Men’s violence and youth robberies

Within the last couple of days, two articles of mine have been published. The first one stems from years back (2002-03 to be precise) when I was working on a project within the field of historical sociology. In fact, the paper was long forgotten and hidden in the depths of my hard drive when I suddenly decided, last spring, to make an attempt at resuscitation. Something that proved successful. Even though its subject matter is quite far removed from the kind of things that I am studying nowadays, it still reflects some of my basic ideas on text, culture and discourse. The second one is on the moral panic about so called youth robberies that took place in the Swedish media between 1998 and 2002. Between 2004 and 2006, I ran a research project on representations of this alleged “crime wave” and I have also written on it elsewhere.

The first article is an analysis of a set of 19th century cases of ‘marital disagreement’ (male violence) in a small northern Swedish town. The data is analysed in two steps: firstly, through a general content analysis with the purpose of uncovering the principal patterns and predominant features and secondly by a discourse analysis of a key case. One of the key questions of gender theory has been that of how a social order in which men are seen as superior to women manages to prevail through space and time – transgressing historical and cultural borders. How can this order subsist in a succession of epochs and cultures which are, in many respects, dramatically different from one another? This question has already been addressed many times within feminism, particularly as part of the debate concerning the concepts of ‘patriarchy’ versus ‘gender order’. This article once again revisits this terrain, and aims to use its very specific historical case study as a point of departure for a more general discussion of how continuity and change in transhistorical male dominance and violence might be theoretically understood.

— Lindgren, S. (2008).”Theorizing continuity and change in the discourse of male violence: A case study of ‘marital disagreements’ in 19th century Sweden”. Anthropological Notebooks, 14(3), pp 5-23.

The second article aims to analyze racist news discourse by applying some notions from Norman Fairclough’s and Teun van Dijk’s work. We know that racism is shaped and defined in relation to specific historic and cultural contexts. How, then, should we grasp the many similarities between different case studies? This issue is addressed by relating the results of the case study mentioned above to the ones arrived at by Stuart Hall et al. in their classic Policing the crisis (1978). The conclusion is that these similarities have to do with the recurring externalization of internal conflicts in capitalist societies.

— Lindgren, S. (2009).”Representing Otherness in Youth Crime Discourse: Youth Robberies and Racism in the Swedish Press 1998 – 2002″. Critical Discourse Studies, 6(1), pp 65-77.