[Commlist] Call for papers - Media and sexist and sexual violence. Inform, denounce, raise awareness

We are pleased to announce the call for papers for the conference /Media 
and sexist and sexual violence. Inform, denounce, raise awareness/, 
which will take place on April 4 and 5, 2023 at the University of Paris 
Panthéon-Assas.

Proposals must be sent no later than December 1, 2022 to the following 
address: (mediavss2023 /at/ gmail.com) <http://gmail.com><http://gmail.com>

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  Argument

This symposium aims to question the role of the media in the production 
of information about sexual and gender-based violence (hereafter 
referred to as SGBV), which we understand as ‘a multiplicity of types of 
coercive, non-hierarchical acts imposed by men to control women and any 
people who do not belong to the hegemonic masculine, throughout their 
lives’ (Connell, 2014; Buisson and Wetzels, 2022: 4). Thus, our approach 
to violence is based on the concept of a continuum (Kelly, 1988), making 
it possible to apprehend the different forms of this violence in their 
plurality and to define them by the way they are linked together. Such 
violence manifests itself in several forms: physical, verbal, 
psychological and sexual, as well as economic and administrative. It 
forms part of relationships of domination intertwined with other factors 
such as race, age, social class, religion, disability, sexual 
orientation and gender identity (Crenshaw, 2005; Diederich, 2006; 
Direnberger and Karimi, 2019).

Over the past twenty years, many disciplines have taken up the issue of 
SGBV: psychology (Salmona, 2018; Pache, 2019), law (Le Magueresse, 2012 
and 2021; Moron-Puech, 2022), medicine (Jouault, 2020), political 
science (Boussaguet, 2009; Delage, 2017) and sociology (Debauche and 
Hamel, 2013; Le Goaziou, 2013 and 2019; Brown et al., 2020; Lacombe, 
2022). Different fields have been studied, such as armed conflicts 
(Audouin-Rouseau, 1994; Virgili and Branche, 2011; Cohen and Nordas, 
2014), public space (Coutras, 1996; Condon and Lieber, 2005; Dekker, 
2021), the family (Hamelin et al., 2010; Dussy, 2013), and work 
(Baldeck, 2021).

But SGBV has rarely been discussed by researchers in terms of its media 
coverage. While this question is the subject of studies abroad, 
particularly in English-language research (Bullock, 2007; Charlesworth 
and McDonald, 2013; Easteal et al., 2015; De Benedictis et al., 2019), 
this is far from being the case within French-language research, 
including in France itself. However, many dissertations in progress will 
soon be extending this state of the art (Beaulieu, Buisson, Itoh, 
Khemilat, Ruffio and Wetzels: see bibliography). The few existing 
studies focus on the media, but this research mainly focuses on femicide 
(Guérard and Lavender, 1999; Sapio, 2017, 2019, 2022) or on domestic 
violence; it particularly analyzes the press, and more specifically the 
daily press (Mucchielli, 2005; Hernández Orellana, 2012; Sépulchre, 
2019; Lochon, 2021).

Institutions are increasingly vigilant about the role played by the 
media in the visibility and prevention of SGBV: in this sense, it is 
interesting to note that the Istanbul Convention, ratified by France in 
2014, appeals to the ‘Participation of the private sector and the media’ 
in order to ‘to set guidelines and self-regulatory standards to prevent 
violence against women and to enhance respect for their dignity’ (art. 
17). And, in a note written by Margaux Collet in the same year for the 
French High Council for Gender Equality, she emphasizes, among other 
things, that it is crucial to include articles relating to acts of 
violence against women in the ‘Politics’ section of newspapers, rather 
than in the ‘Other news’ section; it is also inadvisable to use the 
‘words of the aggressor to create a headline’ or to use expressions such 
as ‘crime of passion’, a formula still very frequently found in the 
regional daily press (Ambroise-Rendu, 1993; Houel and al., 2003; Sapio, 
2019). For its part, in March 2019, the Committee of Ministers of the 
Council of Europe adopted new Recommendation on Preventing and Combating 
Sexism, noting that: ‘Another aggravating factor is where the reach, or 
potential reach, of the sexist words or acts is extensive, including the 
means of transmission, use of social or mainstream media and the degree 
of repetition.’

