The
mainstream media play a vital role in constructing certain
endangered young women as valuable ‘front-page victims’, while
dismissing others as disposable. In this essay, I examine the
techniques that activists can use to challenge media stereotypes of
‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims. Drawing on examples
from the USA, central America, and Europe, I offer three practical
methods for engaging in feminist media activism: the ‘diagnostic’,
to provide a cultural vocabulary for unveiling and resisting media
biases; the ‘theatrical’, to revive the lives of disenfranchised
bodies in the public imagination; and the ‘archaeological’,
to dig proactively for the human stories that have been buried
beyond the margins.
Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.
James Ellroy
Each
day, the mainstream media provide audiences with a subtle instruction
manual for how to empathise with certain endangered women’s
bodies, while overlooking others. These messages are powerful:
they position certain sub-groups of women often white,
wealthy, and conventionally attractive as deserving of our
collective resources, while making the marginalisation and
victimisation of other groups of women, such as low-income women
of colour, seem natural. Activists must therefore think carefully
about how to bridge the constructed gulf between ‘worthy’
female victims and ‘unworthy’ ones, reclaiming the media as an
ally to expand the boundaries of societal empathy. In this
article, I make the case for three creative approaches to
feminist media activism: the diagnostic, the theatrical, and the
archaeological.
Selective
silences: some statistics on distorted media coverage
When
it comes to body counts, which bodies ‘count’? International
headlines deliver the lurid details of British three-year-old
Madeleine McCann’s disappearance while on holiday with her family
in Portugal, but offer few clues about the fate of 16-year-old
Esmeralda Alarcon, one of more than 400 young women to go missing in
the border town of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, over the
past decade. The Canadian media feature prominent coverage of a whale
named Luna who died when she collided with a tugboat propeller, but
silence enshrouds the brutal murders and disappearances of more than
32 indigenous women along a prominent highway in central British
Columbia. News treatments of child abductions in the USA show a
particularly glaring bias in favour of cases featuring young white
females: between 2000 and 2005, 76 per cent of child abductions
featured on CNN News between 2000 and 2005 were white children,
although only 53 per cent of abductees are white (Hargrove and Haman
2005). Virtually all of the most prominent cases featured
conventionally attractive females.
Sensationalised
news coverage of young white women and girls in peril is
so common in the USA that commentators have coined a name for it:
‘The missing white girl syndrome’. The phenomenon typically
involves round-the-clock coverage of disappeared young females
who qualify as ‘damsels in distress’ by race, class, and
other relevant social variables. Cable news serves up images
and anecdotes of the victims; media-aware lawyers and pop
psychologists debate possible suspects on radio talk shows; and the
national public participates in the trauma of ‘every parent’s
worst nightmare’ building memorial websites, for example, or
erecting shrines of flowers and stuffed animals to the young women
and girls at the centre of the media flurry. As Washington Post
columnist Eugene Robinson reflected in an article entitled
‘(White)women we love’: ‘Someday historians will look
back at America in the decade bracketing the turn of the 21st
century and identify the era’s major themes: Religious
fundamentalism. Terrorism. War in Iraq...Nuclear proliferation.
Globalization. Therise of superpower China. And, of course, Damsels
in Distress’ (Robinson 2005, A23).
But
this contemporary trend of media distortion is not unique to the USA.
Similar phenomena can be found in the Canadian and British
press. According to Amnesty International, in Canada, indigenous
women between the ages of 25 and 44 are five times more likely
than all other women of the same age group to die as the result of
violence, but significantly less likely to receive coverage in the
local or national news (2004). In Britain, a related paradox of
female ‘disposability’ presents itself in news stories
about violence against sex workers. On the one hand, tabloid
headlines capitalise on the sensational aspects of serial
killings of sex workers, bringing these cases into the
limelight; on the other hand, the female victims are often painted
with a broad and dehumanising brush, depicted as
hyper-sexualised ‘vice girls’ who are reified in
one-dimensional deaths, rather than illuminated in nuanced and
complex lives. Following the discovery of five murdered sex workers
in Ipswich in December 2006, columnist Joan Smith described the
contradictions inherent in much British coverage: ‘The press
can never quite decide whether murdered sex workers are tragic
victims, like any woman targeted by a serial killer, or
have chosen a lifestyle that means they are partly responsible
for their deaths’ (Smith 2006).
