Discourses of Denial: Mediations of Race, Gender, and Violence

Jonathan Anuik is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and
president of the HGSC at the University of Saskatchewan.

Canadian scholars of race tend to isolate it from gender when studying
policy, the media, and education. Yasmin Jiwani’s monograph deploys
race and its close cousin sex as the contours that condition violence,
and situates violence in the larger terrain of power. Jiwani splits up
her discussion of sexist and racist violence into four components:
theoretical and conceptual discourses on violence, race, and the media;
case studies of sexist and racist violence and their reportage in the
media; the voices of women who have experienced violence; and
“mediations of terror.” The setup allows readers to engage with
Jiwani’s conceptual goal of dismantling the “common sense” and the
“normal” while seeing how they affected media coverage of the murder
of Victoria student Reena Virk and the “Vernon massacre.”

Jiwani’s scholarship is enriched by her involvement in anti-racist
and feminist organizing by women’s groups and Status of Women Canada
and in studies with immigrant women’s organizations. In Part 4, Jiwani
assesses the effect of the events of September 11, 2001, in terms of
racism and sexism and the “common sense” and the “normal”
through a study of newspaper coverage on the day of the attacks and in
the months immediately following.

Discourses of Denial will have a wide appeal. Scholars of race and
gender will appreciate the interconnectedness of race and gender.
Activists involved with anti-racist and feminist organizing will
identify with the strategies used to combat the media’s stranglehold
on public opinion. Finally, students entering the field of women’s and
gender studies, race studies, and media studies will be able to engage
with the author’s lively prose.