Panican, Elena, PhD Student

By bjorn on 18 Jun | 0 comments

Short Biography
Elena Panican is doctoral candidate in Comparative Gender Studies at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Having received an MA in Gender Studies from the same institution in 2008, her fields of expertise are feminist cultural and media studies, with particular interest in the realms of television and popular culture. Her doctoral thesis takes a critical approach to issues of national self-definition through othering, and cultural border-setting by way of abjection in postsocialist Romania; especially to how racist, sexist, homophobic and ableist discourses are being summoned in order to produce the “ideal” Romanian, i.e. national, subject(s) of postsocialism. Her research builds on feminist psychoanalysis, postcolonial and nationalism studies, as well as feminist media studies.

GEXcel Project: Mirrors of Shame: Framing Gendered Violence in Postsocialist Romanian Television

Abstract
In the last few years a number of new television programs have emerged in Romania, discussing and offering counseling on (heterosexual) relationships, almost all of them in the transnational "reality tv" format. Such programs are positioned as self-proclaimed "educational" tools arguably meant to instruct the neoliberal Romanian subject into desirable patterns of sexual and emotional citizenship performance. Some of them deal explicitly with domestic violence (physical, verbal, emotional, economic); some implicitly. My interest is to look at these televised instances addressing gendered violence publicly and to examine what exactly they teach, what is their educational content; to look at how ethnicity and class intersect with gender in order to produce typologies of the perpetrators as well as of the victims of abuse, and how these typologies measure up against statistical data. I also want to focus on how cases of abuse are dealt with in terms of the solutions proposed, or the interpretations produced by the "relationship experts" in the programs; how, if at all, individual cases of gendered violence are connected to larger power structures, and exposed as social problems; and whether policies and legislation sanctioning gendered violence are invoked or applied, and if yes, how.

Outline
While gender-based violence is a common occurrence in Romania, across all levels of society, both in the public and in the private spheres, it is only recently thatit started to emerge as an issue of social relevance, as a result of more sensitive legislation (until 1995, domestic violence and marital rape were not recognized as offenses in the Penal Code). But despite the legislation, cases of abuse are rarely reported due mostly to the fact that the system of support in place for victims of domestic violence is very frail, and it cannot offer more than a temporary escape from the abuse, if at all. Instances of gender-based violence are generally tolerated and accepted as “natural” to such an extent that media rarely considers covering them and framing them as a widespread social issue that needs to be addressed urgently. What does occasionally trickle into the news, in both the printed press and on television, are cases of sexual assault described in great detail, often providing the full name and location of the victim. Representations of gendered violence are also present in popular culture, usually with a “comedic” intention. There is an easy combination of pornographic representations of women and of violence against women in the Romanian media, which reveals the sexualized way in which violence against women is perceived.

In addition to these representations of gender-based violence that mix “humor”, pornographic conventions, and sensationalism, a few reality television shows have appeared in the last few years, whose main focus is providing relationship advice and counseling. It is these shows that I am interested in looking at, since the discourses they use concerning gendered and domestic violence do not follow the already discussed patterns of “comedy”  andsexualization. They adopt a self-proclaimed “educational” purpose, whereby they not only intend to teach the participants in the show how to behave towards one another, but also the viewer. My project aims to explore how representations of gendered violence in these shows produce this ideal subject, and what is the role of emotion in this process; in addition to examining the particular discourses around gendered violence (for instance, the term “domestic violence” is never used, although it exists as an established phrase in Romanian). Specific questions that I will ask concern the content of the “educational” message sent out by discussing domestic or gendered violence; the way that gender, ethnicity and class intersect in these discourses to produce stereotypical images of the victims and perpetrators of violence (such as members of marginalized, underprivileged groups, often ethnically “other”), images not supported by the available statistical data; the framing of gendered violence as a private, individual problem, not indicative of a wider social problem, or the result of larger structures of power; the relationship between the representations and “expert” advice on gendered violence and existing legislation and policies. In a broader sense, this project addresses the larger issue of the links between the media, political action, and strategies of representation in the context of postcommunist Romania, and engages with representational practices of gendered violence in order to investigate various patterns of social inclusion and exclusion along the intersecting dimensions of gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity/race, and ableness.