The body that was not Jessica: a
personal case study
My
own academic and personal inquiry into the ‘Missing white
girl syndrome’ and related media myths of female disposability
began in early 2005, when I found myself immersed in a disturbing
tale of two corpses. That February, it was difficult for anyone who
owned a television set in the USA to ignore the widespread media
coverage of Jessica Lunsford, a nine-year-old girl who had
disappeared from her bedroom in Homosassa, Florida. Lunsford was
last seen alive on the evening of 23 February, asleep in her pink
silk nightgown. The next morning, she was nowhere to be found. Within
several days, the crisis exploded in the national media,
prompting massive out-pourings of public empathy. Celebrity donors
offered a $110,000 reward for information leading to her safe
return, and nearly 540 volunteers joined law enforcement
officers to scour the area where she lived, on ‘foot, horseback,
and all-terrain vehicles’ amid heavy rains and a tornado warning,
in search of her.
But
as I sat with my eyes glued to the Fox News coverage of the case, a
different body suddenly captured my attention, a corpse mentioned
only for a brief instant in a ticker-tape scroll that crawled along
the bottom of the screen: ‘Body found in lake was not Jessica’s’.
The headline grabbed me not for the tragic loss that it
intended to document, but rather for the loss that it blatantly
erased. Whose dead body was floating in the lake, if not Jessica’s?
Did this body have a name? Did this body have a gender, a race, a
story, a family awash in fear or grief? Few clues proved
forthcoming. A subsequent Internet search revealed a series of
similar headlines: ‘Police confirm body found is not Jessica’s,’(1)
‘Body found in lake is not missing [Florida] girl’(2) but none
addressed the secondary body’s identity, other than to
convey a sense of relief at what, or who, it was not. To make
the morality tale even more stark, local authorities held a
televised press conference in which Sheriff Jeff Dawsy
proclaimed: ‘We have confirmed it is not our girl. I repeat, it
is not our girl. And for that, we are very happy.’
Witnessing
this drama unfold, I felt compelled to learn more about how such
gross acts of dehumanisation could not only be possible,
but typical, in mainstream reporting. Soon thereafter, I began
to document transnational activists’ efforts to resist media
narratives that naturalise the deaths of certain ‘kinds’
of women (poor, non- white, precariously employed), while
commodifying others. In the remainder of this essay, I offer the
fruits of this research, focusing on three primary methodologies for
media activism that have proven useful in my own work on the ‘Missing
white girl syndrome’, but which could also apply to a
broad range of social movements and human rights advocacy
The diagnostic: naming, shaming, and
citizen journalism
Before
we can attempt to shed light on ‘the body that was not Jessica’or,
rather, the many thousands of ‘bodies that were not Jessica’
denied visibility in the public sphere- we first need a
vocabulary to discuss the media frenzy that created
‘Jessica’. Sensationalised news coverage of young women and girls
in danger is a difficult topic to address, precisely because it
is such an accepted part of the north American and British
cultural fabric. The goal of the diagnostic toolkit, then, is to
remind audiences that every act of seeing is also an act of not
seeing (Ewen and Ewen 2006). Activists can do much to awaken
audiences to the dehumanisation that often results from seemingly
‘neutral’ or ‘natural’ news coverage, inviting them to think
more critically about their responsibilities as media consumers.
The
first and most basic diagnostic tool is the act of naming. When the
deaths and disappearances of young women factory workers began
to come to light in Ciudad Juarez in the mid-1990s, for
example, the Mexican media refused to recognise the crimes as
anything more than a string of isolated incidents (Schmidt Camacho
2004). Human rights advocates stepped into this media void to insist
on giving the atrocities a name -feminicidios, Spanish for
‘femicide’. Femicide is often defined as the systematic
killing of women because they are women (Wright 2001; Prieto-Carron
et al. 2007), and employing this term urged audiences to
consider how the violence was intimately linked to the gender of
its victims. This act of naming the violence, born of grassroots
protest movements, had a powerful impact on national and
international news coverage of the crisis in Ciudad Juarez.
