Need help finding an article.

jeff_the_nurse · 2016-12-03T16:17:52+00:00

Effacing the Male:incidentalizing, displacement, exclusion

See also the montage of news reports about male perpetrators vs male victims in ManWomanMyth - Men Don't Exist

The effacing of male victims in mass media is generally accomplished by three interrelated strategies.

The first might be called incidentalizing. Modern news, as noted, is a hierarchical creature. It generally "leads" with the dominant theme of the article, which the headline is also meant to convey. Many newspapers, printing or reprinting an article or wire-service report, will include only (a version of) the headline and the first several paragraphs of the story. Thus, to relegate an important theme to passing mention in the middle reaches of the article, or to introduce it only at the end, is effectively to render it incidental and inconspicuous, if not outright invisible.

A second strategy is displacement. Here, the male is defined by some trait or label other than gender -- even when gender obviously, or apparently, is decisive in shaping the experience or predicament being described. During the Kosovo war, typical displacement terminology included designations such as "Kosovars," "ethnic Albanians," "bodies," "victims," and "people." In this context, consider Daniel Williams' report in The Washington Post on the mass murder at Istok prison, a facility bombed by NATO planes in late May 1999. After the last of three bombing raids, the Serbs paraded 19 male corpses before western media, declaring that they were the bodies of prisoners killed by NATO. It now appears likely that many of these men, along with up to 100 others, were massacred by the Serbs in one of the war's larger acts of gendercide. Here is how Williams reported the Serbs' propaganda show:

Bodies of dead prisoners were shown to reporters lying around the prison courtyard Saturday [22 May], and on Monday [24 May] another group of corpses inside a foyer entrance to a cellblock. ... Despite the presence of 1,000 mostly ethnic Albanian prisoners, [NATO] bombed it twice Saturday and once early Sunday. No one seemed to take into account the possible extra danger to the prisoners ... 19 bodies of prisoners lay in and around the courtyard, and on Monday those bodies lay in the same spots ... An inspecting magistrate said the bodies were left outside because he had not had time to carry out his work, what with all the bombing. ... Then there was the new group of dead on display Monday ... Twenty-five bodies in the foyer, some lined up on top of one another domino-style, many with streaks of blood on their bodies ... These corpses were not dusty. ... No one seemed to know why the 19 Saturday bodies were left outside, but ... (Williams, 1999, emphasis added.)

There was precisely one reference to "men" in the story: to the "masked [Serb] men with rifles" hovering around the facility. Males as agents of violence were visible, and gendered; as victims, they were effaced from the discourse.

The third marginalization strategy is simply exclusion. The trope most commonly adopted here can be summarized in the little-examined phrase, "including women" -- or, equally commonly, "including women and children." The trend has been persistently evident in media coverage of the Bosnian war, as a report as recent as October 1999 makes plain (duly emphasized throughout):

Bosnian forensic teams have exhumed 251 bodies, mainly of Muslim civilians, in the Serb-run half of Bosnia in the last two weeks ... The bodies, victims of the 1992-95 Bosnian war, were exhumed from more than 14 mass graves each containing up to 15 corpses, as well as individual graves ... The majority, including 12 women and five children, were executed by Bosnian Serb forces who had captured these regions at the beginning of the war ... Some 3,000 people, mainly Muslims, were still missing in northwestern Bosnia. (Agence France-Presse, 1999a.)

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Title	Need help finding an article.
Author	jeff_the_nurse
Upvotes	10
Comments	2
Date	December 3, 2016 3:49 PM UTC (9 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/5ga40k/need_help_finding_an_article/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/need-help-finding-an-article.936467 https://theredarchive.com/post/936467