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Family Men and the Women They Murdered: A Critique of Popular Press Reporting of Three Crimes in Australia
This essay targets a version of the “family man,” in media cultural representation, that serves patriarchal and capitalist interests as a gendered figure of social/structural support for violence against women. It reads three violent crimes where white middle-class men in conventional, ideated family roles murder the women who are either married to or estranged from them. I locate aspects of media coverage of the crimes that run contrary to a public narrative of outrage about “domestic” violence and “family” violence that feeds into a more general, neoliberal tendency of sounding progressive without being politically so, identified, among others, by Faith Agostinone-Wilson in 2020.
Analysis of media texts shows that concerted efforts to identify multi-faceted expressions of men’s privilege are a way to resist even subtly naturalised forms of men’s violence against women. Extreme and lethal instances of this violence (as victims’ “family” experience) are reported ever more frequently. The project of insisting on the implicit connections between notions of white middle-class normalcy and the stereotypical family to structurally supported, gendered violence is reaffirmed as necessarily disruptive.
Analysis of media texts shows that concerted efforts to identify multi-faceted expressions of men’s privilege are a way to resist even subtly naturalised forms of men’s violence against women. Extreme and lethal instances of this violence (as victims’ “family” experience) are reported ever more frequently. The project of insisting on the implicit connections between notions of white middle-class normalcy and the stereotypical family to structurally supported, gendered violence is reaffirmed as necessarily disruptive.