Most vitally, it introduced a language through which
journalists could connect individual traumas with local and
regional struggles against gender-based violence.
Recently,
the rise of online citizen journalism and blogging (the posting of
personal and political commentary on public websites)
sparked another, quite different, campaign of naming: an
effort to address the exploitative coverage of ‘damsels in
distress’. In the past few years, Internet journalists have
coined terms such as ‘The missing white girl syndrome’ and
‘The missing pretty girl syndrome’ to describe the central
dilemma of this essay (Malkin 2005; Ridley 2007). This expanding
vocabulary, when applied with care, can help raise questions
about who profits from turning attractive white female victims
into national commodities; and, by extension, how we might counteract
the myth of brown women’s disposability.
Another
diagnostic tool that complements the act of naming is the act of
shaming, whereby satire and critical humour prove useful strategies
for capturing the attention of corporate newsrooms. Yet this
diagnostic tool is inherently limited, in that it helps us to
identify the problem of exploited damsels and their forgotten
counterparts, but provides no nuanced methodology for countering
it. Satire has the potential, when carelessly wielded, to
invite the very kind of dehumanisation that it claims to resist,
belittling the suffering of white female victims and those who mourn
them. The goal of effective intervention is not to dismiss injustices
against well-known victims such as Madeleine McCann or Jessica
Lunsford; quite the opposite, the goal is to expand the
boundaries of societal empathy to encompass the many ‘bodies
that were not Jessica’ as well. Only once we have
developed a shared vocabulary for diagnosing mass-mediated
constructions of ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims can
we turn our attention to the quest for proactive solutions.
The theatrical: resuscitating bodies
through storytelling
The
second toolkit for creative media activism, what I will
call ‘the theatrical’ approach, can be summarised in two simple
words: tell stories. Ironically, the ‘Missing white girl syndrome’
hints at its own best remedy, revealing the power of storytelling to
bring young female victims of violence into the public
imagination and mobilise resources for their protection. Following
the disappearance of Jessica Lunsford, it was easy to relate to
the grief of her family, in all its specificity, due
largely to the proliferation of storytelling through interviews,
home videos, and family testimonies featured in the press. Jessica
was presented in the media as ‘everyone’s daughter,’ and
Americans leapt to her defence accordingly. Meanwhile, the
inverse was true of the body found in the Florida lake described
only as ‘not Jessica’; it is difficult to rally a social movement
around the rights of an anonymous corpse. How, then, can activists
restore the specificity of women’s lives that have been
twice marginalised, first by terrible acts of violence,
then by a refusal of recognition and narration in the
mainstream media? Lessons from the theatre community offer an
instructive point of departure.
The
first rule of the theatre is that every story needs a
stage. When no public platform exists for an important news
story, the challenge is to make or seize one often through the
re-appropriation of symbolic social space (Butler 2004). This tactic
is exemplified by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a group of
bereaved mothers whose children were ‘disappeared’ during
the brutal Argentine military dictatorship, between 1976
and 1983. Every Thursday afternoon for three decades, the
Madres paraded in front of the presidential palace in Buenos
Aires, enduring threats and beatings in order to call out
the names of their lost children: ‘‘‘Hilda Fernandez:
¡Presente! (Present)... Eduardo Recuena:¡Presente! Irma Zucchi
¡Presente!...’’. They transformed their bodies into news stories
and ‘walking billboards’ (Taylor 1997, 183), hanging blown-up
photographs of the disappeared around their necks and writing
pleas for accountability on their clothing. The effects were
astounding. By bravely thrusting acts of ‘private’ mourning
into the public arena, the Madres inspired a massive surge in
international news coverage of Argentina’s 30,000-odd disappeared
persons, and helped to undermine the legitimacy of the military
junta.
