An Analysis of Two Albertan Anti-Domestic Violence Public Service Campaigns: Governance in Austere Times

An Analysis of Two Albertan Anti-Domestic Violence Public Service Campaigns: Governance in Austere Times Introduction Bailey Gerrits is a PhD Candidate in Political Studies at In response to what the police called “the worst Queen’s University in Canada and a 2015 Pierre Elliott mass murder in Edmonton’s history” (Dosser 2014, Trudeau Doctoral Scholar. Interested in the intersec- n.p.), the Edmonton Police Service (EPS) re-ran its 2012 tions between gender-based violence, racialization, anti-domestic violence television spot. It features three news production, and engaged scholarship, her disser- consecutive close-ups on battered and bruised women’s tation investigates recent discourses, patterns, and pro- faces, silenced by duct tape, with 911 domestic violence duction of domestic violence news in Canada. calls playing in the background. This 15-second commercial is part of a larger public service announcement Abstract (PSA) campaign that also includes posters with those This article compares two anti-domestic violence cam- same women’s faces, along with three more women, bat- paigns created by the Edmonton Police Services and the tered and silenced by duct tape. This imagery is strik- Government of Alberta. This paper argues that both ingly similar to the 2006 campaign developed for the campaigns rely on and reinforce gendered and racial- Government of Alberta’s (GOA) Ministry of Children ized schema, legitimize each institution, and simulta- Services, entitled “Speak Up.” Seven posters feature a neously call upon you, the viewer, to address domestic close-up of a victim, either a woman or man, with an- violence. other person’s hand firmly grasping their mouth. This poster series accompanied an award-winning commer- Résumé cial, Fight Circle. The strikingly similar visual references Cet article compare deux campagnes de lutte contre drew my attention: what can one learn from compar- la violence familiale lancées par les services de police ing the similar visual representations of violence in two d’Edmonton et le gouvernement de l’Alberta. Cet ar- distinct campaigns? Approaching the texts as sites in ticle fait valoir que les deux campagnes s’appuient sur which to study the “relations of power and ideology as un schéma fondé sur le sexe et la race et le renforcent, they appertain to cultural processes and practices in the légitiment ces deux institutions et, font simultanément public sphere” (Lazar 2007, 156), this article employs appel à vous, l’auditeur, pour lutter contre la violence anti-oppression feminist critical discourse analysis to familiale. specifically investigate: (1) Who are the subjects in each campaign? (2) What do these campaigns communicate about the relationships of power between the creating organization and the viewer and between the victims, perpetrators, and the viewer? I argue that the pictorial and word choices in both campaigns activate gendered and racialized imagery to mark the subject of domestic violence; that is, those subjected to domestic violence and those who are responsible to end domestic violence. The GOA’s posters and television commercial also add a distinct feature: they locate violence in heteronormative, eth- nically homogenous family units. The victims in both campaigns are visually marginalized by structures of 195 Atlantis 38.1, 2017 www.msvu.ca/atlantis racism, colonialism, sexism, and economic inequality, cusses social problems assumed to concern the general but the campaigns fail to interrogate these structures. population (O’Keefe and Reid 1990, 67-68). As con- This conclusion seems rather obvious, as public agen- densed, hyper-visual forms of political communication, cy-created PSAs are unlikely to be critical of the struc- PSAs reduce complex social problems into tiny, impact- tures that those same public entities help to maintain. ful morsels, often relying on stereotyping and exaggera- However, I further argue that studying how these PSAs tion (Hernández Orellana and Kunert 2013) to visually define domestic violence and its solutions exposes the support institutional definitions and solutions to social neoliberal rationalization underpinning both the Gov- problems. Scholars often consider whether PSAs are ef- ernment of Alberta’s and Edmonton Police Service’s fective (for example, Wray et al. 2004); however, I es- approach to managing domestic violence as well as the chew questions of impact in favour of examining the PSAs themselves as cost-effective tools of governance. texts as socially situated discourses. But first, I discuss Indeed, both campaigns hold the viewer responsible for the theoretical relationship between one ideological addressing domestic violence while simultaneously jus- context–neoliberalism–and PSAs as discourses. tifying the minimal, but important, role of the respec- Neoliberalism is a political rationality (Brown tive public institutions. 