Session 5(b): Warriors, Punk and Metaphors

Session 5B: Warriors, Punk and Metaphors
Chair: Raphael Cohen-Almagor

The Gender Factor as Revealed by the Experiences of Women Warriors: The Middle Ages and Today
Katrin Sjursen
Department of History, University of California Santa Barbara, USA

The media flurry surrounding the female general commanding the soldiers who abused Iraqi prisoners and a female private who participated in the abuse has raised interest in women’s place in warfare, highlighting gender roles as a key factor in the likely emergence of violence. Exploring reactions to women who participated in war – as commanders, aggressors, heroes, victims, or supporters – reveals how conceptions of “proper” gendered behaviour underlie justifications for both causes of and deterrents for violence. By using the methodology of studying women’s roles in warfare, scholars will find that violence depends just as much on the ideas regarding gender roles as it does on economic and political factors.
For example, in the fourteenth century legists argued that women could not inherit the crown because women could not properly keep peace. Practice, too, followed suit: in the thirteenth century, Blanche of Navarre was forced into armed conflict when, as a widow, her nieces’ husbands challenged her for control of the county of Champagne . Yet positive descriptions of female commanders demonstrate that chroniclers believed that women could both establish and maintain order. Likewise, many medieval people believed so strongly in the ability of women to maintain peace that they designated women as sole heirs or as regents (as Blanche of Navarre acted for her minor-aged son).
This dichotomy holds true today. On May 7, 2004, the Washington Times reported that Muslims’ negative reaction to females holding power over male prisoners would likely result in violence, and in the U.S. , voters refuse to elect a female president, in other words, a female commander-in-chief. On the other hand, the U.S. believed enough in women’s ability to maintain order to place a woman in control of the prison camps, and the experiences of Margaret Thatcher and Madeleine Albright demonstrate the western confidence that women can establish and maintain order.

Punk in the Politics of N.Ireland
Roy Wallace
School of Media, Language and Music, University of Paisley, Ayr Campus, Ayr, Scotland

This aim of this paper is to explore the representation of cultural identity and examine how communities in conflict (specifically in N.Ireland) are portrayed by the media. To also examine the role of the media in helping re-enforce our understanding of sectarian stereotypes and why this may contribute to the prioritising of representations of sectarian violence and community conflict in N.Ireland and its possible resolution above alternative representations. I will argue that such naïve realist representations are interlinked with institutional practices and conventions of production, which are influenced politically by dominant concepts of balance and impartiality. Furthermore that, these concepts inform the conceptual framework and structures of production thereby contributing to the binary representation of cultural identities in N.Ireland as a polemic discourse through which the media assume a false but dominant neutrality.
These relationships present cultural activity in a one dimensional and over-simplistic way, which may have an impact on the potential for alternative representations of progressive and oppositional identities to emerge outside of contemporary institutional and cultural frameworks. I will present examples of ‘institutional’ documentary texts, which have informed my own documentary practice. I will also present a critical analysis of my engagement with these concepts along with my own work (Big Time 2003 30mins), as a practice based strategy to challenge dominant sectarian representations of cultural identities in N.Ireland. By using such strategies in practised based research, the aim is to politicise this activity and to reclaim and re-present a particular narrative of the period 1977-82 in Belfast.
Therefore, I would discuss these themes using a series of contextualising video texts and my own research materials to explore how the punk subculture has influenced a narrow but influential cultural space which is normally unrepresented in dominant realist representations of cultural activity and conflict in N.Ireland.

Global Trafficking: Hollywood’s Rogue Cop as Metaphor for Nation
Marilyn Yaquinto
American Culture Studies, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA

Hollywood ’s rogue cop character—a cowboy-like (white) knight of the mean streets—has expanded his enemies list from outlaws and thugs of the urban ghetto to transnational terrorists of the nation-state. The Hollywood cop has come to symbolize the American white male as the last man standing, battling alone the enemies of liberty. As a performative figure, he helps to construct what he also exists to reflect: whiteness, hegemonic masculinity, and American ideals about tainted heroism, state violence, and the machismo of the U.S. in the New World Order. Whether G-man, spy, or detective, he is ubiquitous on screens around the world, personifying the professed beneficence and export of American ideology; as such, he confers legitimacy on U.S. policies that behave similarly, defying international law and consensus, and claiming a moral authority to which only he (and the America he represents) has access. The U.S. and its popular culture juggernaut first expanded their crimefighting orbit during the Truman era, when the president endorsed films as a weapon to win America converts and customers. Hollywood has long echoed the nation’s ambitions to “police” the world, reflecting a fusion of heroism and villainy, and a crusade to use violence as the ugly means to a noble end. This paper traces one example of the Americanization of a global story, transforming the British miniseries Traffik (1989), retaining a measure of its interlocking webs of capitalism, complicity, and crime when made into a film (2000). But once retooled as a TV miniseries in 2003, its approach exposes an awakened jingoism and an increased appetite for violence in the wake of 9/11. With Afghanistan as a backdrop and drug trafficking as a cover story, it charts a familiar story of a rogue American cop who forsakes the rule of law for the violent abuse of law and order.

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