Once
a stage for storytelling is created or reclaimed, how else might
activists seek to fill it? One option is props. Influenced by
the Madres’ use of personal artefacts, grassroots activists
recently gathered in the smog-filled streets of Guatemala
City to protest the unsolved murders of more than 2,200
women and girls throughout the country since 2001. Each carried a
dress on a pink cross, each dress to evoke the memory of a specific
stolen life. In a more light-hearted event last year, a coalition of
sex workers’ rights groups took to the streets of
Montreal, Canada, holding red umbrellas as a boisterous symbol of
strength and solidarity to mark the International Day to End Violence
Against Sex Workers.
Another
option for dramatic space reclamation is the use of photographic
images. In 2005, artist Jean-Christian Bourcart took what he
describes as a ‘desperate gesture’ to resist the marginalisation
of Iraqi deaths in the American media: he projected giant images of
dead and injured Iraqis onto shopping malls, residential
houses, parked cars, and churches in a small New York town at night.
As Bourcart explains, ‘I could not help thinking of those
images as some kind of restless ghosts... I took care of
them like an embalmer would; downloading, revamping, printing,
rephotographing, then projecting them as if I was looking for a place
where they would rest in peace and at the same time haunt those who
pretend not to know what was going on’ (Bourcart 2005). The
Madres, too, used large photographs of their disappeared
children as a public symbol against forgetting.
But
the theatrical use of props and images to counter the hierarchies of
the ‘Missing white girl syndrome’ has its pitfalls. One must
think carefully about how to represent marginalised victims in life
rather than simply embalming them in death, helping audiences
to move beyond the dogma that poor, non-white women’s bodies can
only gain public visibility once they have been gruesomely violated.
Scholar-activist Alicia Schmidt Camacho warns against the
growing numbers of artistic responses to the femicide in Ciudad
Juarez that fixate on Mexican women’s corpses, often under titles
such as ‘The dead women of Juarez’ and ‘The city of dead women’
(Schmidt Camacho 2004). She argues convincingly that ‘the use of
the cadaver in artwork and journalism documenting the crimes does not
demonstrate an authentic connection with the dead or their
communities, but rather an ethical and political distance between
observer and victim; it has a demobilizing effect where it
intends to incite the desire for change’ (2004, 36). Some of
these ‘awareness-raising’ images such as a sculpture featuring a
murdered Mexican woman with her undergarments pulled down around her
legs veer dangerously close to eroticising violence and
indulging voyeurism rather than resisting it.
This
is where storytelling comes to the rescue. With the 21st century rise
of Internet technologies and grassroots media campaigns,
disenfranchised communities increasingly have the opportunity to
speak for themselves, and for the lives of the dead who have been
robbed of voice. Anyone with access to a computer connected to the
Internet can now partake in ‘citizen journalism’, playing an
active role in ‘collecting, reporting, analysing and
disseminating news and information’ (Bowman and Willis 2003),
including animated profiles of marginalised victims. Corporate
newsrooms are quickly losing their monopoly on public accounts
of ‘newsworthy’ violence, due in part to online media such
as community newspapers, blogs, chat forums, and video-sharing
websites.
During
the first round of US media fixation on blonde teenager Natalee
Holloway’s disappearance in Aruba in 2005, a group of bloggers in
Philadelphia banded together to spark national media attention
for a local disappeared woman named LaToyia Figueroa (Degraff
2005). Bloggers narrated Figueroa’s plight in vivid theatrical
detail: a 24-year-old black woman who worked as a waitress,
Figueroa was five months pregnant when she vanished on 18
July in west Philadelphia, to the oblivion of the mainstream
media. A growing number of citizen journalists shared stories about
her life and provided her family with a mouthpiece for their
grief. Most of the online stories were action-oriented: they
disseminated Figueroa’s photograph, generated a $100,000-dollar
reward fund for news leading to her return, created online
videos about the case, and encouraged other bloggers and community
organisations to profile Figueroa on their webpages. The surge of
guerrilla journalism spread quickly through cyberspace, and soon
Figueroa’s case was featured widely in the mainstream media,
garnering coverage on Fox News, CNN, USA Today, and other
major news outlets. A committed team of citizen journalists had
successfully ushered Figueroa to the ‘other side’ of the good
victim/bad victim chasm.