2006, 693). Borrowing from Michel Foucault, Wen- dy Brown (2006) states that “a political rationality is a Anti-Oppression Feminist CDA, PSAs, and Neoliberal specific form of normative political reason organizing Political Rationality the political sphere, governance practices, and citizen- To make these arguments, this article is framed ship” (693). To avoid a totalizing discourse, one must by a method and theoretical commitment to an anti-op- understand neoliberalism as a process, as incomplete, pression feminist critical discourse analysis (CDA), as inconsistent. This rationality emphasizes market ra- which aims to not only deconstruct texts, but also to tionality, privatization, commodification of social re- connect the representational to the material (Lazar production, and individualization of the public space 2007, 142). Through the critique of text, anti-oppression (see Brodie 2008, 148; Koshan and Wiegers 2007, 147; feminist CDA highlights the intimate interrelationships Brown 2006, 693). Another salient feature is “austerity between images, ideology, and socio-political contexts. thinking,” referring to a government rhetoric that em- Indeed, the basic assumption behind CDA is that both phasizes reducing debt through cutting social services discourses–social practices and communications– as well as the inverse–justifying the slashing of social and the social “are mutually constitutive” (Fairclough, services in order to reduce the debt. Indeed, a neoliber- Mulderrig, and Wodak 2011, 370). An anti-oppression al political rationality seeks to justify–rationalize–polit- feminist CDA further explores how multiple systems ical actions or inactions, highlighting the importance of of domination (racism and sexism, for example) inter- studying political discourses. lock to augment depictions of oppression (Lazar 2007). While PSAs are not inherently neoliberal, they Here, I take up Michelle Lazar’s (2007) specific under- are inherently tools of political rationalization and are standing of anti-oppression feminist CDA as “a political indeed important tools of neoliberal governance. Using perspective on gender, concerned with demystifying the term ‘governance,’ I invoke Foucault’s (1979) notion the interrelationships of gender, power, and ideology that power is productive rather than simply repressive. in discourse” (144). Thus, this article aims to elucidate Here, public institutions discursively produce a way of the discursive construction of gender-based violence in understanding social problems and social norms by de- the two public service campaigns with strikingly simi- fining these social ills and expectations and by speci- lar images and connect this to ideological commitments fying modes of intervention and appropriate solutions and material consequences. (Lemke 2001, 191). In the case of domestic violence Public service advertisements and announce- PSAs, it tells the viewer who may be a potential vic- ments (PSA), as a type of discursive text, are well suited tim, what victimization looks like, who causes harm, to an exploration of these interlocking relationships. A and who is responsible for addressing the problem. By PSA is any educational or promotional material such invoking Foucault and defining PSAs as discourses, I as television commercial, poster, or radio spot that dis- invite a tension–I will discuss some of the misrepre- 196 Atlantis 38.1, 2017 www.msvu.ca/atlantis sentations of domestic violence in the campaigns while systematically dismantling welfare programs (Striwer- also refusing to settle on “truthful” representations of da 2014) while creating the so-called “Alberta advan- domestic violence. The point is to illuminate how two tage”–low taxes (see McMillan and Warrack 1995, 2; public institutions represent domestic violence and how Patten 2015, 262). The consequences for domestic vi- these representations relate to ideological and socio-po- olence shelters were dire. In a mere 18 months follow- litical contexts. More specifically, this article identifies ing Klein’s election, the GOA cut social services by $397 how these PSAs, grounded in neoliberal political ratio- million or 19%; following the cuts, 4,000 women were nality, are tools of governance, discursively upholding turned away from Albertan shelters in 1994 (Morrow, systems of marginalization. Yet, the campaigns under Hankivsky, and Varcoe 2004, 366-367). Recent research review here are not disconnected from other forms of in other political contexts on the impact of the recession governance. Before engaging in a close examination of on women’s experiences of violence suggests that aus- the texts, I will first briefly

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