Abstracts
Abstract
After the December 6, 1989 massacre of fourteen young women at Montréal’s École Polytechnique, Canadian women’s anti-violence groups and a now international men’s campaign against men’s violence to women adopted a variety of resonant visual images in commemoration and protest. The striking differences underlying women’s and men’s choices of images also reflect tensions at a rhetorical level about the appropriateness of men speaking out against violence to women. To explore these tensions, this article uses a method of rhetorical analysis that maps associations among “men’s” and “women’s” images, situates these associations within particular social contexts, and suggests some possible effects of these images and their messages on various audiences. While some activists feared that the men’s white ribbon — rather than the women’s rose or other symbols — might dominate the public imagination as a generalized protest against violence to women, a brief joint billboard campaign displaying the white ribbon and the rose side by side represents the possibility of women and men working with and through the power inequalities that exacerbate gender differences.
Résumé
Après le massacre, le 6 décembre 1989, de quatorze jeunes femmes à l’École polytechnique de Montréal, des groupes anti-violence de femmes canadiennes et une campagne, à présent internationale, d’hommes contre la violence faite aux femmes par les hommes, ont adopté un certain nombre de signes visuels (qui se remarquent) en signe de commémoration et de protestation. Les différences frappantes, sous-jacentes aux choix des hommes et des femmes, reflètent, au niveau discursif, les tensions concernant la question de savoir s’il était convenable ou à-propos que des hommes protestent contre la violence faite aux femmes. Pour explorer ces tensions, cet article utilise une méthode d’analyse rhétorique qui «ESPINSECcartographieESPINSEC» les associations entre les images des femmes et les images des hommes, situe ces associations à l’intérieur de leurs contextes particuliers et suggère quelques effets possibles de ces images et de leurs messages sur des publics variés. Tandis que certaines activistes redoutaient que le ruban blanc des hommes — plutôt que la rose des femmes ou d’autres symboles — ne domine l’imagination publique en tant que protestation généralisée contre la violence faite aux femmes, une brève campagne conjointe montrant côte à côte le ruban blanc et la rose a représenté pour les hommes et les femmes la possibilité de travailler sur et à travers les inégalités qui exacerbent les différences de genre.
Appendices
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