Discourses of Denial
Mediations of Race, Gender, and Violence

By Yasmin Jiwani
Vancouver, B.C.: UBC Press, 2006

Discourses of Denial argues that racism and sexism constitute structural and discursive violence, and shows that physical violence against girls and women of color is often linked to, facilitated by, and trivialized on account of white patriarchal dominance in Canadian social institutions.  Jiwani is especially interested in media reporting about race, gender, violence, and their interconnections, as media discourse shapes and reinforces social constructs such as “common sense,” “reasonable behavior,” and the image of the “typical” Canadian that in turn influence social understandings of, and responses to, violence.  

Throughout the book, Jiwani demonstrates that the media and other social institutions engage in “discourses of denial” regarding the racism and sexism extant in Canadian society.  At best, these discourses characterize racist and sexist violence as rooted in individual ignorance, bias or pathology, a view which obscures the structural and socially pervasive nature of racism and sexism.  Reporting about intraracial conflict often invokes “the culturalization of violence,” i.e., the racist/xenophobic assumption that certain immigrant groups are culturally prone to violence.  This emphasis on nonwhite victims’ or perpetrators’ “cultural difference” frames them as non-Canadians, and implicitly paints Canadian society as egalitarian, colorblind, non-patriarchal, tolerant, and nonviolent.  This move is not only racist; it works to eliminate social responsibility for violence, and obscures the sexism inherent in much violence against women.  These misrepresentations of violence in turn amount to “symbolic annihilation” of the victims of racism and/or sexism, who are rendered invisible and essentially expendable – irrelevant to the flourishing of the Canadian social order.

Despite these strengths, the book also contains several flaws.  Jiwani’s conclusions are weakened by the localized nature of her data (four chapters are based on research centered in and around Vancouver, and another examines 20 days of reporting in the Montreal Gazette).  While she casts her work as a national “mapping” and draws conclusions about the “Canadian public imagination,” the “landscape of violence” in Canada, and the like, she never establishes that such regional data are representative of the entire nation.  Similarly, research findings from other countries are cited in support of her analysis, without consideration of similarities and differences in, for example, the media of each nation, immigration policies in each locale, and the norms of citizenship in each country.  In addition, judicial discourse is treated as if it is coterminous with media discourse, with no recognition that courts, attorneys, judges and juries are subject to different social, legal and institutional imperatives than journalism and reporters, and thus merit a distinct discourse analysis.

Perhaps most troubling, throughout the book Jiwani’s intention to emphasize intersectionality is often lost.  She frequently pays insufficient attention to the interplay of racism and sexism in the cases she analyzes, tending to highlight one form of oppression or the other, or examining intersectionality only in regard to one actor.  A related problem is the absence of attention to differences among immigrant groups; Jiwani does not do justice to cleavages based on class, sexual orientation, physical ability, language facility, religion and age that make some (sub-) groups more vulnerable to violence than others.  Though she rightly argues that she is trying to emphasize common structural barriers facing many immigrants, she overgeneralizes; intersectionality analysis must go deep enough to avoid essentializing non-whiteness or immigrant status.

Nonetheless, Jiwani stands on solid ground in casting racism and sexism as violence, and in insisting that social institutions need to name racist and sexist violence as systemic, so that it can’t be dismissed, trivialized, or misinterpreted.