Representing and Remembering Murdered Women: Thoughts on the Ethics of Critique

[C]ritique is not equivalent to rejection or denunciation... the call to rethink something is not inherently treasonous but can actually be a way of caring for and even renewing the object in question.

Wendy Brown Edgework

These two important texts on women and violence were both published in the few months leading up to the first trial of Robert Pickton (who is accused of killing twenty-six women in total, making this Canada’s largest case of serial murder), as Vancouver (and the rest of the country) prepared to learn the details of what happened to Sereena Abotsway, Marnie Frey, Angela Joesbury, Georgina Papin, Mona Wilson, and Brenda Wolfe, the first six women for whose murders Pickton was to stand trial. Although this may be one of the strange coincidences of the publishing world, these are nonetheless very timely texts. In fact, both of these books make reference to murdered or missing women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood in their first few paragraphs. Undoubtedly, the violence directed at women from the Downtown Eastside has provoked new attention, both popular and academic, to the problem of violence against women and to questions about how such violence ought, or ought not, to be represented and remembered. I count myself among those whose attention has been caught by stories of “missing women,” by the representations of women’s lives (and sometimes of their violent deaths) put forth in these stories, and by the questions they raise about the relationship between cultural memory and social justice. These two texts also arrive at a moment in which questions about how and why we remember (or fail to remember) particular victims of violence or murder are garnering significant attention across a wide variety of academic disciplines. Those of us whose attention is drawn in this direction, particularly those of us attempting to respond to these acts of violence from within the academy, negotiate difficult ethical and political terrain. What is the relationship between representation and violence? Between violence and remembrance? Between representation and cultural memory? For feminists taking up these questions in our intellectual or political work (or both), these two similarly themed but very different texts will undoubtedly prove to be valuable resources. But while both texts ask us to contemplate the ethics and politics of representing or remembering acts of violence against women, they also raise some important questions about the ethics of critique. I will argue that both texts might, as a result, benefit from some further reflection on how critique might best be formulated when it attempts to respond to violence, murder, loss, and the suffering of those left in their wake.

Burfoot and Lord begin their introduction to the collection of essays in Killing Women with reference to the recent rise in attention to the disappearance of potentially more than five hundred indigenous women in Canada. They juxtapose coverage of this story on the cbc’s website with in-depth coverage of rape in Darfur, asking:

What is it that one wants of representation in such situations? What would a just representation be? Is the representation of violence drawn so heavily from genre and gender codes that even the most horrific realities are destined to become “stories”—normalized and folded into the everyday racist and sexist ideologies that form our senses of belonging to a nation, a gender, a race, an ethnicity, a class?

(xii)

The essays in this collection take up these compelling questions in an effort to draw links between a contemporary fascination with women who are the victims of violence and with women who commit violent acts. The collection is thus a unique attempt to demonstrate similarities between representations of women as victims of violence and those of violent women, and by doing so the editors offset the risks...