Session 7: Violence in the Turkish Media
8th Global Conference
Monday 4th May – Thursday 7th May 2009
Budapest, Hungary
Feminist Resistance to Violence in the Media in Turkey
Hanife Aliefendioglu
Eastern Mediterranean University, North Cyprus
The purpose of this study is to analyze how the feminist media institutions and campaigns cover the issue of violence in general, and violence against women in particular, within the specific cultural environment of Turkey.
Two magazines, Pazartesi and Amargi, and a campaign on sexism in Turkish media, will be explored for the study. Both magazines and the campaign are were conducted/published by feminists journalists in Turkey. With the exception of honor killings, violence against women is ignored by the Turkish mainstream media. Violence against women is a broad concept that includes domestic and sexual violence, premarital and extramarital sexual contact, adultery, rape, virginity examinations, girls/women who commit suicide, prostitution, and other sexual experiences. Sometimes being married, living alone, or being the mother of lost children makes a woman a potential target of violence.
I will also focus on the content of the magazines and the publications of the campaign to demonstrate the expanding coverage of violence by feminists which includes all forms of militarism, Islamic fundamentalism and nationalism and its effects on gender relations in society in shaping the culture of violence. Militarism in mainstream media equals masculinity
while non-violent, passive resistance is seen as feminine. In the last decade it is obvious that the feminist media, together with antiviolence movement, is not limited to domestic violence but also antimilitarism and ethnic violence.
Based on post-structural arguments, my aim is to explore the underlying cultural meanings of violence within the feminist discourse in Turkey. “
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Is it the Representation of Violence or the Violence of Representation? A Brief Analysis of Television News Stories about Terrorism in Turkey
Özge Özaydin
Dogus University, Istanbul, Turkey
The representation of violence can create spaces for resistance to violence. To bring the various types of violence (domestic and sexual violence, public violence, workplace violence, political violence, etc.) into sharp relief through the medium of an art work or a television news story can create sensitivity in people about violence, broaden their views and ideas about violence, and, moreover, induce them to act against violence. On the other hand, the representation of violence can recreate the culture of violence. The manner of the representation can incite people to commit violent acts. The representation of violent acts as glamorous, easy, or justified can inspire imitation. The continual-cumulative exposure to the representation can desensitize viewers to violence. As can be seen, the representation of violence both creates spaces for resistance to violence and recreates the culture of violence. The representation of violence has always the possibility of developing into the violence of representation. Because of the difficulty of walking this thin line, all people who set out to represent violence (artists, writers, politicians, media workers, social scientists, etc.) have a moral responsibility of doing it.
Like in many countries worldwide, the representation of violence in television news stories is very problematic in my country too. One of the most fundamental discussions is the manner of the representation of terrorism continuing for generations in Turkey. We possibly understand the situation of victims of terrorism who have suffered bodily injury and of dependants of persons who have died as a result of terrorism. But we do not indeed understand the situation of people who were exposed to television news stories about terrorism. The manner and the frequency of broadcasting have a bad effect on viewers and create a new victim category: the victims of television news stories about terrorism. Do the television news stories about terrorism sensitize or desensitize people to violence? Do they make people the exponents or the opponents of violence? The aim of this presentation is to examine the possibility of developing the representation of violence into the violence of representation, along with the focus on the analysis of television news about terrorism in Turkey.
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