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Janine Little
QUT
'Apprehended Violence and Journalism's Woman: News and Gendered Justice in Australia'
This paper begins a cultural analysis of the portrayal of gendered justice in Australian journalism as filtered through dominant apprehensions of race.
My use of the word 'apprehension' has multiple inferences, including historic understandings of threatening/desirable female identity that still function very strongly as registers of representation for news media. An 'apprehensive' dominant culture seeks to contain or 'apprehend' particular kinds of difference as being somehow removed from justice as a social imperative, and/or as a fairly distributed outcome of law.
By focussing on two case studies - trafficking of young Thai and Vietnamese women as 'sex slaves', and the 'Girl in the Cupboard' case involving Natasha Ryan - I will consider how contrasting notions of identity and justice are reproduced through journalistic practice. The markedly different treatment of each 'victim' will be examined as a form of violent representation of women that depends on familiar versions of racial and cultural entitlement.
My paper is intended to begin a longer study of journalism's role in reproducing dominant ideological constructions of gender.
Bio: Janine Little teaches, writes, and researches in areas of journalism, cultural theory, and race relations. She has published widely in these areas, and has worked as a journalist in Australia and Britain. Her Doctoral dissertation, from the University of Queensland, was a study of race through culture in Australia and America.
<jmlittle@pacific.net.au>