Ultimately,
however, the goal is not to replace one sensational missing female
case with another: a white girl with a brown girl, a university
student with a sex worker. What we need is a different
way of constructing ‘news’ altogether, one that
acknowledges the social roots of gender-based violence and respects
survivors’ rights to speak for themselves in the mainstream media,
whenever possible not as tokens of suffering used to peddle
newspapers, but as knowledge-bearers and agents of social change.
Such an approach might be modelled on the empathetic
template of the theatre: using reclaimed public spaces as stages,
props, and vivid personal stories to help audiences imagine each
human life as equally worthy of narration and protection. This goal
is intertwined with broader political struggles against the
intersections of race, class, and gender oppression, since
attempts to reclaim the full worth of marginalised female
victims cannot ‘stick’ until long-standing hierarchies of
human worth are deconstructed (Jiwani and Young 2006). Consider that
even when LaToyia Figueroa’s case finally received the coverage it
deserved, cable news networks could not save her from an
inexcusable fate: police found the young woman’s corpse in
a grassy lot, murdered by the father of her unborn child.
The archaeological: a personal journey
towards ‘The body that was not Jessica’
It
is easy to comprehend why telling stories matters. But in this final
section, I would like to suggest a strategy for addressing lives
buried so deeply or neglected so radically that they resist our
attempts at narration altogether. Sometimes, we begin with only a
brittle collarbone unearthed from a mass grave, or a six-word
obituary in a local paper, or perhaps just a name or phrase
(‘Not our girl ...’).
In such instances, what is our obligation if any to pursue the
unknown ghosts who are the inevitable outcomes of the ‘Missing
white girl syndrome’? This is precisely the question I
asked of my encounter with the body that was not Jessica. I would
like to share the details of my personal
search for this unknown corpse, in the hope that it might
spur future elaborations on a third and final form of media
activism: ‘feminist archaeology’, or the everyday practice of
sifting for human lives buried beyond the margins.
For
more than a year after I first witnessed that haunting Fox
News broadcast about Jessica Lunsford and her unnamed counterpart,
the local sheriff’s catchphrase of dehumanisation rang in my
ears ‘It is not our girl’. Eventually, I decided to pick
up the phone and request answers from the local County Sheriff’s
Office. The officer on duty relayed an account of the
anonymous corpse that was both shocking and sadly predictable:
it belonged to a 23-year-old white woman named Donna Julane
Cooke, who had been arrested by local police four times for
prostitution before her death. Her body showed clear signs
of strangulation, but no murder suspect had been identified,
and the case had now gone ‘cold’ i.e. closed to active
police investigation. The officer assured me that he could
not, or simply would not, say more
about the victim.
As
the inheritor of such unsettling news, one’s loyalties to the
broader project of media activism are suddenly pushed to their
concrete breaking point. What could I realistically do to
legitimise the non-marginality of Donna Cooke? The most central
element of the archaeological toolkit is persistent digging.
And so, as if possessed, I took a leap of faith: I bought
a flight to Donna’s hometown of Tampa, Florida, followed
the trail left by her criminal record, knocked on the doors
of her five last known addresses, and endeavoured to
unearth whatever signs of her life still reverberated.
After a week of this digging, it became clear that
unlike Jessica Lunsford, whose personal story is documented
in over 340,000 million Internet search entries that include
intimate anecdotes and family photographs, Donna’s life
surfaces in the public archives only through mug shots and
police reports (for prostitution); medical records (for
state-mandated drug rehabilitation); social security disputes (for
epilepsy and mental disability payments); and death records.
