| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 60

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Yasmin Jiwani, Discourses of Denial: Mediations of Race, Gender and Violence (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2006)

YASMIN JIWANI OFFERS a persuasive interpretation of how media representations of violence sustain hierarchies of dominance through what she calls the discursive denial of systemic racism and sexism. Jiwani's primary concern is the perpetuation of racial and gender inequality in Canadian government policy and the mass media over the past 20 years. But Discourses of Denial is also about identity, and how the normalization of these discourses of denial affects the lived experiences of girls and women of colour in Canada. Using a Foucauldian approach which focuses on "structures of power and the discursive devices used to maintain them," (xiii) Discourses of Denial reveals how news media and government policies are not only gendered and racialized, but are also the corollaries of colonization and its legacy of violence. Jiwani provides great insight into contemporary social relations on both intimate and institutional levels by identifying and mapping the complex and interconnected terrain of racism, sexism, and violence embedded in everyday negotiations, discourses, and texts.

Discourses of Denial is a rich and generally succinct book, organized into four sections. The first addresses the theoretical and methodological frameworks used in her analysis. Although Jiwani claims that she is not writing for an audience "well versed" in theory, her book delves into postmodern, critical anti-racist, and feminist theory with little mercy. Jiwani argues that discourses of morality and mobility are central in governing the bodies of racialized women of colour, and that the dominant media propagates these discourses. In doing so, the media obscures the violence of race and racism by "reflecting an imagined community, its hegemonic ideals, and its fictions of assimilation." (29) If this first section is somewhat dense, it is perhaps a necessary foray into a subject matter that is so intangible and yet so intrinsic to our way of thinking. The reader is rewarded with a sense of empirical balance in the following three sections.

The second part of Discourses of Denial gives an analysis of media representations of the highly publicized murder of Reena Virk and the equally sensationalized Vernon "Massacre." These two incidents occurred within a year of each other, in 1996 and 1997, and both in the province of British Columbia. Reena Virk was a 14-year-old girl of South Asian origin who was brutally beaten and drowned by a group of 14-to-16-year-olds. While this group of seven girls and one boy was racially mixed, the two key instigators of Virk's murder were White. Through the Reena Virk case, Jiwani clearly demonstrates how the focus on girl-on-girl violence in media representations strategically obscured the role of racism and the interconnectedness between race and gender. Jiwani argues that the privileging of gender and the absence of any discussion of racism in either the news coverage or the subsequent court proceedings was made possible through the "common sense" of "everyday racism," in what is at issue is as much what is being said as what is not spoken. In contrast, the media coverage of the Vernon "Massacre" provides an example of how racism and sexism are deflected through what Jiwani calls culturalization. In this incident, Rajwar Gakhal, a woman also of South Asian origin, was murdered along with eight of her family members by her estranged husband. The media portrayed this violence in cultural terms, citing the Gakhal family's Sikh religion and the practice of arranged marriage as possible causes for violence. Culturalization, according to Jiwani, refers to the use of categories such as language and religion to signify race. Cultural racism, as opposed to biological racism, both naturalizes cultural differences and situates these differences against an invisible background of White dominance. Where the privileging of gender obscured the issue of race in the Reena Virk case, the privileging of culture performed a similar function in the case of the Vernon "Massacre." A notable strength in Jiwani's approach is her use of comparison. She effectively highlights the persistence and reality of White structures of dominance by comparing the media and court characterizations of Reena Virk with that of Kelley Ellard, Virk's White murderer. In the same way, Jiwani reveals how the naturalizing of cultural difference neutralized and thus reinforced systemic racism in her contrast of media interpretations of the Gakhal murders with the attempted murder of Sharon Velisek. The Velisek incident occurred less than two weeks following the Gakhal murders, in the same small town in British Columbia, and also involved an estranged spouse. However, where race was central to media representations of the Gakhal case, it was not an issue at all in the Velisek case.

Jiwani's detailed exploration of these sensationalized cases clearly demonstrates the significance of the intersecting influences of race and gender, but strays from her assertion that class plays an equally important role in shaping the lives of women of colour. The third section of Discourses of Denial brings class into the analysis in a substantial way while at the same time foregrounding the voices of girls and women of colour. The two chapters in this section are, in my opinion, the most powerful. Drawing on interviews with immigrant girls and young women of colour, Jiwani provides an aperture into a previously silent perspective. The big question being posed here concerns identity, and what exactly is required of racial/cultural Others to fit in. Here, Jiwani perceptively argues that the constraints of poverty for many immigrant girls and young women living in a culture of consumption are interconnected with issues of race and gender. Socioeconomic factors, then, as a specific correlate of immigration, play a significant role in the experiences of immigrant girls in the public school system, health care system, and more broadly, in consumer culture. The analysis could, however, be extended to ask how class differences among immigrant girls and women of colour – not always one and the same category – result in differential patterns of vulnerability to violence. Jiwani places as much stress on the ways that discourses of Whiteness, Otherness, Orientalism, and the hierarchical binaries of colonialism are imposed as on how these discourses are internalized and normalized by girls and women of colour. The idea of normalization implies that while the "White/Other" binary is undeniably significant, there is also a more complex hierarchy at work.

For example, in her discussion of the health care system, Jiwani shows how immigrant women are particularly susceptible to violence and abuse because of the constraints of immigration policies and patriarchal family structures. Immigrant girls and young women of colour are similarly vulnerable to violence because they are subject to the demands of two competing patriarchal discourses. But how would these intersecting racialized and gendered discourses shape the lives of those in interracial marriages, for second or third generation girls and women of colour, or for girls and women of mixed racial backgrounds? How do these discourses vary according to region, or in rural as opposed to urban settings?

In the final section of Discourses of Denial, Jiwani does address a more specific category of "Otherness" – the Muslim body – in a specific historical and geographical context – the aftermath of 9/11 in Montreal. Drawing from Said's work, Jiwani argues that the major Montreal newspapers embodied notions of Orientalism and the binaries of colonization in their representations of the event, and functioned not only to establish a climate of terror but one which obscured structures of White dominance. As Jiwani makes evident, the local context, particularly the distinct mix of English, French, Jewish, and Muslim communities in Montreal, shaped the dynamics of media coverage of the events of 9/11. Jiwani's key argument in this chapter is that the post 9/11 situation has emphasized the strategic use of discourses of denial under the banner of terror. More specifically, following 9/11, the Montreal news readership was bombarded by the mainstream media with representations of the binaries of East versus West, Christianity versus Islam, democracy versus oppression – essentially, those hierarchical binaries of us versus them which serve to reinforce structures of patriarchal White dominance.

The questions raised here are evidence that Discourses of Denial is undeniably a provocative and innovative work. Jiwani's most valuable contribution lies in the notion that the current status of race relations in Canada, characterized by normalization and denial, both allows for the possibility of certain types of violence and constitutes a powerful form of violence in itself. By identifying and explicating these discourses of denial, Jiwani provides a way of understanding racism that should be taken into consideration by those interested in the study of race as well as, more generally, scholars of Canada.


LILYNN WAN Dalhousie University

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