Perpetrating Selves: Doing Violence, Performing Identity

305 Pages·2018·3.456 MB·English

by  Clare Bielby, Jeffrey Stevenson Murer

Perpetrating Selves
Doing Violence, Performing Identity
Edited by
Clare Bielby and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer
Perpetrating Selves
Clare Bielby · Jeffrey Stevenson Murer
Editors
Perpetrating Selves
Doing Violence, Performing Identity
Editors
Clare Bielby Jeffrey Stevenson Murer
Centre for Women’s Studies University of St Andrews
University of York St Andrews, UK
York, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-96784-4 ISBN 978-3-319-96785-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96785-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950418
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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Cover image: © Steve Pratt, ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’ acrylic on canvas, 150 150 cm
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(2009)
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Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank all of those who contributed to this
volume and who assisted in making it possible. In particular, we would
like to acknowledge the generous support of the Centre for Women’s
Studies at the University of York, the School of International Relations
at the University of St Andrews, the School of Histories, Languages
and Cultures at the University of Hull, the Centre for Research in the
Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of
Cambridge, Dresden University of Technology and the German History
Society. Julia Irvin provided useful assistance and we are grateful to
Olga Burkhardt-Vetter for her time spent transcribing our interviews.
Our editors at Palgrave, in particular our editorial assistant Poppy Hull
and our publisher Sharla Plant, provided important support and advice.
Finally, we would like to also thank the co-organisers and all those
who contributed to and participated in the conference where this pro-
ject began: ‘The Perpetrator Self: Violence, Gender, and Emotion in
Conflict and Culture in the Long Twentieth Century,’ hosted by the
Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation at the
University of Hull.
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Contents
1 Perpetrating Selves: An Introduction 1
Clare Bielby and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer
Part I Enactments and Bodily Performances
2 Leading Men a Merry Dance?: Girls as Sex Crime
Perpetrators in Contemporary Pop Culture and Media 17
Melissa Dearey
3 Embodying a Perpetrator: Myths, Monsters and Magic 39
Katarina H. S. Birkedal
4 The Making of a Dangerous Individual: Performing
the Perpetrating Self—An Interview with Steve Pratt 61
Clare Bielby and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer
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viii Contents
Part II Narration and Textual Performances
5 Scripting the Perpetrating Self: Masculinity, Class
and Violence in German Post-terrorist Autobiography 85
Clare Bielby
6 Innocent Superspy: Contradictory Narratives as
Exculpation in a Woman Apartheid Perpetrator Story 113
Robyn Bloch
7 ‘It’s My Destiny’: Narrating Prison Violence and
Masculinity in the Shaun Attwood Trilogy 133
Josephine Metcalf
8 Intimate Enemies: Representations of Perpetrators in
Literary Responses to the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda 155
Nicki Hitchcott
9 ‘By Any Means Necessary’: Interviews and Narrative
Analysis with Torturers—A Conversation with Dr. John
Tsukayama 177
Clare Bielby and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer
Part III Perpetration in the Museum
10 Selective Empathy in the Re-designed Imperial War
Museum London: Heroes and Perpetrators 199
Gabriel Koureas
11 Identifying with Mass Murderers? Representing Male
Perpetrators in Museum Exhibitions of the Holocaust 223
Birga Meyer
Contents ix
12 Managing Perpetrator Affect: The Female Guard
Exhibition at Ravensbrück 247
Susanne Luhmann
13 Curating Violence: Display and Representation—An
Interview with Jonathan Ferguson and Lisa Traynor
(Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds) 271
Clare Bielby and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer
Index 291
Notes on Contributors
Clare Bielby is a Senior Lecturer in Women’s Studies at the Centre
for Women’s Studies, University of York. She is the author of Violent
Women in Print: Representations in the West German Print Media of the
1960s and 1970s (Camden House, 2012) and co-editor (with Anna
Richards) of Women and Death 3: Women’s Representations of Death in
German Culture Since 1500 (Camden House, 2010).
Katarina H. S. Birkedal is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of
International Relations, University of St Andrews, in Scotland. Her
current research is situated broadly within the fields of critical military
studies and popular culture in IR, and is focused on understanding the
politics of those who situate themselves within militarised popular cul-
ture narratives; how these narratives are enacted by and upon the body,
and whether (and how) there is within that a space for resistance. Her
thesis, titled ‘Resistance Within Reproduction: The Gender Politics of
Cosplay,’ combines the concepts of embodiment, affect, agency, aesthet-
ics, popular culture and mythology.
Robyn Bloch is a postdoctoral candidate at the Historical Trauma
and Transformation Unit at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She
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xii Notes on Contributors
developed the chapter in the present volume at the Wits Institute for
Social and Economic Research at the University of Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, South Africa, as part of her Ph.D. Bloch’s primary area of
study investigates recent apartheid perpetrator narratives to chart how
these representations emerge after more than twenty years of democracy.
Bloch is also interested in developing experimental writing styles to best
figure or encounter the apartheid perpetrator now.
Melissa Dearey is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Hull. She has a
specialist research interest in cultural criminology and the development
of interdisciplinary methods in criminology, utilising arts and human-
ities research. She is particularly interested in the representations of
crime, victimisation and harm in cultural genres such as dance, music
and popular culture.
Nicki Hitchcott is a Professor of French at the University of St
Andrews in Scotland. She has published widely on various aspects
of African literature and her most recent books are Rwanda Genocide
Stories: Fiction After 1994 (2015) and Francophone Afropean Literatures
(co-edited with Dominic Thomas, 2014), both published by Liverpool
University Press. Since May 2015, Nicki has been leading a major
AHRC-funded research project, ‘Rwandan Stories of Change’ (http://
rwandan.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk).
Gabriel Koureas is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History of
Art, Birkbeck, University of London. His research interests are in the rela-
tionship between memory, conflict and commemoration in the construc-
tion of national and gender identities in visual culture and museums. He
successfully completed an AHRC Networking Grant in collaboration
with Reading University and Sandhurst Military Academy which inves-
tigated how the terrorist has been represented in the visual arts, film,
photography and the media. Out of this project emerged the collected
volume of essays Terrorist Transgressions: Gendered Representations of the
Terrorist, co-edited with Sue Malvern (IB Tauris, 2014).
Susanne Luhmann is an Associate Professor and Chair of the
Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta,
Canada. Her research interests include cultural memory, gender studies,