Juggling diverse subjects that range from Zinedine Zidane to murder victims, Concordia Communications Studies professor Yasmin Jiwani looks at how race and gender affect media representations, violence against women and identit
Communications Studies professor Yasmin Jiwani’s work on race, gender and media spans a broad framework. She says, “There are so many different directions: criminology, women’s studies, cultural geography, communications.”
It was the head-butt felt round the world. In extra time during the 2006 World Cup final, French soccer icon Zinedine Zidane, apparently reacting to a disparaging remark about his sister made by Italy’s Marco Materazzi, turned purposefully, strode toward the Italian player and delivered a head-butt that lifted Materazzi off his feet, landing him on the ground. Zidane received a red card and was ejected, and the game ended with France losing 5-3 in a penalty shootout. Had Zidane not been sent off, many feel the outcome would have been different.
The French-born Zidane’s portrayal by his country’s media after this, his final act before retiring, ran the gamut from national hero to scoundrel. His actions were variously attributed to his Algerian descent, that he is a man of integrity defending his women, that he is a hothead, a rogue, a Muslim, from a bad neighbourhood, a competitor . . . and on it went. Finally, the press, public opinion and France’s president seemed to settle for condemning the act, not the man.
How the media, and by extension the public, use or avoid racial and cultural frameworks to make sense of incidents like these is the purview of Yasmin Jiwani, an Associate Professor in Concordia’s Department of Communications Studies and the director of its BA program. Her body of work largely deals with how mediated portrayals help us understand ourselves, those around us and our place in society. In the aftermath of the Zidane affair, she delivered a plenary paper, “Reading Zidane: Race, Religion and Contesting Masculinities,” at the 2006 conference of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.
How this self-described sedentary academic who has never participated in organized sports came to present to a body devoted to the study of sport has more to do with the interdisciplinarity of her work than the obvious appeal of putting the Zidane incident under a microscope. Indeed, Jiwani has a BA in Psychology from the University of British Columbia, and an MA in Sociology and PhD in Communications from Simon Fraser University. “So the sports thing happened serendipitously,” she says. “They asked me to present at the plenary session, and I decided to talk about this in relation to notions of community.”
Convenient denial
But while this topic was no doubt as entertaining to study as it was to follow the game, its aftermath and the spike in demand for lip readers to decipher the grievous insult that was the undoing of Zidane, Jiwani normally focuses on weightier matters, such as in her recent book, Discourses of Denial: Mediations of Race, Gender, and Violence (UBC Press, 2006).
In Discourses of Denial, Jiwani uses real examples from the lives of immigrant girls and women of colour to consider how racism, sexism and violence are interwoven deep within the foundations of Canadian society. One of the cases she examines is the 1996 Vernon, B.C., massacre in which Mark Chahal methodically gunned down nine members of his estranged wife’s family. Jiwani’s contention is that this particular killing spree was framed as an “ethnic phenomenon” and cast as a manifestation of violence that is supposed to be endemic to the Indian community, when in fact the media should have been focusing on the fact that authorities failed to act in spite of repeated complaints. “Culturalized explanations used for violence essentially allow other agencies to abdicate responsibility,” Jiwani says.
Conversely, when it is convenient, Jiwani describes, racial and cultural explanations are removed from incidents, as was the case with Reena Virk. The 14-year-old Virk was killed in 1997 during an attack by a group of teens, mainly girls. But as the story developed in the media, the focus was on girl-on-girl violence and bullying, rather than any racial element that may have played a part when the teenager of Indian origin was beaten and drowned.
“Essentially, a cultural framework is used to portray groups as deviant when it suits, to show that they are not deserving of social intervention,” Jiwani explains. “But other times, the cultural framework is left aside when it means looking at issues of our society.”
French midfielder Zinedine Zidane seconds after head-butting Italian defender Marco Materazzi during the World Cup 2006 final football match between Italy and France.
Media coverage
From sports heroes to mass murders to swarming — what’s the common thread? “The important part of my work is the notion of fitting in and belonging,” Jiwani says. “Instead of taking a psychological or intra-psychic perspective, I take a sociological perspective and consider how society and social institutions contribute to how people fit in and how they feel about their place. I use the terrain of the media because they reflect images back to communities. They are the amplifiers.”
And in a country that prides itself on an image of multiculturalism and tolerance, Jiwani’s work takes on even greater importance. “Multiculturalism is this national character that is promoted in media coverage — that of a peaceful kingdom in a state of harmony,” she says. “But is this really true? There is so much we gloss over, including the fact that we create underclasses and how we go about doing that. So I interrogate the reality.”
Jiwani no doubt had plenty of fodder for her research with a number of high-profile events in the last year in Quebec, including reporter Jan Wong’s comment after the murderous rampage at Dawson College that the shooter was the product of the exclusion and racism of Quebec society; the Léger Marketing survey that revealed that 43 per cent of Quebecers were self-proclaimed mild racists and 15 per cent were moderate racists; the infamous Hérouxville resolutions concerning prospective immigrants that, among other things, prohibited the stoning of women; and the banning of a Muslim girl from a soccer game in Laval for wearing a hijab. (These issues are covered in RACElink, a biannual publication of RACE [Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equity], which Jiwani edited recently.)
Jiwani maintains that the media play these incidents received evoked a society under siege, reacting to the threat of outsiders and what she terms “the impending dilution if not erasure of the dominant culture.” In virtually every incident, the key term that emerged was “safety”: from the safety of playing soccer with a hijab, to the safety of purported practices of certain immigrant groups and, more broadly, the safety of Quebec society in the face of different cultures. But Jiwani maintains that this notion of safety is consistently defined from the perspective of how these other cultures threaten “our” society, rather than the safety of those who are the target of exclusion, and sometimes violence. Eventually, studying issues of race, culture and violence will bring one up against the topic of war. In the last chapter of Discourses of Denial, Jiwani started to delve into 9/11, specifically looking at gender, violence and national identity. She is now in the process of taking that research further, considering how the media coverage at the time communicated notions of gender.
“I found that Afghani women were construed as abject victims who needed to be saved by the West, putting these women in a position that diminishes their agency,” Jiwani says. “Laura Bush’s statement that these were oppressed women who needed to be rescued was so revealing. The coverage perpetuated that idea by not letting their voices be heard. Even Muslim women raised in the West weren’t quoted frequently. And there were several stories where reporters walked around in a burka to experience what it was like. Why not speak to women wearing the burka? Why take away their voice?”
Which, oddly, brings us back to Zidane. One of the narratives of the story as reported in the media was Materazzi’s attack on “Zidane’s women,” and Zidane’s being a Muslim, albeit non-practicing, was central to how the story was understood. “What struck me from a feminist perspective was that you had one towering sports figure, Zidane, against another, Materazzi. Materazzi said something to Zidane about his sister or his mother, and Zidane responded in defence of their honour. And while the coverage was intense and went on for a long time, nobody went to the women until the end.”
The reinstatement of Zidane’s status as a French hero was no surprise to Jiwani. Failure to resurrect him would likely have exacerbated the recent volatility in France spurred by racial and economic tension. Zidane, as a morality play of race, is crucial to how French society understands itself. He is the good Muslim, the assimilated other who symbolizes the success of the modern nation.
“This is standard with the representation of people of colour or outsiders in the news. They are either depicted as deviants or criminals, or they are held up as ambassadors. This is especially the case in sports. They become emblems of identity. And there is always this racialized discourse behind it; in this case racial logic was used to recoup Zidane’s stature and restore him to fame.”
Rhonda Mullins, MA 96, is a Montreal freelance writer.
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