Male and Female Violence in Popular Media - (Library of Gender and Popular Culture) by Elisa Giomi & Sveva Magaraggia (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Male and Female Violence in Popular Media brings into focus the apparently symmetrical phenomena of men's violence against women and women's violence against men, explaining the profound differences in their actual features as well as in their representations, which over the last few years have been proliferating in a vast array of global media contents.

Elisa Giomi and Sveva Magaraggia consider popular media including crime TV series such as The Killing (Denmark, 2007- 2012), The Fall (UK, 2013-2016) and True Detective (USA, 2015), factual entertainment such as Who the (bleep) Did I Marry? (Investigation Discovery, 2010-2015), and Italian pop music in order to examine popular culture's depictions of men and women in their opposite, yet complementary, roles of perpetrators and victims. They reveal how TV shows, pop-songs, news and commercials that populate global audiences' daily life fuel false beliefs about love and sexuality that either legitimate or stigmatise violence depending on the perpetrators and victims' gender.

Review Quotes

Male and Female Violence in Popular Media is a clear, multilayered and disarmingly accessible look at the complex relationship between gender and violence, gendering as an act of violence, and violence as always already gendered.



The theoretical framework and analytical approach to gender violence, the breath of the sources consulted and the range of media discussed, make this comparative study of media representations of violent men and women an original and valuable contribution to scholarship in gender studies and sociology of communication.

About the Author

Elisa Giomi is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts at Roma Tre University, Italy. Her work has been published in Television Antiheroines (2017) and the International Review of Sociology.

Sveva Magaraggia is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Sciences at the University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy. Her publications include Feminist Perspectives on Teaching Masculinities: Learning Beyond Stereotypes (2019) and "The Men's Issue. Male Violence against Women in Media Representations" in AIS-Journal of Sociology.