Male and Female Violence in Popular Media (Library of Gender and Popular Culture)

Male and Female Violence in Popular Media brings into focus the apparently symmetrical phenomena of men’s violence against women and women’s violence against men, explaining the profound differences in their actual features as well as in their representations, which over the last few years have been proliferating in a vast array of global media contents. Elisa Giomi and Sveva Magaraggia consider popular media including crime TV series such as The Killing (Denmark, 2007- 2012), The Fall (UK, 2013-2016) and True Detective (USA, 2015), factual entertainment such as Who the (bleep) Did I Marry? (Investigation Discovery, 2010-2015), and Italian pop music in order to examine popular culture’s depictions of men and women in their opposite, yet complementary, roles of perpetrators and victims. They reveal how TV shows, pop-songs, news and commercials that populate global audiences’ daily life fuel false beliefs about love and sexuality that either legitimate or stigmatise violence depending on the perpetrators and victims’ gender.

Elisa Giomi is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts at Roma Tre University, Italy. Her publications include "Putting Women Back in Their Place: Reflections on Slutshaming, the Case Asia Argento and Twitter in Italy", in the International Review of Sociology and "'Really good at it': The Viral Charge of Weeds' Nancy Botwin (and Popular Culture's Anticorps)", in Television Antiheroines (2017).

Sveva Magaraggia is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Sciences at the University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy. Her publications include Feminist Perspectives on Teaching Masculinities: Learning Beyond Stereotypes (2019) and "The Men's Issue. Male Violence against Women in Media Representations" in AIS-Journal of Sociology.

Claire Nally is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English Literature, Linguistics and Creative Writing at Northumbria University, UK. She is the author of Steampunk: Gender, Subculture and the Neo-Victorian (Bloomsbury, 2019), co-editor or Bloomsbury Library of Gender and Popular Culture and Deputy Editor (including reviews) of the open access journal C21 Literature.

Angela Smith is Professor of Language and Culture at the University of Sunderland, UK. She has written numerous articles and book chapters on media discourses, gender, the portrayal of immigrants and the representation of politicians.