The persistence of sensitive areas in media discourse – despite these 
recommendations – stems, among other things, from the structural 
characteristics of journalistic circles (Neveu, 2000; Damian-Gaillard 
and Saitta, 2020; Damian-Gaillard et al., 2021) which are not immune to 
the sexist logics of the society in which they exist. The composition of 
the editorial staff, the training and the conditions of recruitment and 
development of journalists are significant factors in producing 
information, as shown by the results of the Global Media Monitoring 
Project (Biscarrat et al., 2017; Breda, 2022). Thus, certain culturally 
and historically situated journalistic practices and traditions persist.

While they are partly responsible for the propagation of hate speech and 
harmful narratives about SGBV, the media also play a fundamental role in 
the prevention and denunciation of the latter, by opening up spaces for 
the production of ‘counter- discourses’ (Baider and Constantinou, 2019) 
and responses to stigmatization, ranging from ‘destigmatization’ (Bazin 
and Sapio, 2020) to ‘resignification’ (Paveau, 2020). In some cases, 
journalists themselves can provide metadiscursive reflections on media 
productions; this is the case with the collective known as Prenons la 
Une, which endeavours to take a critical look at the problematic aspects 
of journalistic writing.


    Presentation of themes for papers

We are calling for proposals from different disciplines: information and 
communication sciences, history, sociology, semiology, law, political 
science, linguistics, and more broadly from any interdisciplinary 
approach able to shed light on the production, circulation and reception 
of media productions on SGBV. We thus subscribe to a broad vision of the 
notion of media, focusing not only on traditional information media – 
the press, television, radio, online media and other social media – but 
also on all media structures as defined by Benoit Lafon (2019), 
encompassing the publishing industry and exhibitions, as well as 
proto-media such as posters and engravings. Please note, however, that 
this call for papers relates only to informational discourse: we have 
excluded fiction and entertainment from our scope. Research on music, 
for example, will not be taken into account, especially since a 
symposium on the subject will soon be organized. Studies analyzing the 
media coverage of SGBV from a comparative perspective (international, 
over time, comparing different objects/platforms and types of violence) 
are welcome. Proposals can fall under one or more of the five proposed 
themes.


      Theme 1 – The conditions of production of media content

For this theme we call for papers that question the professional logics 
at work in the visibility or concealment of SGBV within the media 
industries themselves. Proposals that address this perspective may 
relate, for example, to media that have built their editorial line 
around SGBV, but also to services or mechanisms created by the media 
industries so as to editorialize this violence: the creation of pools of 
journalists dedicated to these questions, the creation of posts as 
gender editors or the drafting of good practice guides and other 
editorial charters. Also, the violence that takes place within media 
companies themselves can be questioned, in particular by examining 
emblematic case studies such as the Ligue du Lol, the Patrick Poivre 
D’Arvor (PPDA) affair and the ‘Bas les Pattes’ (‘Hands off’) column 
published in Libération in 2015. A more general apprehension of this 
violence could enrich the reflections envisaged here. To what extent is 
it visible in media industries (Beaulieu, 2019)? Is it heard and/or 
addressed, and if so, by whom? What are the strategies used to fight 
against SGBV in these spaces? Conversely, by what mechanisms are they 
discredited or silenced? Finally, this theme will be an opportunity to 
consider the vocabulary (for example, the (non)use of the term femicide) 
and formats mobilized in the media field to place violence on the agenda 
(such as the interactive online map of the newspaper Libération to count 
femicides).


      Theme 2 - Media representations of SGBV

Media discourses, whether ‘socially constitutive’ or ‘socially 
constituted’ (Fairclough, 1997), are not merely illustrative of the 
society that produces them but are considered in their capacity both to 
consolidate and to transform the latter. In other words, ‘journalistic 
writings are also social facts’ (Neveu, 2013: 64) that can reinforce 
sexist stereotypes (Coulomb-Gully, 2019), fuel violence and shape – by 
helping to naturalize them – stereotypical depictions of victims and 
attackers. Media devices can thus become the sounding board for hate 
speech defined ‘as any discursive or semiotic manifestation inciting 
hatred, whether ethnic, racial, religious, or based on gender or sexual 
orientation’ (Baider et al. Constantinou, 2019: 10). This type of 
discourse can either be characterized by violent formulations (from 
insults to verbal abuse) or it can be ‘disguised’, thus operating in a 
more insidious way. Without neglecting the contributions of feminist 
movements promoting, among other things, a critical scrutiny of media 
representations of SGBV (Ruffio, 2019; Lamy, 2021; Noetzel et al., 2022; 
Cavalin et al., 2022), we are asking for analyses of fact-based 
narratives attentive to the representations of the actors involved 
(victims, perpetrators of violence, witnesses, experts, politicians, 
activists), to the sources used by journalists (the police, the judicial 
system, local associations), to the images used and to the rhetorical 
devices deployed. These include the ‘other news’ style of information on 
SGBV; sensationalism; ascribing guilt to the victims; and the 
euphemization and even trivialization of SGBV (Burt, 1980; Benedict, 1992).


