Perpetrating Selves Doing Violence, Performing Identity

This volume explores violent perpetration in diverse forms from an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. From National Socialist perpetration in the museum, through post-terrorist life writing to embodied performances of perpetration in cosplay, the collection draws upon a series of historical and geographical case studies, seen through the lens of a variety of texts, with a particular focus on the locus of the museum as a technology of sense making. In addition to its authored chapters, the volume includes three contributed interviews which offer a practice-led perspective on the topic.

Through its wide-ranging approach to violence, the volume draws attention to the contested and gendered nature of what is constructed as ‘perpetration’. With a focus on perpetrator subjectivity or the ‘perpetrator self’, it proposes that we approach perpetration as a form of ‘doing’; and a ‘doing’ that is bound up with the ‘doing’ of one’s gendered identity more broadly. The workwill be of great interest to students and scholars working on violence and perpetration in the fields of History, Literary Studies, Area Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Museum Studies, Cultural Studies, International Relations and Political Science. 

1. Perpetrating Selves: An Introduction; Clare Bielby and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer.- PART ONE: Enactments and Bodily Performances.- 2. Leading Men a Merry Dance?: Girls as Sex Crime Perpetrators in Contemporary Pop Culture and Media; Melissa Dearey.- 3. Embodying a Perpetrator: Myths, Monsters and Magic; Katarina H. S. Birkedal.- 4. The Making of a Dangerous Individual: Performing the Perpetrating Self -- An Interview with Steve Pratt; Clare Bielby and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer.- PART TWO: Narration and Textual Performances.- 5. Scripting the Perpetrating Self: Masculinity, Class and Violence in German Post-terrorist Autobiography; Clare Bielby.- 6. Innocent Superspy: Contradictory Narratives as Exculpation in a Woman Apartheid Perpetrator Story; Robyn Bloch.- 7. ‘It’s My Destiny’: Narrating Prison Violence and Masculinity in the Shaun Attwood Trilogy; Josephine Metcalf.- 8. Intimate Enemies: Representations of Perpetrators in Literary Responses to the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda; Nicki Hitchcott.- 9. ‘By Any Means Necessary’: Interviews and Narrative Analysis with Torturers – A Conversation with Dr. John Tsukayama; Clare Bielby and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer.- PART THREE: Perpetration in the Museum.- 10. Selective Empathy in the Re-designed Imperial War Museum London: Heroes and Perpetrators; Gabriel Koureas.- 11. Identifying with Mass Murderers? Representing Male Perpetrators in Museum Exhibitions of the Holocaust; Birga Meyer.- 12. Managing Perpetrator Affect: The Female Guard Exhibition at Ravensbrück; Susanne Luhmann.- 13. Curating Violence: Display and Representation -- An Interview with Jonathan Ferguson and Lisa Traynor (Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds); Clare Bielby and Jeffrey Stevenson Murer.  

Clare Bielby is Senior Lecturer in Women’s Studies at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York. She is the author of Violent Women in Print: Representations in the West German Print Media of the 1960s and 1970s (Camden House, 2012) and co-editor (with Anna Richards) of Women and Death 3: Women’s Representations of Death in German Culture since 1500 (Camden House, 2010).