Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Shepherd, Laura J.

Titel

Telling stories: An essay on gender, violence and popular culture

Ist Teil von

• Gender, Violence and Popular Culture, 2013, p.15-26

Ort / Verlag

United Kingdom: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The purpose of this introductory essay is to provide an overview of the theoretical framework underpinning the essays that follow. I also locate the book as a whole in the disciplinary literature of International Relations (IR) with which I seek to engage and from which I draw analytical and theoretical insights. This chapter comprises three substantive sections. In this first section I explain the context and rationale for the book as a whole, discussing the motivations for its production and the contribution I hope to make. The second section discusses the major thematic concerns of the book, exploring the conceptualisations of gender and violence that inform my analysis and the reasons underpinning my placement of these concepts as central to the analytical work I undertake here. Finally, I discuss the theoretical interventions and methodological strategies that distinguish the essays collected here, paying particular attention to the imbrication of narrative theory with poststructural theories of IR. This collection is perhaps best described as ‘similar to a patchwork quilt; although each piece is individually crafted in detail, it is the eventual sewing together of the pieces that provides the overall image’ (Wibben 2011: 8). The individual essays that follow all speak in some way to the representation of gender and violence in television shows, and, further, investigate the ways in which these narrative representations function alongside, and in part constitute, other conceptual frameworks that are central to the narrative worlds of each artefact. My own location in the discipline of IR ensures that I attend to these representations with a critical eye to what these stories can tell us about our wider social locations that are at once personal, political, local and global, and I focus on television because it is a ‘crucial site for the production, circulation, and sometimes the contestation of, meanings’ (Weldes 1999: 120). This was a hard book to write. It was quite an easy book to research – finding evidence to support my analysis of the textual artefacts with which I engage, interpreting the artefacts themselves (otherwise known as ‘watching television’); these were relatively straightforward tasks to undertake – but it was a hard book to write. More specifically, it was a hard book to think about writing. Aside from the critical voices within the discipline from which I write, which insist that ‘serious’ scholars of IR don’t spend valuable research time analysing or writing about television shows (for an elegant elaboration of this point, see Weldes 2006: 178 and passim), there was an insistent critical voice in my own head asking what exactly I thought was the point of this particular project. In other research activities, I have not struggled to outline the objectives motivating my investigations: to examine the ways in which United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 was formulated and the political processes governing its drafting and adoption, for example; or to write about the discipline of International Relations in a way that both makes it accessible to students and illuminates the gendered logics of its conceptual and physical organisation. The core aim of the former project was to understand better the politics and practices of the Security Council and its treatments of gender and violence (see Shepherd 2008a), of the latter, to teach IR in a manner commensurate with my research priorities: to communicate to students of the discipline that to construct an understanding of global politics that does not take the gendered human subject seriously is to construct a very thin and partial account indeed (see Shepherd (ed.) 2010). By contrast, with this project I found it difficult to articulate a persuasive answer to the most fundamental challenge to any research project: ‘So what?’ This precipitated something of a crisis of confidence with the project. If I could not account for my aims and objectives in the privacy of my own thoughts, how could I hope to produce a valuable contribution to disciplinary knowledge or intellectual debate?2 I spent a long time considering the point of the book that I wanted to write, reading and re-reading those texts that had inspired me to take on this project in the first place (see, for example, Weldes (ed.) 2003; Weber 2006; Shapiro 2009), and got to thinking further about the point not only of the book I wanted to write but also ‘the point’ of poststructuralism, the politics and framework supporting my analytical investigation. Judith Butler once wrote that the core analytical insight offered by postructuralism is ‘that power pervades the very conceptual apparatus that seeks to negotiate its terms, including the subject position of the critic’ (1994: 157). Politically engaged critique, therefore, can attend to the ‘conceptual apparatus’ that structures knowledge in any given society and investigate not only how we (think we) know what we (think we) know – and mostly take for granted – but also what this means for who ‘we’ are. The categories we use to think with, those categories that are frequently assumed to be descriptive, such as ‘white’, ‘female’, ‘heterosexual’ and so on, are constituted politically and are constitutive rather than reflective of identity. That is to say, such categories are always normative, rather than purely technical. To give an example: when we theorise the world as constituted by a population of juridically equal sovereign states, per the ‘myth of Westphalia’ (Osiander 2001; see also Paul 1999) that traces the birth of the modern state system to the treaties comprising the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, this has normative implications for the recognition of statehood, the production and reproduction of a particular form of political authority, and the legitimacy or otherwise of a range of international activities, including but not limited to the use of force in international affairs. The acceptance that the world really is populated by juridically equal sovereign states, the making and sustaining of this ontopolitical claim, is produced by and productive of a whole host of other, related claims that inform how we then engage with the world: it makes meaningful, for example, the concept of ‘failed states’; demands that we can carefully account for the motivations of ‘humanitarian intervention’; insists that we as individuals cannot move across borders arbitrarily but rather must rationalise such movements and ensure that they occur within the predetermined framework of who belongs inside and outside of a particular ‘state’. This conceptualisation of the world, and of being in the world, requires that I think carefully about how the ‘conceptual apparatus’ regulating knowledge are produced and reproduced. We assume that our categories of thought and of analysis are stable in our everyday lives; a poststructural analysis engages critically with that stability, asking how and under what circumstances it is (re)enforced. In very basic terms, I suggest in this book that our cognitive frameworks are (re) produced in and through the stories we tell ourselves and others. We glean ideas and ideals about the world and our place in it from the stories we are told; we reproduce these ideas and ideals in the stories we tell. Some stories are highly specific to their social and political context and some stories have wider resonance. ‘The narratives of the world are numberless’, according to Roland Barthes (1977: 79); whether we call them myths, tales, fables, history, journalism or discursive formations they are all stories. We are all stories. ‘Individual conceptions of the Self are narratively based and are derived from the “tales” we tell about who we are’ (Delahanty and Steele 2009: 526). Hidemi Suganami refers to this theoretical position, which assumes the centrality of narrative to social experience, as ‘“conventionalist narrative monism”, in as much as it suggests that, conventionally, there is really only one way to give an account of social events or phenomena – to present a narrative’ (1999: 371). Further: narrative is not just an academic subject. There is a basic human drive to hear and tell stories. Children very early develop what one might call a basic narrative competence: demanding stories, they know when you are trying to cheat by stopping before the end.