      Theme 3 - Media circulation of testimonials

Going beyond the #MeToo phenomenon already studied by French researchers 
(Cavalin et al., 2022), this symposium aims to broaden the analysis of 
the testimony of violence through media other than social networks: 
television, radio, podcasts, cinema, press, and publishing. Who is 
behind the publication of these testimonies and to what extent does 
their publication contribute to the constitution of the public problem 
of SGBV? Does the appropriation of testimonies by mainstream media 
contribute to democratizing the subject? Does such an appropriation take 
place at the cost of depoliticization? How does the voice of victims 
circulate in media and cultural productions (to varying degrees of 
visibility), and can we identify particular characteristics from the 
profiles of the victims (public or anonymous personalities) and types of 
violence? By way of example, case studies could be based on testimonials 
on the radio (the Baupin case, Mediapart and France Inter [Buisson, 
2022, forthcoming]); in the press (the Haenel case, Mediapart); on 
YouTube (Alix Desmoineaux, reality TV candidate, for Melty), in a book 
(Acquittée. Je l’ai tué pour ne pas mourir (Acquitted. I killed him so 
as not to die), by Alexandra Lange), on television (Delphine Leclerc, a 
victim of obstetric violence, in La Maison des Maternelles) or in a 
podcast (Ou peut-être une nuit, Charlotte Pudlowski).

We invite contributors to question the specificities of media platforms 
and their role in highlighting the power relations relating to SGBV 
testimonies, both for the audiovisual media (seating of guests, duration 
and modalities of exchanges between speakers, editing techniques, 
blurring of faces) and for the press (layout, anonymization, format, 
headings).

The place taken by the perpetrators of violence is also a subject for 
study. How do the media use the perpetrators’ words and does this 
editorial choice raise questions within the profession? Whether it is 
the sequence cut from the documentary Je ne suis pas une salope, je suis 
une journaliste (I’m not a slut, I’m a journalist), where Marie 
Portolano confronts Pierre Menès with the sexual assault to which he 
subjected her a few years earlier, or the ‘Lettre d’un violeur’ (‘Letter 
from a rapist’) published by Libération the same year, what does this 
tell us about editorial developments taking place within the media 
industries?


      Theme 4 – The mechanisms and language of prevention and awareness

The language used about the prevention and/or awareness of SGBV can 
foster a critique of existing norms and promote behaviours that can 
prevent and/or subvert it, but they can also function as receptacles for 
these same norms, despite their initial aims. In this perspective, the 
book Quand l’État parle des violences faites aux femmes (When the state 
speaks of violence against women) by Myriam Hernández Orellana and 
Stéphanie Kunert is an essential contribution that points out the limits 
and contradictions of institutional communication in France. Based on 
the analysis of a corpus of government campaigns, the authors underline 
the paradoxical nature of the language used in institutional 
communication where ‘women’s power to act is almost non-existent [...] 
while the State, as a tutelary speaker, systematically addresses them in 
the imperative (in particular by enjoining them to “break their 
silence”)’ (2014: 90-91). We therefore invite contributors to extend 
these observations by working on other French or foreign government 
initiatives, and on institutional campaigns led by associations and 
communities such as the Hubertine Auclert centre in Île-de-France. We 
are also looking for work analyzing educational content dealing with 
SGBV such as comics (Les Crocodiles by Thomas Mathieu and Mon vagin, mon 
gynéco et moi (My vagina, my gynecologist and me by Rachel Lev) and 
Instagram accounts (@stopfisha; @disbonjoursalepute), to mention just a 
few examples.

There are relatively few studies of the language used to prevent SGBV 
(Bruneel, 2018; Stassin, 2019; see also theme 4 of the 
‘(Cyber)harcèlement’/‘(Cyber)harassment’ symposium), and there are even 
fewer relating to the reception of the language and mechanisms for 
preventing violence against women (Potter and al., 2011; Romero, 2020; 
Sapio, 2020; Basile-Commaille and Fourquet-Courbet, 2021; Léon, 2021).

