Hedersrelaterat våld eller mäns våld mot kvinnor - en diskursanalys av den offentliga debatten i media.

Abstract Author: Marit Bachs Title: Honorrelated violence or men´s violence against women - a discourse analysis of the public debate in media. Supervisor: Mats Hilte Assessor: Elizabeth Martinell Barfoed This paper studies the debate surrounding the murder of Fadime Sahindal from a discourse-analytical and post-colonial approach. My purpose has been to investigate and discern how honor related violence was described and explained in the debate in Swedish newspapers and tabloids following the so-called honor killing of Fadime Sahindal (2002). Based on the positions taken in the papers I have distinguished different discourses. My purpose has also been to examine how “the victim" and “the perpetrator" of honor violence were presented in the media. The empirical data has consisted of contemporary opinion articles from different Swedish newspapers, three months after the murder of Fadime Sahindal. The discourse analysis as an analytical tool has been inspired by the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe. My analysis shows two dominant discourses. The first I call the ”culture support discourse”. Within this discourse the honor violence is constructed by assuming that the murder of Fadime can only be understood and explained by finding the cause within a specific "culture" - a culture constructed as being completely different from the "Swedish gender equality culture”. In the second discourse, which I call the ”culture critical discourse”, it is argued that it is not possible to understand honor violence without studying it from a patriarchal structure, in which men as a group are superior to women as a group. This means that the violence takes different forms and shapes, but that the foundation and the cause are the same. In my material I found a stereotypical and one-dimensional image of the "perpetrator", described as a patriarchal, oppressive and misogynistic male immigrant. The victim, the immigrant woman, was portrayed as a strong, courageous and freedom seeking person. I found this freedom to be strongly associated with "Swedishness". This “Swedishness is frequently described in positive terms, symbolizing individual autonomy and equality Finally. I found an emerging racist discourse, which I found to be a consequence of the culture supportive discourse. This discourse is based on how the public conversation talks about "them" and "their culture". The use of the term "culture" can be understood as a replacement of the term "race" in a way that opens up for legitimate racism. Culture may be a racist impairment as it is something that is attributed to "them" and not "us" and also implies a derogatory view of "them". Keywords: culture, racism, honor related violence, discourse analysis, immigrant, Fadime