Female bodies adrift: Violation of the female bodies in becoming a subject in the western media

Abstract

This article focuses on how the violation of female bodies in the case of mass harassment of women is rendered intelligible by the Western media and the refugees. Violation of female bodies is approached as a site for politicizing possibilities of becoming a subject in the Western media. Informed by Deleuzian notion of “becoming” and the subjectivation of the refugees, I argue that the understanding of “violation” is a central component in contributing to possibilities of becoming affirmed as a subject in the Western media. Empirical material subjected to critical text analysis includes a key text form the Finnish daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat and refugee interviews. The analysis suggests that the repression of irreducible conceptions of “violation,” and the subsequent erasure of the uncertainty of a “self” in the process of becoming, yields to offering possibilities of becoming primarily in Western terms and the affirmation of Western ideological certainty in understanding mass harassment of European women by the refugees.