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This article analyses two visual representations of highly publicized cases of violence against women in Canada by drawing on innovative bridging of Gramsci’s hegemonic common sense and Deleuze’s cliche. I argue that as elements in the representational assemblage surrounding these cases, both cultural productions contributed to the construction of such acts of gendered violence as national events.Both images exploit the capacity of cliche to move images towards meaning and to move the audience into and out of affective proximity with those being represented. The first case study, a series of paintings by Pamela Masik entitled The Forgotten, fails to close the distance between the viewer and the marginalized women depicted. By contrast, the effect of cliche in the second case study, an episode of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s series, The Fifth Estate, is to create subjective distances, reinstating dominant common sense about the boundaries between strangers and neighbours and upholding th...

In 2013, Russell Williams, a colonel in the Canadian military, pled guilty to eighty-eight violent charges, including two charges of sexual assault and two charges of first-degree murder. Drawing on narratives of (trans)gender anxiety popularized by horror films, the media built an explanatory framework which fixated upon Williams’ fetishistic cross-dressing. This article interrogates the site where fantasies of absolute sexed difference coincide with fantasies about military phallicism in the national psyche. Drawing on Lacan’s paternal metaphor, I argue that gender operates as a symptom, assuaging the anxiety that arises when a nation is confronted with the fallibility of sex binaries and phallic authority. The symbolic castration of Colonel Williams provides a case study of how the quest for a phallic master has cultivated a nation of hysterics.

This article centers around two questions: (a) What do social workers do at the sites where psychopharmaceuticals and practice with children and youth converge? and (b) Are social differences reinscribed through our practices at these sites of convergence? A Foucauldian analytics of governmentality provides a lens through which the authors explore how social workers function within neoliberal discourses, specifically when they are called to reinforce compliance and disciplinary practices in their interventions with children and youth. Drawing on two practice examples, the authors argue the importance of an analytics of historical contexts of race and ability when working with medicated children and youth.

Over the past decade, Canadian media coverage of street sex work has steadily increased. The majority of this interest pertains to graphic violence against street sex workers, most notably from Vancouver, British Columbia. In this article, the authors analyze newspaper coverage that appeared in western Canadian publications between 2006 and 2009. In theorizing the violence both depicted and perpetrated by newspapers, the authors propose an analytic framework capable of attending to the process of othering in all of its complexity. To this end, the authors supplement a Foucauldian analysis of abjection by considering the work of Judith Butler along with Julia Kristeva's conceptualization of abjection. Using excerpts from western Canadian newspapers, the authors illustrate how the media's discursive practices function as triggers for the process of cultural abjection by inscribing street sex workers with images of defilement. The authors argue that newspaper coverage of street sex workers reinforces the inviolability of normalized life by constantly reiterating the horror reserved for abjected bodies.

Over the past decade, street sex workers and their families garnered considerable media attention through extensive coverage of disappeared and murdered women in Western Canada. The research presented here examines whether recent media accounts differ from past coverage given that families and friends of disappeared and unaccounted for women inserted themselves into media discussions and circulated alternative readings of their stories. We found that coverage was dominated by two discourses: Vermin-victim discourse demonstrates the tensions between historically dominant conceptualizations and more recent ideas promulgated by families; and risky lifestyle discourse is related to neo-liberal ideologies about personal choice and responsibility.