revolutionary aesthetic, neoliberal aesthetic. With this in mind, we adopt the reflection posed by Hito Steyerl in her text Documentarism as Politics of Truth.[15] That is, the documentary, in its role of structuring and intervening in the social sphere adopts biopolitical tasks (Steyerl 2003). Thus, action through symbolic products can be essentially developed in the terrain of culture, and this is where mechanisms of diffusion will have to be constructed that allow a new way of seeing and contribute to revealing the deceits of media hegemony. Documentary forms in a context like Spain have to assume the function of biopolitical governmentality which Steyerl situates in representation, a task which should not exclusively be assigned to the mass media, since artistic practices and ways of doing things are a space of symbolic exchange,  proliferation of representations and production of knowledge.

The prehistory of this book is linked to optimism. Faced with the bibliographical poverty that characterizes the Spanish analysis of violence and its representation, we have avoided the temptation to publish pioneer works that wind up becoming definitive. Instead, we have opted to expose the gaps so others may fill them, if they so desire. This has been our objective: to present the reader, on one hand, with previously unpublished texts, and on the other hand, texts written specifically for publication in Spain, Latin America, North American and Europe, with the common denominator being the notion of symbolic representation and construction of visual culture. We hope that this publication will be of use to those who work to eradicate violence in post-industrial societies, and that its intellectual perspective keeps it fresh over time. At the same time, we also hope that the project has generally been aware of its limitations and has not pretended to bring a recently-initiated journey to an artificial end. We have begun a story with many sequences that have remained, although filmed, off-screen: the records and counternarrations of video, the testimonies, the trauma, the causes, possible ways out of this cycle of gender violence that is part of many women's lives, the anonymous faces in the media that is plagued with cold and equally anonymous numbers, and the desire to name the variants of gender violence as a way of making the quotidian visible since, as Ana Navarrete put it in her text about the counterhistory of artistic practices: This funeral is for many dead women.


 

Virginia Villaplana Ruiz

Mass media researcher and writer. Associate Professor of Audiovisual Communication (UCH, Valencia). She has curated various film and video cycles on gender and culture: Le détournement des technologies, Constantvz, Laurence Rassel, Brussels, 2002; Miradas transversales al género, Ecosofías, Madrid, 2000; Amores y deseos, Granada Council and the Women's Assembly of Granada, 2003; Just do it and RealTV with El Sueño Colectivo for the International Women's Film Fest of Barcelona, 2003-2004. From 1992-2001 she was the editorial coordinator of Ediciones de la Mirada publishers and the magazine Banda Aparte, formas de ver. She has published the book 24 Contratiempos and several texts in books of essays such as Actos de escritura: género, narración e hipertextualidad, Trompe la Mémoire. Historia y Visualidad, Cultura electrónica, El cine de Marguerite Duras, Chris Marker. Retorno a la inmemoria, Historias sin argumentos, El cine imposible, Un minuto para una imagen televisiva. Agnès Varda and El discurso televisivo de la violencia. She has also received the following writing awards: the XV Alfons Roig Essay Prize (1998) and the Espais Prize with Sueño Colectivo, RealTV, Gerona (2004). In audiovisual production she has directed the following experimental documentaries, among others: Daydream Mechanics, Tras las fronteras, Stop Transit, Anonymous Film Portrait, NUIT and Doble Escenario.


 

Bibliographical references

Altés, Elvira. “Violència privada, espectacle públic”, Capçalera. 87 (1998): 5-11.

BOURDIEU, Pierre. Masculine Domination. (Trans. by Richard Nice) Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.

 

braidotti, Rosi. Nomad subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994

 

Colaizzi, Giulia (ed.). Feminismo y Teoría del Discurso. Madrid: Cátedra, 1990.

 

FERNÁNDEZ DÍAZ, Natalia. La violencia sexual y su representación en la prensa. Barcelona: Anthropos, Colección cultura y diferencia, 2003.

Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real. The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1996.

FRIEDMAN, James. Reality Squared. Televisual Discourse on the Real. London: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

 

GAINE, Jane M. and Michael RENOV (editors). Collecting Visible Evidence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

 

HERMAN, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

 

Kaplan, Laurie. Over the Top in the Aftermath of The Great War. Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2001.

 

Knight, Julia. Women and the New German Cinema. London: Verso, 1992.

 

LÓPEZ DÍEZ, Pilar. Representación de género en los informativos de radio y televisión. Madrid: RTVE e Instituto de la Mujer, 2002.

 

McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television. Visual culture and public space. London: Duke University Press, 2001.

McCORMICK, Richard W. Gender, Film, and German History. Filmmaking by German Women Directors from Weimar to the Present, en Elke P. Frederiksen and Martha Kaarsberg Wallach (editors): Facing Fascism and Confronting the Past. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2000, 245-267.

—. “Rape and War, Gender and Nation, Victims and Victimizers: Helke Sander's BeFreier und Befreite”, Camera Obscura 46 (2001): 99-141.

