Mobs and monsters; Independent man meets Paulsgrove woman  

Oleh:

Lawler, Steph

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Feminist Theory vol. 3 no. 1 (Apr. 2002), page 103–113.
Topik: Mobs and monsters; Lack of rationality; The wrong kind of femininity; The wrong kind of mothers
Fulltext: 103.pdf (49.64KB)

Isi artikel

In the summer of 2000, and following the murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne, the British tabloid, the News of the World, ran a ‘name and shame’ campaign, giving names and addresses of ‘known paedophiles’. There followed a series of ‘riots’ in which those named were targeted; the most publicized and perhaps most orchestrated of these occurred in Paulsgrove in Portsmouth. This article is about the broadsheet press coverage of the so-called riots in Paulsgrove.1 Hence, I want to emphasize that it is not about the participants themselves (to whom I have no access), but about the ways in which they were represented. This coverage, I argue, contains a middle-class horror of the mob, projected on to the women who appear in these representations. 2 This horror cuts across conventional Left/Right distinctions: ‘liberal left’ newspapers were just as likely to depict the women in terms expressing horror as those on the right. While I do not want to commend the actions of the protesters, I do want to draw attention to their vilification and to argue that broadsheet press representations had less to do with the actions themselves, and more with a mingled horror of, and fascination with, working-class women. My argument is not that these representations are distorting a ‘truth’, but that they are constituting working-class women (for a mainly middle-class readership) as Other to a middle-class norm. What I am concerned with here is, first, the way in which the concept of ‘the crowd’ or ‘the mob’ is strategically used to legitimate some forms of protest and to pathologize others, and, second, the ways in which class and gender are built into the heart of notions of ‘the mob’.There are, of course, also dangers in romanticizing these women. So, I want to refuse the choice between pathology and romanticism, and to draw attention, instead, to the ways in which the politics of protest can be rendered both mad and pathological through invoking the personal characteristics of the protesters. This invocation has everything to do with the ways in which cultural meanings of class and gender circulate.

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