1 CONTENT ANALYSIS OF VIOLENCE AND GENDER IN MEDIA AIMED AT YOUNG PEOPLE IN ICELAND

• Main Author: Annadís G. Rúdólfsdóttir
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.557.6046; http://www.iiav.nl/epublications/2003/Gender_and_power/5thfeminist/paper_350.pdf

For the last year I have been part of an interdisciplinary research team in Iceland involved in a research project called “Gender, youth and violence”1. The overall foci of this research can be divided into two parts. On one hand we are interested in what kind of violence young people (14 to 20 years old) encounter and what constitutes as violence in their minds. On the other hand, we are interested in exploring the effects violence has on young people’s experiences and how they construe the relation between gender and violence. This is still work in progress but I want to present you here with part of the results from our analysis of the media. Moore argues that “violence of all kinds is engendered in its representation, in the way it is thought about and constituted as a social fact ” (1994: 70). In our research we are concerned with the gendered ways violence speaks to its audience in the public sphere which, in an ideal feminist world, should belong equally to every individual (Kappeler, 1995:32). Not that we have any illusion that this is the case agreeing with Nancy Fraser (1990, quoted in Kozol, 1995) when she points out that the public sphere is neither neutral nor apolitical but rather is shaped by hierarchies of power. The knowledge produced and reproduced takes its cue from