Meyers, Marian. News Coverage of Violence Against Women. London: Sage Publications, 1997.

MILLER, TONY. Technologies of Truth. Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media (Visible Evidence Series nº2). Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999.

MULVEY, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Screen, 16.3, Autumn 1975, 6-1

—. "New Subjectivities: Documentary and Self-Representation in the Post-Vérité Age", en Diane Waldman y Janet Walker (eds.). Feminism and Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 84-94.

RUSSELL, Diana and Jill RADFORD. Femicide: the Politics of Woman Killing. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.

SCOTT, Joan W. "Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: Or the Uses of

Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism",  (1988) Feminist Theory: A Reader. Ed. Wendy Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski. Mayfield Publishing Company, 2000.

SILVERSTONE, R. Television and Everyday Life. London: Routledge, 1994.

Steyerl, Hito. "Documentarism as Politics of Truth," http://www.republicart.net, 2003.

Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories. The Vietnam War, the Aids Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California, 1997.

Villaplana, Virginia. "El discurso televisivo de la violencia: representación y registros enunciativos en las formas narrativas audiovisuales fragmentarias: videoclip y reportaje de investigación cultural", Revista Trípodos, Facultat de Ciències de la Comunicació (Blanquerna) URL, Barcelona, nº extra 2003.

Zelizer, Barbie. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust memory through the camera's eye. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998.



[1] See McCormick 2000.

[2] See McCormick 2001.

[3] See Gaine and Renov 1999.

[4] This notion is further explored and revised by the author in her text “Afterthought on Visual Pleasure” in Visual and Other Pleasures, London, Macmillan, 1989.

[5] Within the 'ethnoscapes' of postmodernity, today we are experiencing the proliferation of alternative figurations of post-humanist subjectivity which needs to be put into contact with forms of real and symbolically represented violence. The concept of alternative figurations of subjectivity contributed by the feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti alludes to the processes, political fictions that refigure the Woman not as 'the Other of the Self' as Irrigaría put it, but as the Other of other women in their vast diversity. These figurations, which are social representations, are all materially inserted and therefore are not metaphorical. See Braidotti 2004, 217.

[6] The term neotelevision, coined by Umberto Eco in his text The Strategy of Illusion in 1983 and subsequently expanded upon by authors such as Casetti, Calabrese, Verón and Wolton, directly stresses the blur between reality and fiction in postmodern television discourse. This brings us to the question: How has this transformation affected the representation of violence on television and by extension, the rest of audiovisual media in our society? Since the representation of violence adopts different degrees of "verisimilitude" through the "reality effect." As Roger Silverstone indicates when he refers to the theoretical approaches of the theorist Walter J. Ong (1977): "Television as an open system is distinguished (compared with the relatively closed system of writing and printing) by its peculiar ability to present the appearance and superimpose life and stage, the real and the imagined, the spontaneous and the rehearsed.” To see this idea developed, see Silverstone 1996, 226.

[7] See Fernández 2003. This author makes note of a question that marks a shift of direction in written representation in Spain. That is, which news sources are usually consulted to draw up a news item? What does research say about the news sources consulted by professional journalist on this subject? If during the period 1982-1983 and 1988-1989 organized feminist women represented the main news source of events about domestic violence, these were the organizations that defined the conflict. Yet during the Nineties, the police is the dominating communicative actor in the case of information about violent acts, representing 61.5 percent of the total number of informing individuals, institutions or organisms. Women only accounted for 7.5%; justice organisms,  9% and journalists and experts, 6%. See also López 2002. Clearly in Spain this is a context to be considered in the documentary forms that must assume the function of governmentality in representation.

[8] With regard to news models, the media, the public sphere and artistic practices, see also McCarthy 2001.

[9] This perspective in critical literary theory has been developed by Kaplan 2001. See also Herman 1999 and the text Captivity in this publication.

[10] This conceptual contribution has been made by the authors Russell and Radford 1992, 42.

[11] What are the contents of this investigation? Its development is grounded in the experience of a work method which I call critical theory of discourse in everyday violence. I've also taken into account other forms of representing violence and their effects on the everyday lives of women and their physical and mental health.

[12] See also by the same author: Feminists Theorize the Political (edited by Judith Butler.) New York: Routledge,1992. Schools of Thought: Twenty-five Years of Interpretive Social Science (edited by Debra Keates), Princeton University Press, 2001.

[13] See the following edited volumes by this same theorist and professor: Colaizzi, Giulia (ed.) (1995), Feminismo y Teoría fílmica Valencia: Ed. Episteme. Lectora: Revista de dones i textualitat 7: Dones i Cinema, ed. by Giulia Colaizzi. Universitat de Barcelona: Centre Dona i Literatura, 2001.

[14] For a revision of queer theory and everyday violence see: Multitudes n°12 "Féminismes, queer, multitudes", Printemps 2003 Ed. Exils (Paris). Web : http://multitudes.samizdat.net/

[15] See also Miller 1999.