Dangerous Discourses: Feminism, Gun Violence, and Civic Life

Dangerous Discourses brings together new work by feminist scholars who provide a multifaceted view of the ways contemporary media discourses inscribe particular understandings of gendered social identities, gun violence, and public policy. The chapters examine multiple media locations where discourses about guns and violence against women proliferate, including social media, mainstream news, National Rifle Association-sponsored magazines, gun research, public policy debates, popular magazines, and television drama. Utilizing theory and empirical research, this book helps us see more clearly how gender, sexuality, and other intersecting identities must be included in analysis of media discourses of guns and gendered violence. The authors discuss the role of patriarchal ideologies, and center feminist thought and concerns in order to get beyond the one-liners, sound bites, and truisms about bad guys, the Second Amendment, mental health, and personal freedom that currently dominate public debates about guns and violence. With its unique views on the ways gun violence and gender inflect each other in the United States, this book is designed for courses in media studies, women’s studies, and sociology.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments – Rachel Alicia Griffin: Foreword – Catherine R. Squires: Introduction – Part I: Reframing Guns, Violence, and Gender in Public Discourses – Carol A. Stabile and Bryce Peake: Coverage That Kills: Misogyny, "Mass Shootings", and the Masculine Economy of the U.S. News Cycle – Patty Sotirin: Silencers: Governmentality, Gender, and the Ban on Gun Violence Research – Ruth DeFoster & Catherine R. Squires: What Does Civility Have to Do with It? TV News Coverage of the 2011 Tucson Rampage Shooting – Sarah J. Jackson: Defining Women in Need: Online Coverage of the Violence against Women Act and Native and Undocumented Women – Part II: Recognizing Victims – Brittany Lewis: The Black Shadow of White Sympathy: Hunger Games, Disposable Black Girlhood, and the Unspoken Politics of the National Gun Debate – Catherine R. Squires: Making Visible Victimhood, Bringing Intersectionality to a Mass Shooting: #SAYHERNAME, Black Women, and Charleston – Part III: Men Who Shoot Women – Margaret Rhee: The Virginia Tech Tragedy and the LGBTQ Media: Responses of Normativity and Nation – Gayatri Devi: Misogyny, Gun Control, and Mental Illness: The Etiology of a Cultural Disease – Part IV Dames in Distress(?): When Gals Have Guns– Mary D. Vavrus & August Leinbach: Postfeminism at the Shooting Range: Vulnerability and Fire-Empowerment in the Gun Women Network – Pamela Hill Nettleton: Lady Killers: Twenty Years of Magazine Coverage of Women Who Kill Their Abusers – Amanda Keeler: Gender, Guns, and Survival: The Women of The Walking Dead – Contributors – Bibliography

About the Author :
Catherine R. Squires (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Dispatches from the Color Line (2007), bell hooks: An Introduction to Communication Theory (Peter Lang, 2013), and The Post-Racial Mystique (2014).