In this theme, we are also interested in media platforms and digital 
mechanisms when they are mobilized within the framework of a mediation 
with the perpetrators of violence, with the victims and the actors in 
the field (Oddone 2020; Sapio 2023), and in the framework of restorative 
justice. Recent years seem to have witnessed an increasing number of 
initiatives, such as the app developed by the Marseille city hall to 
fight against SGBV on the beach and the website ‘deposetaplainte.fr 
<http://deposetaplainte.fr>’.


      Theme 5 – The sensitive corpus of data: emotions and commitment in
      research

Studying practices and media discourses relating to SGBV can place 
researchers who come into contact with them in a situation of emotional 
vulnerability, in some cases identified as a ‘vicarious syndrome’ 
(Bourdet, 2021). But what can be said and done about such emotions 
experienced during research? We invite contributors to reflect on this 
question by foregrounding their places as social and political subjects. 
How does ‘our fieldwork, especially when it is difficult or painful, 
modify us, both as people and as researchers?’ (Paveau, 2013). How can 
repeated exposure to stories and images of violence affect research? 
What should we do when the media language that we study revives personal 
traumas? While the emotions experienced are likely to hinder scientific 
reflection, they can also trigger a power to act (Paveau, 2013), an 
‘emotional charge (émotricité)’ (Le Cam and Ruellan, 2017), and lead to 
the development of new hypotheses for research (Dalibert, 2021). The 
researcher may also not feel any particular emotions, and then feel at 
odds with the social reactions that people expect in the discussion of 
sensitive subjects.

In this theme, we are also interested in the place of affects in the 
relationship to fieldwork, and more specifically to the corpus of data, 
something much less often studied in existing research: for example in 
the process of data collection, during which a feeling of guilt towards 
the victims (Dussy, 2013) or sometimes one of joy (Joël, 2015) can 
emerge. Finally, there is the question of the conditions for sharing 
research results: how are we to talk about sensitive and gruelling data? 
What place should be given to victims and aggressors? Should we 
anonymize victims, or on the contrary give them a face and a name when 
they are sometimes reduced to a mere statistic (Salles, 2021)? How are 
we to communicate stories and images of violence without thereby 
rekindling their pain (Julliard, 2021)?


  Submission guidelines

Paper proposals should be sent to: *(mediavss2023 /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(mediavss2023 /at/ gmail.com)>**by* *1 December 2022.*

In order to guarantee the double-blind evaluation process, please send 
us (in Word format) :

  * a first anonymous document with your paper proposal of a maximum
    length of 500 words (specifying the title, the axis(es) in which the
    proposal fits, an abstract presenting the research question, a brief
    review of the literature and/or theoretical perspectives, elements
    of methodology) as well as an indicative bibliography.
  * a second document specifying the title of your paper and a
    bio-bibliographical note of 150 words maximum in which your name,
    first name, institutional affiliation, and a brief presentation of
    your research themes and main publications appear.

Notification of acceptance will be sent in mid-January 2023.


  Scientific committee

  * Laurence Allard (Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, IRCAV)
  * Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu (Université de Versailles
    Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, CHCSC)
  * Maëlle Bazin (Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas, CARISM)
  * Laetitia Biscarrat (Université Côte-d’Azur, LIRCES)
  * Laurie Boussaguet (European University Institute, Florence)
  * Charlotte Buisson (Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas, CARISM)
  * Maxime Cervulle (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, CEMTI)
  * Marlène Coulomb-Gully (Université Toulouse 2 Jean-Jaurès, LERASS)
  * Pauline Delage (CRESPPA-CSU, CNRS)
  * Sophie Dubec (Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, IRMÉCCEN)
  * Eric Fassin (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, LEGS)
  * Isabelle Garcin-Marrou (Institut d’Études Politiques de Lyon, ELICO)
  * Josiane Jouët (Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas, CARISM)
  * Cécile Méadel (Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas, CARISM)
  * Sandy Montañola  (Université Rennes 1, ARÈNES)
  * Bibia Pavard (Université Panthéon-Assas, CARISM)
  * Giuseppina Sapio (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, CEMTI)
  * Florian Vörös (Université de Lille, GERIICO)
  * Jeanne Wetzels (Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas, CARISM)


  Organizing committee

  * Charlotte Buisson
  * Maëlle Bazin
  * Giuseppina Sapio
  * Jeanne Wetzels
  * Cécile Méadel
  * Arielle Haakenstad



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