Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse

Abstract

While current mainstream media stories oscillate between Canadian troops in Afghanistan attempting to restore safety and democracy and the imminent threat of a war on terror on domestic soil, a sorely neglected story concerns the continued war on women in Canada. In this paper, we look at one site of this war-the case of missing and murdered women in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Employing a frame analysis, we analyze 128 articles from The Vancouver Sun published between 2001 and 2006. We argue that prevailing and historically entrenched stereotypes about women, Aboriginality, and sex-trade work continue to demarcate the boundaries of 'respectability' and degeneracy, interlocking in ways that situate these women's lives, even after death, in the margins.Résumé : Les reportages qui font la une présentent soit les troupes canadiennes postées en Afghanistan tentant de rétablir la sécurité et la décromatie, soit la menace imminente d'une guerre contre la terreur en sol domestique. Il est pourtant une histoire délibérément occultée : la guerre sans fin que subissent les femmes au Canada. Cet article explore une facette de cette guerre-celle des femmes disparues et assassinées du When the terrain is sexual violence, racism and sexism interlock in particularly nasty ways. These two systems operate through each other so that sexual violence, as well as women's narratives of resistance to sexual violence, cannot be understood outside of colonialism and today's ongoing racism and genocide. When women from marginalized communities speak out about sexual violence, we are naming something infinitely broader than what men do to women within our communities, an interlocking analysis that has most often been articulated by Aboriginal women.-Sherene Razack, Looking White People in the Eye (1998a, p. 59) A recent news article in The Vancouver Sun announced that one of Vancouver's "missing" women had been found (Culbert, 2006). That brought the count down to 67 women who have disappeared from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Over the past 30 years, approximately 100 women in British Columbia alone have gone missing. In the Hazelton-Houston-Burns Lake corridor-or the "Highway of Tears," as the Aboriginal women of the region have called it-police say nine young women and girls have disappeared, while a citizens' report suggests that the number may be as high as 30 (Hume, 2006). If we count women missing across the country, the numbers skyrocket. Yet, in comparison with the events "out there" dominating the international scene and their links here in the homeland, little attention has been paid to the phenomenon of missing women in the mainstream media.Our location informing this paper draws from our position as feminist researchers investigating the terrain of racialized and sexualized violence and its mediations. Our point of departure is that violence against women constitutes a gendered war that remains peripheral to the public sphere constructed by the mass media. In using the war metaphor, we borrow from anti-violence ...

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