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Safe distances and unbearable closeness: cliché representations of violence against women in Canada

ABSTRACT This article analyses two visual representations of highly publicized cases of violence against women in Canada by drawing on innovative bridging of Gramsci’s hegemonic common sense and Deleuze’s cliché. I argue that as elements in the representational assemblage surrounding these cases, both cultural productions contributed to the construction of such acts of gendered violence as national events. Both images exploit the capacity of cliché to move images towards meaning and to move the audience into and out of affective proximity with those being represented. The first case study, a series of paintings by Pamela Masik entitled The Forgotten, fails to close the distance between the viewer and the marginalized women depicted. By contrast, the effect of cliché in the second case study, an episode of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s series, The Fifth Estate, is to create subjective distances, reinstating dominant common sense about the boundaries between strangers and neighbours and upholding the sanctity of the community. I highlight these images to demonstrate the role of cliché in conditioning and drastically limiting our ethical and political responses to violence against women. I conclude by attempting to add friction to the slippery surface of cliché, expanding the moments where representation fails. My contention is that spending more time in zones of incomprehension creates the potential for counterhegemonic memory-images to take hold.