At her former addresses, I found nothing more than abandoned
and demolished apartments. I began to wonder if the elusiveness of
documenting Donna Cooke’s personal narrative her housing, her
friends, her family, her employment was in fact its own kind
of ‘news’.
But
just as I was preparing to chalk up my quest for the body that was
not Jessica as a testament to media myths of disposability turned
literal I had failed, it seemed, to shed light on Donna Cooke’s
life as more than a sum of documents I located her
24-year-old sister, Gladys Cooke, in a small Ohio town 1,000
miles way. A young woman full of strength and generosity, Gladys
was more than eager to share what she could of her sister ’s
story, which she felt had been so unashamedly exploited in the search
for Jessica Lunsford. Over several days, she showed me family photo
albums and shared childhood anecdotes. She described the process of
dealing with her sister ’s death, and, somewhat alarmingly,
her attempts to take up the role of private
investigator after the murder, when police neglected to
actively pursue the case. By conducting her own interviews with
Donna’s friends, neighbours, and colleagues in the sex industry,
she confirmed the troubling suspicion that her sister had been hired
by the police to work as an informant in exchange for the
waiver of her fines for prostitution convictions; yet another
example of the state’s colossal failure to protect a mentally
disabled woman whom they had deliberately endangered. Emphasising her
anger that Donna’s history of sex work caused others to construct
her as a ‘throwaway’ life mere bait whom the police could dangle
to help them ‘clean the streets’ of drug dealers and pimps -
Gladys articulated her desire for justice, and I replied with my
desire to be her ally in this pursuit. Over the past year, we have
embarked together on a shared project of media activism to bring
Donna’s story to light, as part of a broader intervention against
the dehumanisation of women in the sex industry who must bear the
material consequences of the mass-mediated ‘Missing white girl
syndrome’ and its dark underbelly.
The
methods of feminist archaeology have proven invaluable in this
endeavour: foregrounding ‘feminist curiosity’ (Enloe 2004) as a
powerful alternative to passive media consumption; recognising the
need for proactive digging to recover stories about those deemed
‘disposable’; and valuing the structural integrity, details, and
delicacy of each individual story you unearth. Whenever I feel
paralysed by the complexity of this task in the case of Donna Cooke,
I return to a photograph taken during my visit with Gladys: a
portrait of her holding the ashes of her 23-year-old sister in her
lap. I share this photograph here, so that Donna Cooke may enter the
public records as a focal point of her sister ’s love, rather than
as the sum of her bureaucratic entanglements, and so that Gladys
might be recognised for her courageousness in fighting back against a
state and a mainstream media who have failed to recognise her plight.
Conclusions:
transforming grief to grievance
This
article has demonstrated the remarkable power of the mainstream media
in north America and Britain to position the lives of certain young,
white, well-off women as worthy of societal empathy, while casting
others as disposable lives (Wright 2006): the ‘Bodies
that were not Jessica’. But it has also shown that activists
possess the power to challenge dominant media representations of
‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims and cultivate empathy through
diagnostic, theatrical, and archaeological strategies. This is
happening today in cyberspace, where everyone from comedians to
bloggers is challenging the ‘Missing white girl syndrome’ and
providing a new vocabulary for its deconstruction. It is happening in
the streets of Guatemala City and Ciudad Juarez, as mothers and
transnational human rights groups insist on theatrically narrating
the lives of young women extinguished with impunity in acts of
femicide: marching, calling out the names and stories of the dead,
refusing to let them go silently. And it is happening in Tampa,
Florida, where Gladys Cooke wrestles to reclaim her sister ’s
memory from the clutches of Fox News’ callousness and the state’s
abandonment. Each of these journeys from grief to grievance, from
‘suffering injury to speaking out against that injury’ (Cheng
2001, 1), gives hope to the evolving importance of feminist media
activism. Through critical news consumption and participatory
reporting, we can dredge forgotten bodies back up from placid lakes
and insist that no body - nobody - is imagined as anything less than
fully human.
Gender & Development - vol. 15, No. 3, November 2007
DOI:10.1080/13552070701630665
DOI:10.1080/13552070701630665
